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A curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.
The author of five poetry collections, including Ghost in a Red Hat, which was just published W. W. Norton, Rosanna Warren reads "Aftermath," one in a series of elegies she wrote the for poet Deborah Tall, who died of breast cancer in 2006. This reading took place on March 7 at Nyack College.
In this clip, guest editor Maria Shriver takes viewers behind the scenes with the editorial team of O, The Oprah Magazine in Los Angeles as they put the finishing touches on the magazine's first poetry issue, which was just published.
The documentary Behind Those Books, written by Kaven Brown, directed by Mills Miller, and featuring interviews with Terry McMillan, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Kevin Powell, is billed as "the first and only comprehensive documentation, on film, of the urban literature genre, giving viewers a raw and uncut look inside the emerging industry." It will premiere May 28 at Tribeca Cinemas in New York City.
In this rather raw clip, Nick Demske responds to the political situation in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands of protesters—some of them on tractors—descended on the state Capitol over the weekend, with a poem.
Since its release last year, Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, a documentary directed by Lilly Rivlin, has won awards at several film festivals, including the Palm Springs International Film Festival and the Washington Jewish Film Festival.
Poet, novelist, and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu recently delivered a lecture about art, the Internet, and his latest book, The Poetry Lesson (Princeton University Press, 2010), at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In this clip he talks about how Google is killing creativity and what Facebook is "really" all about.
The "mortal work of art," as Shelley Jackson called her 2003 story "Skin," each word of which has been tatooed on the skin of over two thousand volunteers, has found new form in this clip. The author recently asked her original volunteers to record a video of their word tattoo. She then edited the word videos together to create a new story for the Berkeley Art Museum.
In this clip, produced by Open Road Media, novelist Pat Conroy talks about his early years as the eldest of seven children raised in a strict military household in Beaufort, South Carolina. "I was making up stories about my life at a very early age," says the author of The Prince of Tides and The Lords of Discipline. "I was writing fiction long before I knew I was writing fiction."
In this clip by Seth Weiner, a robot re-enacts the typing of a love letter from Franz Kafka to Felize Bauer, who Kafka met on August 13, 1912. In the letter, which can be found in Letters to Felice (Schocken, 1987), Kafka "makes reference to typing the letter on a typewriter and expresses the impact the new writing device has on his train of thought."
Each year the University of Oregon Libraries hosts an Edible Book Festival featuring examples of edible artwork that "must be made from consumable components and reflect the concept of 'the book' through the use of text, form, or literary inspiration." The next Edible Book Festival will be held on March 31. Check out similar events at Duke, Xavier, the University of Puget Sound, and other schools across the country.
