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In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown sits down with literary critics Gilbert Cruz of the New York Times and Maureen Corrigan of NPR to discuss their favorite fiction and nonfiction books of 2022, which include Trust by Hernan Diaz, Foster by Claire Keegan, If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, Stay True by Hua Hsu, and Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun.
“Literature is there to show us how there can be beauty in meaning, and this is what makes the literary experience so unique...and I’m hunting for this feeling all the time.” Hernan Diaz, author most recently of Trust (Riverhead Books, 2022), speaks about his relationship with reading, writing, and language in this Louisiana Channel interview with Marc-Christoph Wagner at the New York Public Library.
In his article “Why Did Borges Hate Soccer?” published in the New Republic in 2014, Shaj Mathew uncovers the reasons the iconic Argentinean writer hated soccer so much that he even scheduled a lecture to conflict with Argentina’s first game of the 1978 World Cup. Mathew observes that what Borges was troubled with was the link from soccer fan culture to “the kind of blind popular support that propped up the leaders of the twentieth century’s most horrifying political movements.” Taking into consideration this year’s controversial FIFA World Cup in Qatar, write an essay that examines your relationship to a popular sport. Is there an element of fandom that unsettles you?
Watch this 2018 reading and conversation with Nobel Prize–winning author Annie Ernaux celebrating the English publication of her book The Years, along with translator Alison L. Strayer and Seven Stories Press publisher Dan Simon at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, France.
In 2018, Chilean author Isabel Allende became the first Spanish-language author to receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. In her acceptance speech, Allende spoke of how her writing comes from “nostalgia, loss, and separation, from an incurable desire to belong in a place.” Lightheartedly and hilariously, she continued by noting that she not only writes in Spanish but cooks, dreams, and makes love in Spanish. “It would be ridiculous panting in English. My lover doesn’t speak a word of Spanish,” said Allende. This week, write a story in which two people from vastly different backgrounds connect through an unexpected similarity. How do they bond through their own language?
In this virtual conversation for the Brown Girl Collective Book Club, Evette Dionne, author of Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul (Ecco, 2022), speaks with Marcie L. Thomas about writing her book and researching the biases placed against Black women in healthcare. Dionne’s essay collection is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun. // Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to / celebrate the terrible victory.” In her seminal poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” Joy Harjo explores the shared history of humanity through the image of a kitchen table. “We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here. // At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks,” writes Harjo. Write a poem that explores the joyful and sorrowful history of a past or present family home. What stories do the rooms, tables, and walls of your home tell you?
“I have heard my father tell a wide variation of the same five stories but you can affix a certain moral to one—you can affix an entry point, an exit point, an image—that makes it feel like a new story every time,” says Hanif Abdurraqib in this lecture on the nature and impact of storytelling for CreativeMornings in Columbus, Ohio. “Twelve Things That Help Me Set My Table” by Abdurraqib appears in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Watch the trailer for Kindred, an FX/Hulu television adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s acclaimed novel of the same name. Adapted by showrunner and series creator Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the show stars Mallori Johnson as Dana, an aspiring writer who moves into a new home and is suddenly transported back and forth in time emerging at a nineteenth-century plantation.
“I should have turned out normal, but I didn’t. What happened?” Watch the book trailer for Kevin Maloney’s second novel, The Red-Headed Pilgrim (Two Dollar Radio, 2023), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
