Poets & Writers Theater

“If I understood Marx, I thought, I could understand my mother.” At Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, Jordy Rosenberg reads from his essay “The Daddy Dialectic,” which was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rosenberg speaks about his debut novel, Confessions of the Fox (One World, 2018), in “The Business of Relationships” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Vievee Francis reads her poems “Parched” and “Paradise” for Voluble, a Los Angeles Review of Books channel. Francis received the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award for her poetry collection Forest Primeval (Northwestern University Press, 2015).

“I want to vanish from this detainment.” A. H. Jerriod Avant reads his poem “This Dull Chaos” over a series of photographs in this video from Voluble, a new channel of visual and literary art that is part of the Los Angeles Review of Books Channels Project.

"I wanted to regain control of experiencing my life in time." Heidi Julavits speaks about the inspiration behind her latest book, The Folded Clock: A Diary (Doubleday, 2015), and why bad book reviews prompted her to start the Believer.

In this short film produced for Voluble, a Los Angeles Review of Books channel, Tarfia Faizullah reads two of her poems. Faizullah, author of the poetry collections Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014) and Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018), collaborated with emcee and producer Brooklyn Shanti and tabla player Robin Sukhadia to create this video.

Jérémie Guez, author of the new novel, Eyes Full of Empty (Unnamed Press, 2015), translated from the French by Edward Gauvin, talks about being inspired by James Ellroy's work. Ellroy enthusiastically introduces Guez at Skylight Books in Los Angeles for a reading of the new novel.

"The relationship between reader and writer is about trying to connect through honesty." Karen Bender speaks about expressing and processing complex emotions through her writing. Bender's debut short story collection, Refund (Counterpoint Press, 2015), is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award.

David Shields and Caleb Powell, coauthors of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel (Knopf, 2015), enjoy a colorful discussion while riding a ferris wheel in a video from the Los Angeles Review of Books. For more on Shields and Powell, watch their appearance at the Poets & Writers Live event in San Francisco.

The novelist, critic, and essayist shares why he thinks writers are "predatory in a benevolent way" and how he met his inspiration for Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade (Liveright, 2014), a memoir of his friendship with a con man and convicted murderer.

The author most recently of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2010) and Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation (2012), as well as coauthor with Greg Sestero of The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside the Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, forthcoming in October, talks with the Los Angeles Review of Books at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California on April 21, 2013.