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A curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.
Akashic Books publisher Johnny Temple, author Adam Mansbach, and illustrator Ricardo Cortés talk about the genesis of the best-selling book Go the F**k to Sleep in this video from Open Road Integrated Media. For more of the inside story, including the long-term impact of such success on Akashic, read "Glass-Slipper Economics: Cinderella Stories in Indie Publishing" in the current issue.
During a recent appearance on the PBS NewsHour, National Book Award-winning poet Mark Doty spoke about one of the great traditions of the holiday season: Handel's "Messiah."
"People think I'm a writer of these very sad stories. Well, I wanted to write about something that was joyful and I wanted to write about how much people will sacrifice of their ambition in order to care for the people they love," says Chris Cleave, the best-selling author of Little Bee (2009), about his next novel, Gold, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster next summer.
"A great work of literature transcends its genre—whatever genre that might be," says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon in this profile by Open Road Media, which has made a number of Chabon's novels available as e-books.
The author of The Uncommon Reader (FSG, 2007) reads from "The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes," one of the two stories in his new collection, Smut, published earlier this year by Faber and Faber and Profile Books in England and forthcoming in the U.S. next month from Picador.
Whether you're stuck in a real blizzard (as a good portion of the central U.S. is today) or just a metaphorical one, take some time to make sense of your situation in writing, as this nifty video by Sajjad Ahmed illustrates.
Kenneth Patchen's poem "A Biography of Southern Rain" is read over Billie Holiday's "Stormy Weather" in this moody video featuring some of the late poet's visual work. For more about Patchen's painted books, silk-screened broadsides, and "picture-poems," read The Written Image in the current issue.
A letterpress print by Richard Ardagh takes shape at New North Press in this short stop-frame video. For more examples of the punctuation mark in its many forms of contemporary usage, view Ampersands in the World. And read "Poets & Ampersands" by Kevin Nance in the current issue.
"He was so old-school he kicked dope strapped down in jail in West Hollywood," says author Jerry Stahl, who joins Henry Rollins and Amiri Baraka in this profile of the author of Last Exit to Brooklyn, Requiem for a Dream, The Demon, and The Room, now available as e-books from Open Road Media.
Director Marilyn Zornado presents an evening with the Insect Literary Society in this animated film featuring poems (read by Mr Spider, Mr. Dragonfly, Ms. Firefly, and Ms. Moth) from Inside the Rainbow Garden by Meme Marie Meyers, a poet from Portland, Oregon, who passed away last Tuesday.
