Poets & Writers Theater

“I had wanted to write a book about freedom,” reads Maggie Nelson from her latest essay collection, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press, 2021), in this 2021 virtual reading and conversation with author Hari Kunzru for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. 

“It sings, it bubbles…it would enrich anybody’s life to read it.” Tim Martin and the panel of judges for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize discuss and praise this year’s winner, Flights (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017) by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft. Tokarczuk is the first Polish writer to win the Man Booker International Prize. 

“I’ve always been quite preoccupied with identity—personal identity—and also how the individual is constructed or constituted by larger social forces...” Hari Kunzru, author most recently of White Tears (Knopf, 2017), talks about his thematic interests and a book project on privacy and surveillance which he worked on during his fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.

Hari Kunzru's digital memoir, Twice Upon a Time: Listening to New York (Atavist Books, 2014), incorporates music, recordings, movable text, and photographs for an interactive experience. Read more about Atavist Books in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Authors Rachel Kushner, Hari Kunzru, and Rivka Galchen speak with poet and Bomb Magazine senior editor Mónica de la Torre about their writing and the state of the literary world at New York City's Strand Book Store.