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A curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.
Bill Gates shares his enthusiasm and suggestions for books to read this summer, which include On Immunity: An Inoculation (Graywolf Press, 2014) by Eula Biss, Hyperbole and a Half (Touchstone Books, 2013) by Allie Brosh, and The Magic of Reality (Free Press, 2012) by Richard Dawkins.
The Northern Irish novelist and poet reads from his poetry collections at the Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark in 2013. Laird's debut collection, To a Fault (Faber & Faber, 2005), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His latest collection, Go Giants, was published by Norton in 2013.
"I was hoping for scandal and deceit, alcoholism, domestic abuse, car crashes, racial complications... and I found all of it." Photographer Sally Mann reflects on her family history and how old letters, photographs, and journals in her attic inspired her memoir, Hold Still, published by Little, Brown this month.
Ruth Rendell speaks about how to get into the mind of a character in a talk at the Center for Fiction in New York City. Rendell, best known for her Chief Inspector Wexford series, passed away on May 2 at the age of eighty-five.
R. A. Villanueva reads "A Brief for the Defense" by Jack Gilbert and "Mine Will Be a Beautiful Service," a poem from his collection, Reliquaria (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). This video is part of the P.O.P. series, shot and edited by Rachel Eliza Griffiths in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets.
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.
"What is a girl but this? This obscene and beautiful making, this brilliant imagination inventing meaning." Lidia Yuknavitch's novel The Small Backs of Children is forthcoming from Harper in July.
In this short film by Echelon Creative Studio, spoken word poet Holly Painter shares her experiences on becoming a poet and what storytelling means to her. Painter is a teacher, public speaker, and two-time Grand Slam Champion of the London Poetry Slam in Canada.
"It's not the duty, but it's certainly the pleasure of a novelist to recreate their imagination and the stories that are lost." Kate Atkinson speaks about her latest novel, A God in Ruins (Little, Brown, 2015), which tells the story of a Royal Air Force pilot in World War II and his postwar family life.
"I think that in writing, we do try to fix moments so that somehow they're captured." Elizabeth Alexander speaks with PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about the loss of her husband and her experiences in writing her new memoir, The Light of the World (Grand Central Publishing, 2015).
