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This new Netflix miniseries about a woman growing up in a strict Hasidic Judaism sect in Brooklyn who flees her arranged marriage and cuts ties with the community is loosely based on Deborah Feldman’s 2012 memoir, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots. The four-episode series is directed by Maria Schrader and stars Shira Haas, Amit Rahav, and Jeff Wilbusch.
“Poetry exists in a relationship so that it can speak to your interior life. That’s why I believe that reading is relationship.” In this 2019 5x15 Stories video, Edward Hirsch, whose latest collection Stranger by Night is out now from Knopf, speaks about the craft of writing poems and how “poetry exists to inspire the reader.”
“For Adunni, a louding voice is a few things: it is the refusal to be silenced by society, it’s the desire to go for everything good and everything positive that can come her way.” In this video, Abi Daré talks about her debut novel, The Girl With the Louding Voice (Dutton, 2020), the main character’s motivations, and how some of the ideas she had for her novel were inspired by her mother’s advice.
“My process of writing is one of contemplation and one of constantly trying to be as authentic as possible in the emotions that I’m trying to express.” Cyril Wong speaks about the voices from his dreams and meditation practice that gave him the stories for his new novel, This Side of Heaven, out now from Epigram Books.
“The book is about what we do when in a long-term relationship something dramatically changes.” In this video, Caroline Leavitt talks about her novel, With or Without You, forthcoming in August from Algonquin Books, and encourages authors and readers to join her “nothing is canceled virtual book tour.”
“You don’t write a book for a market, a publisher, or an agent; you write it because your heart calls you to write it.” Tayari Jones speaks about her “most personal” novel Silver Sparrow (Algonquin Books, 2011) and about what keeps her going as a writer in this Waterstones video.
“I write from the perspective of the suffering character in this novel but also from his wife and his closest friend,” says Brian Platzer about his second novel, The Body Politic (Atria Books, 2020), which is partially based on his own experiences with a neurological disorder. In this video, Platzer explains the premise of the book and how writing it helped him in his personal life.
“If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?” Hilary Mantel reads from The Mirror and the Light (Henry Holt, 2020), the final novel in her trilogy, which began with her Booker Prize–winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.
“This book really is inspired by my grandfather, and a lot of it is actually true.” In this Politics and Prose video, Louise Erdrich talks about her most recent novel, The Night Watchman (Harper, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“One of the reasons why I wrote Deacon King Kong is because I wanted to show a world where people actually got along.” In this video, James McBride, whose novel Deacon King Kong (Riverhead Books, 2020) is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about the inspiration for the novel and shows CBS This Morning host Jeff Glor around the Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn where he grew up.
