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Tsitsiqui Apantzequa Chanaqua, a word in the Purépecha language found in Álvaro Enrigue's new novel, Sudden Death (Riverhead Books, 2016), translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, refers to "a game played with roses as if with balls." Several attempts are made to pronounce the term correctly, before Enrigue himself steps in.
Man Booker Prize–winner Marlon James speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown about the voices in his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead Books, 2015) and what writing with all the senses means.
One BookTuber offers his view on 2015's book lists from the New York Times to Publishers Weekly, Amazon to Goodreads. Paula Hawkins's debut novel, The Girl on the Train (Riverhead Books, 2015), James Hannaham's Delicious Foods (Little, Brown, 2015), and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) are books that top the lists.
"After conquering / frontiers, the mind comes back to rest, / stretching out over the white sand." At a 92Y event, Pulitzer Prize-winner Yusef Komunyakaa reads "Islands" from his poetry collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015), and the Wire actor Wendell Pierce reads from his memoir, The Wind in the Reeds (Riverhead Books, 2015), in which he explores art's ability to redeem his native New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
"As readers we can't simply witness or observe a book from afar—we have to live inside it, we have to go through it, and every time we do, we expand a version of our own lives." Carrie Brownstein talks about the relationship between readers, books, and writers in her introduction to the 2013 National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 ceremony. Brownstein's debut memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (Riverhead Books, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“A thick drizzle from the sky, like a curtain’s sudden sweeping,” begins Lauren Groff’s third novel, Fates and Furies (Riverhead Books, 2015), which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award. In this video, Groff talks about the making of her novel at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington D.C.
"I thought maybe I'd be a filmmaker but I wasn't any good at that either, so I just kept falling through the cracks to fiction." Claire Vaye Watkins, whose first novel, Gold Fame Citrus (Riverhead Books, 2015), is featured in Page One in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about how she arrived at writing fiction.
In this short film presented by Electric Literature, a sentence from Etgar Keret's short story "Todd" is animated by Tatia Rosenthal and set to music by Christopher Bowen. Keret's new memoir, The Seven Good Years, was published this month by Riverhead Books and is featured in Page One in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"I like the fact that in Rachel's case, she's not just unreliable to the reader and to other characters, but even to herself. She can't trust herself." Author Paula Hawkins speaks about the main character of her debut novel, The Girl on the Train (Riverhead Books, 2015), with Becky Anderson, owner of Anderson's Bookshop in Naperville, Illinois.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz talks about the impact comic books had on him as he was growing up, as well as their cultural and literary significance. His novel The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books, 2007) was just named the best novel of the twenty-first century to date by a BBC Culture critics' poll.
