A curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.

Carolyn Forché

PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown recently talked with Carolyn Forché, whose new anthology, Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English 1500-2001, published last month by W. W. Norton, contains the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. Forché calls the collection an "outcry of the soul." 

Philip Seymour Hoffman

The late actor is seen here in the 2005 film Capote, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor. In this scene, Hoffman portrays Truman Capote as he visits Perry Smith and Richard Hickock prior to their execution for the 1959 murder of Herbert Clutter and his family, as chronicled in Capote's 1966 book In Cold Blood.

The Watcher of Vowels

"How lovely it is to write with all these vowels." The latest short film from Motionpoems features Robert Bly's poem "The Watcher of Vowels," with design and animation by Matt Van Ekeren.

Rachel Cantor

This trailer for Rachel Cantor's debut novel, A Highly Unlikely Scenario: Or, A Neetsa Pizza Employee's Guide to Saving the World, published in January by Melville House, features illustrations and animation by Claire Kelley and Paul Bommer and music by Jerome Kitke's Mad Coyote Madly Sings (Peer International Corp). Listen to an excerpt of the book, read by the author, on our Poets & Writers podcast.

Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro

This conversation between acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood and Nobel laureate Alice Munro was streamed live via Google+ Hangout on January 22 to an audience at New York City's Symphony Space as part of the live series Selected Shorts. Despite a few glitches, especially near the beginning, the live stream brought together Munro, who was in Toronto, having been snowed out of New York, and Munro, who was in Vancouver, for a unique exchange.

Tom Spanbauer

"I'm crying, and I've always been crying. It's the only way I know how to gather myself up into a self, to be." The author of the novels Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell In Love With the Moon, In The City Of Shy Hunters, and Now Is the Hour reads from his new book, I Loved You More, forthcoming from Hawthorne Books in April, in this haunting trailer featuring music by Cadens Johnson.

B. J. Novak

The actor best known for his work on NBC's Emmy Award-winning comedy series The Office is also a writer. B.J. Novak's first story collection, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories, is forthcoming from Knopf next month. The trailer features one of Novak's costars from The Office, Mindy Kaling. Novak signed a two-book deal with Penguin Young Readers Group last week.

Ishmael Beah

The author of A Long Way Gone (2007) reads the introduction to his new novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, published this month by Sarah Crichton Books. Listen to a longer excerpt of the book on our Poets & Writers podcast.

Junot Díaz

“Literature gains its universality by being very specific.” Author Junot Díaz discusses his writing, his fascination with the Dominican Republic and its diaspora, and how specific experiences of characters can reflect the human condition.

Rita Dove

“I always tell my students that the first version of anything that you write is purely personal and probably incomprehensible to anybody else.” In this clip, renowned poet Rita Dove discusses the act of creating a poem and the writer’s relationship to the reader.

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