Organizing the Bookshelves
In this playful video a reader transforms his alphabetically ordered bookshelves into a literary display of the color spectrum.
A curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.
Joan Didion's Blue Nights
In this excerpt from a short film directed by Griffin Dunne, Joan Didion reads from the second chapter of her new memoir, Blue Nights. Be sure to read Kevin Nance's moving profile of Didion in the current issue and listen to Kimberly Farr read a passage of the audio book.
Moby-Dick in Pictures
Inspired by Herman Melville's masterpiece, Ohio artist Matt Kish crafted an original piece of art for each page of Moby-Dick. The resulting collection was published in October by Tin House Books. Take a closer look at Kish's work in this issue's installment of The Written Image as well as the related slideshow, which features eleven images from Moby-Dick in Pictures.
"Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91"
L. S. Klatt reads a poem from Cloud of Ink (University of Iowa Press, 2011) in this short film by Tom Jacobsen. Andrew Wyeth, who died in 2009, was a visual artist best known for his painting "Christina's World," an image of which appears in the clip.
Blake Butler's Nothing
In Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, published last month by Harper Perennial, Blake Butler uses scientific data, historical anecdote, Internet obsession, and figures as diverse as Andy Warhol, John Cage, Jorge Luis Borges, and Stephen King to explore the tension between sleeping and conscious life. This bizarre trailer, directed by Drew Mobley, evokes Butler's own 129-hour bout of insomnia described in the book.
Lord Byron's Darkness
To get us all in the mood for this evening's festivities, here's a reading of "Darkness," a poem written by Lord Byron in 1816, also known as the Year Without a Summer because Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies had erupted the previous year, throwing ash into the atmosphere that blocked the sun and caused abnormal weather patterns across northeast America and northern Europe. Happy Halloween!
How to Identify a First Edition
Learn how to decipher the sometimes arcane methods that publishers use to label first editions (the language and lines of numbers on copyright pages) in this incredibly helpful video from AbeBooks.
Zombies Attack Random House!
The folks at Random House and its many imprints, including Knopf, Doubleday, Crown, and Vintage Books, have a little fun promoting Colson Whitehead's latest book, Zone One, a literary zombie novel published last week by Doubleday.
Michael Cunningham on Print vs. E-books
The author of several novels, including The Hours, Flesh and Blood, and By Nightfall, has had it with readers who "stand in front of the bullet train of history" and insist that books must be made out of paper—as this video from inReads makes abundantly clear. "The world changes; things move on," the Pulitzer Prize-winning author says.
Julie Otsuka on Her National Book Award Nomination
The author of The Buddha in the Attic, who was profiled by Renee H. Shea in the September/October 2011 issue, talks about her novel's nomination for this year's National Book Award in fiction. "I feel lucky to even have an audience," she says. "A prize is something I never really thought about. Usually my concerns are very local, like 'Can I make it through this sentence or through this paragraph?'"