For Electric Literature Jennifer Baker interviews Yahdon Israel who hosts the weekly literary interview series LIT on Youtube. On his inspiration for starting the show; “I watch a great deal of interviews on the Breakfast Club, James Lipton’s Inside the Actors Studio, Sway in the Morning, Hot 97, Between Two Ferns. And the people who are seldom interviewed are writers. In many ways being Black has taught me to notice what isn’t there. That lens lends itself to what I notice about pop culture: We’re missing from the conversation. Better put: We’re not included. And by “we” I mean writers.” Watch the show and subscribe, some interviews include Kaitlyn Greenidge, Claire Messaud, Victor LaValle and Jesmyn Ward.
Lit on YouTube
Tuesday New Release Day: Auster; Whitaker; Lobo; Appelfeld; Reve
New this week: 4321 by Paul Auster; The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker; Mr. Iyer Goes to War by Ryan Lobo; The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping by Aharon Appelfeld; and The Evenings by Gerard Reve. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
●
●
David Simon to Adapt MLK Biography for HBO Miniseries
The Wire and Treme creator David Simon tells The Baltimore Sun that he’s going to work on an HBO miniseries about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The project will be based on Taylor Branch’s multi-part biographies of the civil rights leader.
●
●
“How can you buy or sell the sky . . . ?”
Recommended Reading (and Viewing): “Skymall” by Tom Healy.
Love and Correspondence
On Monday, the Harry Ransom Center announced that it had acquired the complete archive of Gabriel García Márquez, which includes notebooks, photo albums and correspondence by the late Nobel laureate. For Márquez fans, the most important part of the collection may We’ll See Each Other in August, the author’s final, unfinished novel. Pair with: Charles Finch on Márquez and the modern novel.
●
●
“Odessa stands for freedom as well as sleaze.”
“Embracing the transients and flâneurs, this is, in effect, a museum of Russian literature. And, being Russian, it becomes a museum of censorship and repression as well as art: of genius and bravery, blood and lies.” Snowdrops author A.D. Miller visits Ukraine’s Odessa State Literary Museum.
●
●
From Well-Read to Well-Written
Well-Read Black Girl, a Brooklyn-based book club and online community celebrating "the uniqueness of Black literature & sisterhood," has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund its inaugural writers' conference and festival. Past WRBG book club guests include Year in Reading alums Jacqueline Woodson and Angela Flournoy, whom we also interviewed about her debut novel The Turner House.
●
●