Poets & Writers Theater

“This is a great one to give—it’s the sort of thing you can keep in the loo at Christmas when you’ve eaten too much food.” Jeanette Winterson reveals some of her favorite books for the holiday season, including The Trouble With Women (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2016) by cartoonist Jacky Fleming, Tara Westover’s Educated: A Memoir (Random House, 2018), and her own collection of winter tales and festive recipes, Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days (Grove Press, 2016).

“My medium is the place where art and poetry find a way to expand into the limitless.” Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña talks about drawing inspiration from life, death, disappearance, and the energy of New York City, and describes her hopes for her textile installation, “Disappeared Quipu,” at the Brooklyn Museum.

Keira Knightley stars in Colette, a biopic about the early-twentieth-century French novelist who published the successful Claudine novels under her first husband’s name before making a name for herself with later novels including Chéri and Gigi. The film is directed by Wash Westmoreland and costars Denise Gough, Eleanor Tomlinson, and Dominic West.

“I’d like us not to be resigned but to be rebellious—I want to see science fiction step over the old walls and head right into the next wall and start to break it down too.” Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is a crowdfunded documentary directed by Arwen Curry, who was able to collaborate with the late author before her death. The film features interviews with Le Guin, as well as authors including Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, and Theodora Goss.

Elle Fanning stars as the titular character in Mary Shelley, a biopic focusing on Shelley’s relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, which inspired her to write the novel Frankenstein. Directed by Haifaa al-Mansour and written by Emma Jensen, the feature film also stars Douglas Booth, Ben Hardy, Bel Powley, Tom Sturridge, and Maisie Williams.

“I think physicists and poets are not as different as we like to think. The same unconscious processes are at work in both.” In this interview from the 2017 Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark, Siri Hustvedt talks about her background in neuroscience, the experiences of writing both nonfiction and fiction, and the value of approaching questions from different interdisciplinary perspectives.

Annette Danek, senior vice president of fulfillment at Penguin Random House, narrates a 360-degree tour of the distribution warehouse in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where twenty-five trailers of books arrive from printers daily. Each day, over one million books are then processed, picked, packaged, and prepared for shipment to independent bookstores and readers.

“I don’t have any heroes in fiction but I have been influenced by fictional heroes many, many times.” In this video, Karl Ove Knausgaard responds to the Proust Questionnaire for the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona’s Kosmopolis Continuous Programme series. His most recent novel, Winter (Penguin Press, 2018), translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey, is featured in Page One in the January/February 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, explains why there is a special set of shelves in the basement of their offices filled with 315,000 words spelled backwards and catalogued. A Q&A with Sokolowski is featured in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“If you believe in literature...then you believe that some of these books have the power to transform people and the way they see the world.” Danny Schaffer, a member of the Books Through Bars volunteer collective, which matches and sends requested books to incarcerated people, talks about the importance of access to knowledge, history, and literature in the prison system.

Planning to play some board games or learn some new words over the holiday weekend? Get some insight from this New Yorker video as professional Scrabble players discuss and reenact their most improbable, most regretful, and most humbling plays and moves.

“I think that the digital age has made print books more popular in a weird way. It’s made everyone come out of the woodwork that really want to see books survive.” This short film directed by Chad Howitt explores the life of Josh Spencer, owner of the Last Bookstore, and what inspired him to open this popular independent bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. 

Will is a television drama about the imagined life of William Shakespeare in his early twenties in London as he struggles to get his plays onto the stage. Created by Craig Pearce, the series stars Laurie Davidson as Shakespeare and Jamie Campbell Bower as his rival Christopher Marlowe.

In this video from Preguiça Magazine in Portugal, watch Armando Costa and Florindo Simões go about the process of professionally binding a book by hand.

Robert Battle, the artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, reminds all artists, whether dancers, musicians, poets, or writers, that “it’s important for us to, at this time, see beyond our circumstances.” Battle continues: “I think we can do that through the arts.”

In this video from NBC's Late Night With Seth Meyers, reenactments of holiday-themed New Yorker cartoons come to life with live actors while editor David Remnick thoroughly explains the humor in each one. (Incidentally, Poets & Writers Magazine subscriptions also make a great holiday gift.)

In this video, owner John Scioli and an assortment of customers share stories and memories of the Community Bookstore, known for being open at odd hours and completely crammed full of piles of books. The bookstore, which first opened in 1985 in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood, closed in 2016. 

“The ampersand is useful and beautiful.” For the New Yorker video series Comma Queen, Mary Norris speaks about the origins of the ampersand and the controversy surrounding this beloved character.

"The idea of The Removals being both a physical and a spiritual or psychological removal really haunted me and intrigued me." Writer and director Nicholas Rombes speaks about an old manuscript by a Puritan woman from the 1680s, which inspired his new film, The Removals, the second feature film produced by Two Dollar Radio. Rombes is the author of the novel, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (Two Dollar Radio, 2014).

"Strong women leave legacies. The legacy is simply, if she could do it, I could do it." Independent Lens, a weekly showcase of independent documentary film on PBS, celebrates Women’s History Month with a collage of documentary films about women featuring writers Trina Robbins and Gloria Steinem.