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A curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.
"My interest in science fiction was really based in what now seems like a very kitschy futuristic aesthetic—an image of the future from about forty years ago." Poet Tracy K. Smith discusses how she conducted research for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). Smith, whose new book, the memoir Ordinary Light, is forthcoming from Knopf, is featured in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this forthcoming novel from the Booker Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, a couple set off on a journey to find a son they have not seen in years. The Buried Giant (Knopf, 2015) is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"I think ideas for independent films often make decent plots for novels because they're human." Actor David Duchovny speaks about how an idea for a screenplay turned into his debut novel, Holy Cow, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux last week.
"What fascinates me about recovering forgotten stories is how often they are the real tipping points for much bigger cultural, defining moments." Journalist Julianne Schultz moderates a discussion about the importance of the novella as a literary form at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, Australia.
"Poems are bullshit unless they are screamed, or howled, or thrown in your face." Spoken word artist Najee Omar performs his poem "The Anti-Poem (After Amiri Baraka)" in this video by All Def Poetry.
"You invent whole sections of something and then later some biographer wants to know which is true and what isn't, and you have to sit and think." In this short video produced in 2013, the late Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing shares anecdotes from her life as a writer. Currently, a search is on to appoint a new biographer for Lessing.
"Broadway was mobbed and messy. It was Sunday and only twelve o'clock, but it was mobbed anyway." In this short film from the Strand bookstore, directed by Rob Sichler, Gizmo the dog plays Holden Caulfield from the novel by J. D. Salinger.
"There's nothing in here of any substance." Bob Odenkirk speaks about his debut collection of essays, published last October by McSweeney's, and why the book will enter the canon of good toilet literature.
In her new novel, published last month by Little, Brown, Harriet Lane examines a complicated friendship between two women from different worlds. In alternate chapters, the same events are told from the separate perspectives of the two main characters.
"If you can dream—and not make dreams your master / If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim." This short film features Rudyard Kipling's poem "If," read by Tom O'Bedlam and filmed by Stephen Lister.
