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Mohsin Hamid | False Starts | Granta Magazine

Mohsin Hamid on the benefits of a starting a novel for the fourth time, why writing is like digging a well, and the Douglas Adams school of authorship.

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Sayu Bhojwani + Naomi Wolf | People Like Us
Sayu Bhojwani and Naomi Wolf discuss diversifying America’s political establishment and Bhojwani’s new book, “People Like Us: The New Wave of Candidates Knocking at Democracy’s Door.” This event is presented in partnership with the Literacy Partners’ Subway Reads Campaign and the New York Immigration Coalition.

Political scientist Sayu Bhojwani is challenging the established status quo of the white, male, Christian and rich political system. In her latest book “People Like Us,” Sayu offers case studies of politicians and activists who don’t fit the established American political bill, be they, people of color or immigrants, fighting the system to create a better world for all. Sayu simultaneously shines a strong spotlight on the roadblocks that quell many people’s chances of affecting robust change in governmental representation.

One of the world’s most influential feminists and the bestselling author of “The Beauty Myth,” Naomi Wolf doesn’t just comment on the world’s most pervasive problems, she aims to solve them. Wolf has written eight bestselling works of nonfiction, including “Give Me Liberty,” which includes effective tools for citizens to promote civic engagement and create sustainable democracy. Wolf is the co-founder of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership and The American Freedom Campaign. The co-Founder and CEO of tech startup DailyClout.io, a digital platform that lets anyone lobby by sharing live bills, pass legislation, and run for office.

Sayu Bhojwani is the Founder and President of New American Leaders, which works across the country to build the power and potential of first- and second-generation Americans. She served as New York City’s first Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs and is the founder of South Asian Youth Action, a community-based organization in Queens. Sayu earned a PhD in Politics and Education from Columbia University, where her research focused on immigrant political participation. Her TED talk focuses on the importance of immigrants to American democracy, and her work to build a more inclusive democracy has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and in The New York Times. Her book, “People Like Us: Knocking at Democracy’s Door,” will be published by The New Press in October 2018. An immigrant of Indian descent, she grew up in Belize and now lives in New York City with her husband and child.

Through #SubwayReads, commuters across New York City can free promotional excerpts from 200+ exclusive books across over a dozen categories, including: Women’s Leadership, Black Lives Matter, Immigrant Stories, Career Development, Food, Travel, and more. Young readers and adults alike can read on and off the subway using www.subwayreads.org
Tayari Jones: 2018 National Book Festival
Tayari Jones discusses "An American Marriage" at the 2018 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Speaker Biography: Tayari Jones had a spectacular debut with her first novel, "Leaving Atlanta," which won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She wrote the novel while she was a graduate student. Her second novel, "The Untelling," is also set in Atlanta and received the Lillian Smith Book Award. Her new novel, "An American Marriage" (Algonquin), was a pick of Oprah's Book Club. Jones is an MFA faculty member at Rutgers University and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.
Mario Vargas Llosa and Paul Holdengräber: A Life In Letters | 5-14-2018
LIVE from the NYPL | Recorded live at the New York Public Library, Celeste Bartos Forum, May 14, 2018.

Legend has it that Mario Vargas Llosa was notified of winning the Nobel Prize while working in the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library. Vargas Llosa has worked on at least two of his novels here—The Storyteller and The Dream of the Celt—and while teaching at Princeton he spent afternoons off here reading. This year, in celebration of his new novel, The Neighborhood, the titan of contemporary Western literature travels from the stacks to the stage to discuss his life in letters.
Keith O'Brien, "Fly Girls"
Keith O'Brien recounts the personal stories of female pilots who broke into the male-dominated sport of airplane racing, in his book "Fly Girls".
Isaac Shapiro | Edokko: Growing up a Stateless Foreigner in Wartime Japan
Issac Shapiro reads from his memoir, Edokko, and answers questions from the audience.

In 1926, professional musicians Constantine Shapiro, born in Moscow, 1896 and Lydia Chernetsky (Odessa, 1905) met and married in Berlin, Germany after their respective families had suffered continuous persecution in war-torn Russia, or the Soviet Union, as it was known after 1922. With Hitler’s national socialism on the rise, remaining in Berlin was for the newly-weds out of the question and they decided to continue their odyssey, first to Palestine, then China, to ultimately spend the World War II years in the relative safety of Japan. In 1931, they found themselves in Japan, where Isaac, son number four and author of this memoir, was born. A few years later, with World War II imminently looming, and the subsequent bombing of Pearl Harbor, their lives were disrupted once again. In 1944, the Yokohama shore was banned for foreigners and the Shapiro family including their five children, were forced to move to Tokyo, where they survived endless hardships, among others the intensified strategic United States bombing campaigns on Tokyo. Operation Meetinghouse started March 9, 1945 and is regarded as the single most destructive bombing raid in human history. The Japanese later called the operation the Night of the Black Snow. During the subsequent American occupation of Japan, 14-year-old Isaac, being multilingual, was hired as an interpreter by John Calvin ‘Toby’ Munn, a United States Marine colonel, (later promoted to Lt. Gen.) who, when the war was over, paved the way for Isaac, or Ike as he soon became known, to immigrate to the United States. In the summer of 1946, Isaac landed in Hawaii, at the time a United States territory, altering the course of his life forever.
Jeffrey Eugenides | The Virgin Suicides & Fresh Complaint
Acclaimed writer Jeffrey Eugenides sits down with Paris Review editor Emily Nemens to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of his debut novel, “The Virgin Suicides,” and introduce his latest short story collection, "Fresh Complaint."

“The Virgin Suicides” announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters—beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys—commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, “The Virgin Suicides” is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit. His first novel, “The Virgin Suicides,” was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel “Middlesex” (FSG, 2002), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France’s Prix Médicis. “The Marriage Plot” (FSG, 2011) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won both the Prix Fitzgerald and the Madame Figaro Literary Prize. In 2017, FSG published his first collection of stories, “Fresh Complaint.” Eugenides is the Lewis and Loretta Glucksman Professor in English and American Letters at New York University. He has been elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Emily Nemens joined The Paris Review as editor in the summer of 2018. Stories published during her tenure at The Southern Review were selected for the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize anthology, and the inaugural edition of PEN America Best Debut Fiction. Her debut novel, “The Cactus League,” is forthcoming from FSG, and her stories can be found in The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, and n+1.

Since its founding in 1953, The Paris Review has been America’s preeminent literary quarterly, dedicated to discovering the best new voices in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The Review’s renowned Writers at Work series of interviews is one of the great landmarks of world literature. Hailed by the New York Times as “the most remarkable interviewing project we possess,” the series received a George Polk Award and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The magazine introduced readers to Jack Kerouac, V.S. Naipaul, and Ha Jin, and featured early stories by David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, and Jeanette Winterson.
Isabel Allende: "The Influence of Hispanic Culture in Literature"
Google celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month by speaking with Isabel Allende, famed Chilean journalist and author, renowned for writing international bestsellers including "The House of Spirits," "City of the Beasts," "Inés of My Soul" and "Paula." She has written over 25 books that have been translated into more than 35 languages and sold more than 67 million copies, and among other awards, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2017.

Ms. Allende speaks about the influence of her Latinx background in her work, Latin American culture as an influence in global arts & culture, and the future of Latinx literature.

Moderated by Natalie Nunez.
Kwame Anthony Appiah with Annette Gordon-Reed: The Lies That Bind | 9-17-2017
NYPL Author Talks | Recorded live at the New York Public Library, Celeste Auditorium, on September 17, 2018.

From the bestselling author and renowned scholar of philosophy and law comes a revealing exploration of how the identities that shape our world are riddled with contradiction. Who are we, and what are we? How do we choose to self-identify? In his latest book, The Lies That Bind, Kwame Anthony Appiah explores the nature and history of the collective identities that define us—creed, sexuality, race, religion—and the role they play in our increasingly polarized world. Appiah shows how our contemporary thinking is disproportionately influenced by affiliations that draw us together as much as they tear us apart. He argues that there is no way to dispense of identities altogether, but suggests that, by gaining a deeper understanding, we can reconfigure them.
Jason Reynolds + Jacqueline Woodson | Lu
NYT bestselling author Jason Reynolds appears in conversation with Jacqueline Woodson, award-winning author and National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, to celebrate the release of “Lu,” the final book in Reynolds’ bestselling “Track” series.

Jason Reynolds is a New York Times bestselling author, a Newbery Award Honoree, a Printz Award Honoree, National Book Award Honoree, a Kirkus Award winner, a two time Walter Dean Myers Award winner, an NAACP Image Award Winner, and the recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors. The American Booksellers Association’s 2017 spokesperson for Indies First, his many books include “When I Was the Greatest,” “Boy in the Black Suit,” “All American Boys” (co-written with Brendan Kiely), “As Brave as You, For Every One,” the “Track” series (“Ghost,” “Patina,” “Sunny,” and “Lu”), and “Long Way Down,” which received both a Newbery Honor and a Printz Honor. He lives in Washington, DC. You can find his ramblings at JasonWritesBooks.com

Jacqueline Woodson is the award winning-author of several books including “Miracle's Boys,” “Brown Girl Dreaming,” “After Tupac” and “D Foster,” “Feathers”, and “Show Way.” She was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018–2019, and is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Newbery Honor Medal and the Coretta Scott King Award. You can find out more about Jacqueline at https://www.jacquelinewoodson.com/
Min Jin Lee: 2018 National Book Festival
Min Jin Lee discusses "Pachinko" at the 2018 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Speaker Biography: Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States when she was 7. She grew up in Queens, New York. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Lee studied history at Yale College, then received a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. After practicing for two years, she began writing full time. She lived in New York with her husband and son until 2007, then spent several years in Japan, researching and writing her second novel, "Pachinko" (Grand Central), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and appeared on many lists for top book of the year. She lives in New York with her family.
Eugenia Cheng: "The Art of Logic: How to Make Sense in a World that Doesn't"
Dr. Eugenia Cheng is Scientist In Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She won tenure in Pure Mathematics at the University of Sheffield, UK, where she is now Honorary Fellow. Alongside her research in Category Theory and undergraduate teaching her aim is to rid the world of “math phobia”. Eugenia is also math columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a concert pianist.

Emotions are powerful. In newspaper headlines and on social media, they have become the primary way of understanding the world. With her new book "The Art of Logic: How to Make Sense in a World that Doesn't", Eugenia has set out to show how mathematical logic can help us see things more clearly - and know when politicians and companies are trying to mislead us. This talk, like the book, is filled with useful real-life examples of logic and illogic at work and an essential guide to decoding modern life.
Lucy Hawking on Stephen Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions
[Note: The description below is taken from the Youtube channel of Waterstones, which interviewed Lucy Hawking]

'It's like having him there, having a conversation with him.'

It was a privilege to speak with Lucy Hawking about her father Stephen, his final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, and to get an idea of what family life was like for the Hawkings as they lived with his work, his health and now his legacy.
Appel Salon | Gary Shteyngart
"I decided, I'm going to set a challenge for myself... " —Gary Shteyngart, on making a billionaire hedge-fund manager a sympathetic character

Gary Shteyngart appeared at the Toronto Reference Library to discuss his new novel Lake Success with Elamin Abdelmahmoud.
Two Poets Laureate on Making Poetry: 2018 National Book Festival
Robert Hass presents "A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry" and Tracy K. Smith presents "Wade in the Water: Poems" at the 2018 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Speaker Biography: Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include "The Apple Trees at Olema," a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner as well as "Time and Materials," "Sun Under Wood," "Human Wishes," "Praise" and "Field Guide," which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer's "Selected Poems" and "The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa." His essay collection "Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry" received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His latest work is "A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry" (Ecco). Hass lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.

Speaker Biography: Tracy K. Smith was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States in 2017. She was reappointed for a second term on March 22, 2018. Smith is the author of four poetry collections, including "Wade in the Water: Poems" (Graywolf) and "Life on Mars," winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her memoir is "Ordinary Light," which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Smith is working to bring poetry to rural communities across America. She teaches at Princeton University.
Seymour Hersh with Paul Holdengräber | LIVE from the NYPL
LIVE from the NYPL | Recorded live at the New York Public Library, Celeste Auditorium, June 30, 2018.

From My Lai to Abu Ghraib, Seymour Hersh has broken some of the most impactful stories of the last half century. In the process, he has earned dozens of prizes for the New York Times and New Yorker, where he was a longtime staff writer. Now, for the first time, Hersh has stepped back to write a memoir, Reporter, some of which was researched at The New York Public Library. Hersh poured over documents from the New York Times Company Archives in the library's reading room, so it's only fitting that he should return here to discuss the resulting memoir, which tells the stories behind headlines that made history. Join us to hear those stories, along with more than a few "unwanted truths" — all from the man David Remnick once described as "quite simply, the greatest investigative journalist of his era."

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Mohsin Hamid | False Starts | Granta Magazine

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