Jump to navigation Skip to content
A curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.
This short film, based on the poem "The Straightforward Mermaid" by Matthea Harvey, was filmed and directed by Ani Simon-Kennedy. It was selected for the Short Film Corner at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. You can read the poem, which appeared in the New Yorker last August, here.
We've all seen movie trailers and book trailers, but here's a new one: a trailer for an undergraduate lecture course that was offered last fall at the University of Michigan. "Comparative Literature 382: Literature and the Other Arts: Dividing Time: Art House Animation and Poetics" used animated films, poems, short stories, aesthetic theory, and film criticism to examine "how the timing, technique, technology, attention to audience, and intertextual relations of a given work condition our experience of it."
Back on September 30, 1970, Dennis Hopper appeared on the "The Johnny Cash Show" and recited Rudyard Kiplling's poem "If." Remember, it's the middle word in life.
Next month Harper will publish Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, in which Carmela Ciuraru tells the stories of more than a dozen pseudonymous authors, including Mark Twain, Isak Dinesen, Lewis Carroll, and George Eliot, and explores the creative process and "the darker, often crippling aspects of fame."
The anime art film Spring & Chaos, directed by Shoji Kawamori and created exclusively for Japanese television, is based on the life of Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa, who died in 1933. The hour-long film can be seen in its entirety at Hulu.com.
Adapted from the 1891 novella by Anton Checkhov, The Duel, starring Andrew Scott as Laevsky and Fiona Glascott as Nadya, was released last April to rave reviews. Widely considered a successful literary adaptation (no small feat), the movie will be available on DVD later this month.
For fans of mash-ups such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Killer comes The Meowmorphosis by Frank Kafka and Coleridge Cook, published this week by Quirk Books.
In April and early May the multimedia production Muse's Market toured the Western United States, bringing together a combination of live music, art, performance poetry, and philosophy to address the topic of sustainability.
Seth Fried has a little fun with the book trailer format in this teaser for his debut story collection, The Great Frustration, published this month by Soft Skull Press.
In this trailer for Scott Sparling's debut novel, Wire to Wire (June), the author talks to his editor at Tin House Books, Tony Perez, about his book, which features a cast of "train-hopping, drug-dealing, glue-huffing lowlifes in a stunning homage to...the American crime novel."
