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A curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.
Check out the dope rhymes in La Shea Delaney and Annabelle Quezada's literary version of a song by Jay Z and Kayne West. "War and Peace, piece of cake, read Tolstoy in three days. / Straight through, no delays. / Didn't miss a word. Not one phrase." The song was recorded and mixed by Stephen Galgano.
Lukas Fiala and Nicole Schmitt recently partnered to create this animated look at Charles Bukowski's rather ecstatic poem, which appears in Burning in Water Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955-1973 (Ecco, 2002).
At one of last year's TED conferences, writer A. J. Jacobs spoke about his long, three-tiered self-improvement project that has resulted in three books, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (2004), The Year of Biblical Thinking: One Man's Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (2007), and Drop-Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection (2012).
"All the things / I hoped would go away this morning. / The stuff I live with every day. What / I've trampled on in order to stay alive." Raymond Carver's poem is read by Alessio Morglia and illustrated and animated by Alessandro Ferraro in this short video.
"You have speakers engaged with everything from the purple gonads of moon jellyfish to ancient Egyptian burial rights," says poet and molecular biologist Katherine Larson about her collection Radial Symmetry, winner of the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets, in this recent profile on the PBS NewsHour.
"This man is pretending to be Billy Collins, so call the police!" Check out the former poet laureate in this episode of the children's show Martha Speaks, which will be aired on PBS on April 2 in celebration of National Poetry Month.
In case you missed it, here's the trailer for Liz Moore's second novel, Heft, the story of the unlikely connection between a former academic, Arthur Opp, who weighs 550 pounds and hasn't left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade, and seventeen-year-old Kel Keller, a poor kid in a rich school who pins his hopes on what seems like a promising baseball career. Heft was published in January by Norton.
Actor Dave Foley (The Kids in the Hall, NewsRadio) reads "Suck It," a poem from Suzanne Weber's To What Miserable Wretches Have I Been Born: Revenge Poems for Babies and Toddlers, forthcoming from Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in April.
The author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, who is profiled in the current issue, describes her three-month, eleven-hundred-mile hike in this new video from Knopf.
Her Majesty's Secret Players present "Pulp Shakespeare," an Elizabethan take on Quentin Tarantino's 1994 movie, now playing at Theatre Asylum on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
