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

John Steinbeck

"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in all the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected." The author of twenty-seven books, including The Grapes of Wrath (1939), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize; East of Eden (1952); and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937) is seen here giving his acceptance speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm on December 10, 1962.

Ann Patchett

At this year's American Library Association conference, held June 27 to July 2 in Chicago, novelist Ann Patchett, whose most recent book is State of Wonder (Harper, 2011), talked about her "profoundly uninteresting" life as a reader and opening an independent bookstore, Parnassus Books, in Nashville.

Tarah Scalzo

In this Single Sentence Animation from Electric Literature, James Willoughby animates the following sentence, from "Orange" by Tarah Scalzo: "Everyone knows a snow leopard is magical."

Orwell's 1984

Richard from AbeBooks.com offers ten reasons why George Orwell's dystopian novel still resonates seven decades after its initial publication by Secker and Warburg in London.

Moveable Type

With music by Ken Shorley and Sahara Jane, this clip from Heidi Kalyani featuring the art of typesetting ends with a quote from Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore.

Secrets of Book Publishing

Susan Shapiro moderates a panel comprised of authors Leigh Newman (Still Points North), Moses Gates (Hidden Cities), and Royal Young (Fame Shark); book editors Danielle Perez (New American Library) and Naomi Rosenblatt (Heliotrope Books); journalism professor Susan Shapiro (New School, NYU); and literary agent Matt Wise and Renee Zuckerbrot.

The Dream

Babe Elliott Baker brings poet Tishani Doshi’s poem "The Dream," from Everything Begins Elsewhere (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), to the small screen in the latest Motionpoem.

Barry Lopez

The author of thirteen books of essays, short stories, and nonfiction—winner of the National Book Award, the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and numerous other honors—talks about the landscape of his home in western Oregon and the art of storytelling in this video from Open Road Media.

The Counselor

Based on Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy's debut screenplay, The Counselor is the story of a lawyer who gets in over his head when he gets into the drug-trafficking business. Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, and Penélope Cruz, The Counselor is scheduled to open in theaters October 25.

More Neil Gaiman

Cover subject Neil Gaiman recently visited the Daily Beast to speak about his new novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, published by William Morrow. Pick up the current issue, on newsstands now, to read Michele Filgate's interview with the best-selling author.

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