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A curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.
The author, who died on Wednesday at the age of ninety-one, is seen here in a 2009 conversation with Lawrence Bridges about his best-known work, the novel Fahrenheit 451. President Barack Obama noted yesterday that Bradbury's "gift for storytelling reshaped our culture and expanded our world."
What would happen if you took Baz Luhrmann's trailer for The Great Gatsby and combined it with clips from the animated My Little Pony series? Thanks to YouTube we need wonder no longer. Enjoy Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) as Pinky Pie and Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) as Rainbow Dash.
When you get right down to it, writing is (or used to be) all about putting marks on a piece of paper. And while there are plenty of inspiring photographs and videos celebrating the typewriter, this clip of John Mottishaw writing with a custom fountain pen (using an ink called Iroshizuku Tsuki-uo Night Sky, or Greenish Deep Blue) is oddly captivating. (The writing starts at about the 1:58 mark.)
The release of Oscar Corral's independent documentary film will coincide with the October publication of Tom Wolfe's fourth novel, Back to Blood, which is set in Miami and focuses on the subject of immigration.
Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel, one of the books generating a lot of prepublication buzz this summer, sets the coming-of-age story of an eleven-year-old girl against the backdrop of a natural calamity unlike anything anyone has ever seen. Foreign rights to The Age of Miracles have already been sold in more than two dozen countries; Random House will publish it in the U.S. later this month.
Anyone who sits down to write a brand-new poem, story, essay—anything—will likely relate to this short film by Henrique Barone, who completed it while he was a student at Vancouver Film School last year. "Maybe a giant robot...or a crazy musician...no,no, an old lady...and a snake...well, this idea is not working."
Ever wonder what it must have been like to sit in on a class taught by Vladimir Nabokov? Christopher Plummer plays the great Russian author, who taught at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, from 1948 to 1959, in this magnificently odd clip from 1989.
"We walk north, as the spirit of Detroit watches over us," writes Victor "Billione" Walker, whose Detroit Poetry Blog seeks to keep the city's poetry community connected. This video, for Walker's poem "Undercurrent," features photos by Roy Feldman and William Archie.
"When you start out on a career in the arts, you have no idea what you're doing. This is great," says bestselling author Neil Gaiman in his commencement address to the class of 2012 at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. "People who know what they're doing know the rules and they know what is possible and what is impossible. You do not. And you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can."
"Now that I'm a grownup, I'm appalled to find out how much of my time is spent having unbelievably boring conversations," says satirical cartoonist Tim Kreider in this trailer for his new book of essays and cartoons, We Learn Nothing (Free Press), in which he turns his funny, brutally honest eye to the dark truths of the human condition.
