Poets & Writers Theater
Every day we share a new clip of interest to creative writers—author readings, book trailers, publishing panels, craft talks, and more. So grab some popcorn, filter the theater tags by keyword or genre, and explore our sizable archive of literary videos.
-
Malina, the 1971 novel by Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann, was rereleased by New Directions in May with a revised translation from the German by Philip Boehm and an introduction by Rachel Kushner. A screening of the 1991 film adaptation of the novel, directed by Werner Schroeter, was recently presented in celebration of the book.
Tags: Fiction | Malina | New Directions | 2019 | movie trailer | trailer | film adaptation | 1991 | Ingeborg Bachmann | translation | Philip Boehm -
“I believe literature should always start from zero. So, I write stories in both languages on purpose.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Yoko Tawada speaks in German, English, and Japanese about thinking and writing in two different languages and about her novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (New Directions, 2016), translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.
Tags: Fiction | Yoko Tawada | Memoirs of a Polar Bear | New Directions | 2016 | Louisiana Channel | interview | translation -
“Yesterday I lost a country. / I was in a hurry, / and I didn’t notice when it fell from me...” Dunya Mikhail reads her poem “I Was in a Hurry” in Arabic and English, accompanied by the National Arab Orchestra. Her fourth poetry collection, In Her Feminine Sign (New Directions, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
-
“Forgive / yourself, they say, but / after you forgive / what you have lived, / what is left?” At San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center, Forrest Gander reads “Stepping Out of the Light” from his collection Be With (New Directions, 2018), for which he won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize award in poetry.
Tags: Poetry | Forrest Gander | Be With | New Directions | 2018 | Pulitzer Prize | The Poetry Center -
“Take a microscope to the face of a beautiful woman and tell me it isn’t grotesque. Poetry is such a broad genre, it covers so many ways of looking.” Kim Hyesoon talks about her newest collection, Autobiography of a Death (New Directions, 2018), translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi, what it means to be a female poet, and why she thinks poetry is disappearing in this 2018 interview with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.
-
Luljeta Lleshanaku reads from her collection Haywire: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) in English translation and in the original Albanian, and talks about how history, politics, and religion have informed her writing. Lleshanaku’s new collection, Negative Space (New Directions, 2018), translated from the Albanian by Ani Gjika, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Tags: Poetry | Luljeta Lleshanaku | reading | translation | Page One | May/June 2018 | Negative Space | New Directions | 2018 | Haywire | Bloodaxe Books | 2011 -
In this video, John Keene reads from his short story “Cold” from his collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015) at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Keene is a 2018 recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize.
Tags: Fiction | John Keene | Counternarratives | New Directions | 2015 | The Poetry Center | Windham-Campbell Prize -
“When you write a poem in your language, you write it one time. And when you think in the other language, and try to write a poem in the other language, I feel as if it’s a new poem. They say ‘lost in translation’ but also there are things found in translation.” Dunya Mikhail, author of The Iraqi Nights (New Directions, 2014), translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, talks about the duality of living with multiple homes and languages, and how her journey from Iran to the United States affected her evolution as a poet. Mikhail occasionally translates her own work.
Tags: 2014 | New Directions | translation | Dunya Mikhail | Arabic | The Iraqi Nights | Kareem James Abu-Zeid | Women in Translation month | Poetry -
“Like two personalities, they didn’t want to be one. They didn't want to tell one story. I couldn’t put them together.” Following the launch of her twenty-third book, The Naked Eye (New Directions, 2009), Yoko Tawada talks about thinking and writing in both German and Japanese. Tawada’s forthcoming novel, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, is translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky and will be released in November by New Directions.
Tags: New Directions | translation | 2009 | 2016 | Yoko Tawada | German | Japanese | Susan Bernofsky | Memoirs of a Polar Bear | The Naked Eye | Women in Translation month | Fiction -
"The difficulty was that different people liked different parts of the book." In the Paris Review's "My First Time" video series, Helen DeWitt talks about the many challenges she faced before the publication of her first novel, The Last Samurai, which was rereleased by New Directions in May 2016.
Tags: New Directions | 2000 | Paris Review | Helen DeWitt | Hyperion | 2016 | My First Time | The Last Samurai | Talk Miramax | Fiction -
"The reason she's legendary is that she has this work that is extremely weird... she wrote like nobody else." Benjamin Moser, editor of The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, published by New Directions this month, talks with Open Letter Books publisher Chad Post about the appeal of Lispector's writing.
Tags: talk | Clarice Lispector | Benjamin Moser | New Directions | Fiction