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"A few years ago, God gave me a birthday present. Joey McIntyre was coming to Madison, Wisconsin, four days before my twenty-seventh birthday." Listen to Emma Straub read her essay "Teenage Dream" for the Franklin Park Reading Series. Her new novel, Modern Lovers (Riverhead Books, 2016), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"I didn't know what I was doing, I wasn't very good at it, but I just couldn't stop doing it. I still can't." Manuel Gonzales talks about the writing life in this episode of City of Asylum Pittsburgh's the Writer's Block. Gonzales's debut novel, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! (Riverhead Books, 2016), will be released in April.
"To the naked eye Boudicca is a haze of noxious green that lurks among fronds of seaweed looking exactly like the aftermath of a chemical spill." Helen Oyeyemi reads her short story "'Sorry' Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea" at the British Council Literature Seminar in Berlin. Oyeyemi's collection of stories, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (Riverhead Books, 2016), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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.
