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April Ryan, "Under Fire"

Book TV visited the National Press Club's annual Book Fair & Author's Night. There we interviewed April Ryan about her book "Under Fire."

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Rebecca Skloot on “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”
Extended discussion with author Rebecca Skloot, author of the best-selling book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” Johns Hopkins University announced plans this week to name a new research building after Lacks, an African-American woman who permanently changed modern medicine nearly 70 years ago when it was discovered that her cells could live forever. These “immortal cells” have helped scientists produce remedies for numerous diseases, including the first polio vaccine, that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But Lacks’s cells were taken without her consent when she was a patient at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in 1951.
Appel Salon | John Irving | December 4, 2018
"Well, in the case of The World According to Garp, I thought I was taking sexual hatred, sexual intolerance, sexual discrimination to truthful extremes... What disheartened me in re-reading the novel 40 years later is how I couldn't find the exaggeration. It seemed to me to be closer to reading a newspaper than I normally like. It seemed to me that what I thought was extreme has not only not gone away, it has become commonplace." —John Irving

John Irving appeared at the Toronto Reference Library to discuss the 40th anniversary of his seminal The World According to Garp with Sam Tanenhaus.
Curtis Sittenfeld on "You Think It, I'll Say It: Stories"
Curtis Sittenfeld on "You Think It, I'll Say It: Stories" at the 2018 Miami Book Fair interviewed by Rich Fahle.

A suburban mother of two fantasizes about the downfall of an old friend whose wholesome lifestyle empire may or may not be built on a lie. A high-powered lawyer honeymooning with her husband is caught off guard by the appearance of the girl who tormented her in high school. A shy Ivy League student learns the truth about a classmate’s seemingly enviable life.

Curtis Sittenfeld has established a reputation as a sharp chronicler of the modern age who humanizes her subjects even as she skewers them. Now, with this first collection of short fiction, her “astonishing gift for creating characters that take up residence in readers’ heads” (The Washington Post) is showcased like never before. Throughout the ten stories in You Think It, I’ll Say It, Sittenfeld upends assumptions about class, relationships, and gender roles in a nation that feels both adrift and viscerally divided.

With moving insight and uncanny precision, Curtis Sittenfeld pinpoints the questionable decisions, missed connections, and sometimes extraordinary coincidences that make up a life. Indeed, she writes what we’re all thinking—if only we could express it with the wit of a master satirist, the storytelling gifts of an old-fashioned raconteur, and the vision of an American original.
Luis Alberto Urrea: 2018 National Book Festival
Luis Alberto Urrea discusses "The House of Broken Angels" at the 2018 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Speaker Biography: Luis Alberto Urrea is a best-selling author of poetry, fiction and essays. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Urrea is also a member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. His published works include "The Devil's Highway: A True Story," "Tijuana Book of the Dead," "Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life," "Queen of America," "The Hummingbird's Daughter" and "The Fever of Being." His most recent book, is "The House of Broken Angels" (Little, Brown).
Picture Freedom
In the decades leading up to the end of U.S. slavery, many free Blacks posed for daguerreotypes—a type of very early photograph. These portraits captured their stories and recorded history, served to prepare blacks and whites both for the coming realities of emancipation, and dignified their subjects, particularly by representing Blackness outside the cultural trappings and assumptions of slavery. In Picture Freedom, Duke University Professor Jasmine Nichole Cobb explores these images to trace the emergence of black freedom as an idea and as a visual representation that has always been crucial - if contentious - to establishing selfhood.
Patrick deWitt | eh List
The eh List Presents Patrick deWitt for his novel French Exit

In conversation with journalist Nathalie Atkinson
Writers Resist LA 2019 Reading Introduction
Kick-off of 1/13/2019 Writers Resist LA reading at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice, CA, includes remarks by Beyond Baroque Dir. Richard Modiano, event organizers Lynne Thompson and David St. John as well as Natalie Green of PEN CENTER USA and Spencer Windes of the ACLU of Southern California.
Natasha Trethewey: Monument
Join two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey as she unveils Monument, her first retrospective, which features new work as well as poems selected with care from each of her four previous collections. In being drawn forth from an “opus of classics both elegant and necessary,” each poem weaves and interlocks with those that came before it, and those that follow. Throughout the collection, too, winds the poet’s own family history of trauma and loss, resilience and love—in terms that have, across Trethewey’s already monumental career, helped us change the very foundation of the vocabulary we use to speak about race, gender, and our collective future.
Fatima Farheen Mirza on "A Place For Us: A Novel" at the 2018 Miami Book Fair
Fatima Farheen Mirza on A Place For Us A Novel at the 2018 Miami Book Fair interviewed by Rich Fahle.

The first novel from Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint, SJP for Hogarth, A Place for Us is a deeply moving and resonant story of love, identity, and belonging

As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadia: their headstrong, eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride. What secrets and betrayals have caused this close-knit family to fracture? Can Amar find his way back to the people who know and love him best?

A Place for Us takes us back to the beginning of this family’s life: from the bonds that bring them together, to the differences that pull them apart. All the joy and struggle of family life is here, from Rafiq and Layla’s own arrival in America from India, to the years in which their children—each in their own way—tread between two cultures, seeking to find their place in the world, as well as a path home.

A Place for Us is a book for our times: an astonishingly tender-hearted novel of identity and belonging, and a resonant portrait of what it means to be an American family today. It announces Fatima Farheen Mirza as a major new literary talent.
“The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee”: David Treuer
We end today’s show with “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee,” a stunning new book by David Treuer that looks at Native America from 1890 to the present day. The book’s powerful mix of memoir, extensive interview and storytelling presents decades of indigenous history that have been sidelined by the mainstream. David Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
National Book Festival Gala 2018
This authors' gala was held the evening before the 2018 Library of Congress National Book Festival and featured awards, special presentations and readings by leading authors.
Kristen Roupenian | You Know You Want This
Kristen Roupenian celebrates the launch of her first short story collection, You Know You Want This, in conversation with writer Haley Mlotek.

You Know You Want This brilliantly explores the ways in which women are horrifying as much as it captures the horrors that are done to them. Among its pages are a couple who becomes obsessed with their friend hearing them have sex, then seeing them have sex…until they can’t have sex without him; a ten-year-old whose birthday party takes a sinister turn when she wishes for “something mean”; a woman who finds a book of spells half hidden at the library and summons her heart’s desire: a nameless, naked man; and a self-proclaimed “biter” who dreams of sneaking up behind and sinking her teeth into a green-eyed, long-haired, pink-cheeked coworker.

Spanning a range of genres and topics—from the mundane to the murderous and supernatural—these are stories about sex and punishment, guilt and anger, the pleasure and terror of inflicting and experiencing pain. These stories fascinate and repel, revolt and arouse, scare and delight in equal measure. And, as a collection, they point a finger at you, daring you to feel uncomfortable—or worse, understood—as if to say, “You want this, right? You know you want this.”
An Xiao Mina & Paul D. Miller | Memes to Movements
Digital media scholar An Xiao Mina and Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) sit down to discuss how meme culture shapes politics today. Mina's new book is "Memes to Movements: How the World's Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power."

Memes are the street art of the social web. Using social media-driven movements as her guide, technologist and digital media scholar An Xiao Mina unpacks the mechanics of memes and how they operate to reinforce, amplify, and shape today's politics. She finds that the "silly" stuff of meme culture—the photo remixes, the selfies, the YouTube songs, and the pun-tastic hashtags—are fundamentally intertwined with how we find and affirm one another, direct attention to human rights and social justice issues, build narratives, and make culture. Mina finds parallels, for example, between a photo of Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri, raising their hands in a gesture of resistance and one from eight thousand miles away, in Hong Kong, of Umbrella Movement activists raising yellow umbrellas as they fight for voting rights. She shows how a viral video of then presidential nominee Donald Trump laid the groundwork for pink pussyhats, a meme come to life as the widely recognized symbol for the international Women's March.

Crucially, Mina reveals how, in parts of the world where public dissent is downright dangerous, memes can belie contentious political opinions that would incur drastic consequences if expressed outright. Activists in China evade censorship by critiquing their government with grass mud horse pictures online. Meanwhile, governments and hate groups are also beginning to utilize memes to spread propaganda, xenophobia, and misinformation. Botnets and state-sponsored agents spread them to confuse and distract internet communities. On the long, winding road from innocuous cat photos, internet memes have become a central practice for political contention and civic engagement.

Memes to Movements unveils the transformative power of memes, for better and for worse. At a time when our movements are growing more complex and open-ended—when governments are learning to wield the internet as effectively as protestors—Mina brings a fresh and sharply innovative take to the media discourse.

An Xiao Mina is an American technologist, researcher, and artist. She served as a contributing editor for the book Ai Weiwei: Spatial Matters, and her own work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the US and around the world. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Wired, the New Inquiry, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera English, and Hyperallergic. A 2016-17 research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and product director at the technology company Meedan, her home is wherever the Wi-Fi is.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky is a composer, multimedia artist and writer. His written work has been published by The Village Voice, The Source, and Artforum, among others, and he is the Editor of Origin Magazine. Miller’s work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial; The Venice Biennial for Architecture; the Ludwig Museum in Cologne; Kunsthalle, Vienna; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Miami/Art Basel fair, and many other museums and galleries. Miller has written the award-winning book Rhythm Science, Sound Unbound, and The Book of Ice, an experiential visual and acoustic portrait of the Antarctic.
The Peacemakers with Bruce Jentleson
Bruce Jentleson discussed his new book "The Peacemakers," which he researched while the Kissinger Chair in the Library's John W. Kluge Center. The book explores how a variety of 20th-century leaders rewrote the scripts they were handed to make breakthroughs on issues long thought intractable.
Reniqua Allen | It Was All A Dream
In It Was All a Dream, Reniqua Allen tells the stories of Black millennials searching for a better future in spite of racist policies that have closed off traditional versions of success. Many watched their parents and grandparents play by the rules, only to sink deeper and deeper into debt. They witnessed their elders fight to escape cycles of oppression for more promising prospects, largely to no avail. Today, in this post-Obama era, they face a critical turning point.

Interweaving her own experience with those of young Black Americans in cities and towns from New York to Los Angeles and Bluefield, West Virginia to Chicago, Allen shares surprising stories of hope and ingenuity. Instead of accepting downward mobility, Black millennials are flipping the script and rejecting White America's standards. Whether it means moving away from cities and heading South, hustling in the entertainment industry, challenging ideas about gender and sexuality, or building activist networks, they are determined to forge their own path. Compassionate and deeply reported, It Was All a Dream is a celebration of a generation's doggedness against all odds, as they fight for a country in which their dreams can become a reality.

Join us as Reniqua Allen discusses her new book with Rebecca Carroll, Producer of Special Projects at WNYC!

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