Tag Archives: Reading and conversation

Karl Ove Knausgaard with Zadie Smith, Conversation, 27 April 2016 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 27, 2016.

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian author whose books include A Time for Everything and Out of the World as well as his six volume, 3,600 page autobiographical novel, My Struggle. Dubbed “a Norwegian Marcel Proust,” Knausgaard begins his story in Book One almost ten years after his father has drunk himself to death. Reflecting on this time while embarking on a new novel, the author breaks down his own life story to its most elemental occurrences. Long passages reflecting on art, literature and music are interspersed with everyday details in the life of an ordinary Scandinavian.

Translated into English by Don Bartlett, Books Two through Five (with translation of Six forthcoming) continue Knausgaard’s epic, with deep introspection on love, family, friends, childhood and coming of age. Reflecting on the history of notions of life and death, Knausgaard asks: “What was man on this earth other than an insect among other insects, a life-form among other life-forms, which might just as well take the form of algae in a lake or fungi on the forest floor, roe in a fish’s stomach, rats in a nest or a cluster of mussels on a reef?”

This was a Lannan Literary event.

In this episode, he is joined in conversation with Zadie Smith. The companion Reading episode may be found here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.

Karl Ove Knausgaard with Zadie Smith, Reading, 27 April 2016 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 27, 2016.

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian author whose books include A Time for Everything and Out of the World as well as his six volume, 3,600 page autobiographical novel, My Struggle. Dubbed “a Norwegian Marcel Proust,” Knausgaard begins his story in Book One almost ten years after his father has drunk himself to death. Reflecting on this time while embarking on a new novel, the author breaks down his own life story to its most elemental occurrences. Long passages reflecting on art, literature and music are interspersed with everyday details in the life of an ordinary Scandinavian.

Translated into English by Don Bartlett, Books Two through Five (with translation of Six forthcoming) continue Knausgaard’s epic, with deep introspection on love, family, friends, childhood and coming of age. Reflecting on the history of notions of life and death, Knausgaard asks: “What was man on this earth other than an insect among other insects, a life-form among other life-forms, which might just as well take the form of algae in a lake or fungi on the forest floor, roe in a fish’s stomach, rats in a nest or a cluster of mussels on a reef?”

This was a Lannan Literary event.

In this episode, he is introduced by Zadie Smith and then read from his work. The companion Conversation episode may be found here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.

Karl Ove Knausgaard with Zadie Smith, 27 April 2016 – Audio

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 27, 2016.

Karl Ove Knausgaard with Zadie Smith

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian author whose books include A Time for Everything and Out of the World as well as his six volume, 3,600 page autobiographical novel, My Struggle. Dubbed “a Norwegian Marcel Proust,” Knausgaard begins his story in Book One almost ten years after his father has drunk himself to death. Reflecting on this time while embarking on a new novel, the author breaks down his own life story to its most elemental occurrences. Long passages reflecting on art, literature and music are interspersed with everyday details in the life of an ordinary Scandinavian.

Translated into English by Don Bartlett, Books Two through Five (with translation of Six forthcoming) continue Knausgaard’s epic, with deep introspection on love, family, friends, childhood and coming of age. Reflecting on the history of notions of life and death, Knausgaard asks: “What was man on this earth other than an insect among other insects, a life-form among other life-forms, which might just as well take the form of algae in a lake or fungi on the forest floor, roe in a fish’s stomach, rats in a nest or a cluster of mussels on a reef?”

This was a Lannan Literary event.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also view the video recordings of this event there.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.

Nadeem Aslam with Phil Klay, Conversation, 30 March 2016 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 30, 2016.

This was a Lannan Literary event.

Nadeem Aslam is a British-Pakistani novelist whose works include Maps for Lost Lovers, The Wasted Vigil, and The Blind Man’s Garden, a tale of two brothers whose lives are upended by war post 9/11. Explaining that his fiction is inspired by “anything that distresses me,” Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil was fed by his conversations with more than 200 Afghan refugees in Britain as well as his travels in Afghanistan.

Aslam’s 2004 novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, tells the story of migrants from Pakistan who live in a cold and unwelcoming English town they have renamed Dasht-e-Tanhaii, meaning the Desert of Loneliness. Marred by racism and violence, Aslam has explained it is not unlike the Northern English town he moved to at the age of 14 where, “we were experiencing low-level September 11s every day.” Through his family, “I learned about political commitment and the life of the mind, and that an artist is never poor.” Nadeem Aslam is the recipient of the Kiriyama Prize, awarded for books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia, as well as a 2005 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction.

In this episode, he is joined in conversation with Phil Klay. The companion Reading episode may be found here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.

Nadeem Aslam with Phil Klay, Reading, 30 March 2016 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 30, 2016.

This was a Lannan Literary event.

Nadeem Aslam is a British-Pakistani novelist whose works include Maps for Lost Lovers, The Wasted Vigil, and The Blind Man’s Garden, a tale of two brothers whose lives are upended by war post 9/11. Explaining that his fiction is inspired by “anything that distresses me,” Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil was fed by his conversations with more than 200 Afghan refugees in Britain as well as his travels in Afghanistan.

Aslam’s 2004 novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, tells the story of migrants from Pakistan who live in a cold and unwelcoming English town they have renamed Dasht-e-Tanhaii, meaning the Desert of Loneliness. Marred by racism and violence, Aslam has explained it is not unlike the Northern English town he moved to at the age of 14 where, “we were experiencing low-level September 11s every day.” Through his family, “I learned about political commitment and the life of the mind, and that an artist is never poor.” Nadeem Aslam is the recipient of the Kiriyama Prize, awarded for books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia, as well as a 2005 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction.

In this episode, he is introduced by Phil Klay and then read from his work. The companion Conversation episode may be found here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.

Teju Cole with Amitava Kumar, Conversation, 3 February 2016 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 3, 2016.

This was a Lannan Literary event.

Teju Cole, writer, art historian, photographer and photography critic of The New York Times Magazine, is the author of the novella Every Day is for the Thief, named a book of the year by The New York Times. Of his novel Open City, Time Magazine said, “A powerful and unnerving inquiry into the human soul. Cole has earned flattering comparisons to literary heavyweights like J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald and Henry James, but Open City merits higher praise: it’s a profoundly original work, intellectually stimulating and possessing of a style both engaging and seductive.”

Teju Cole has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Financial Times, Aperture, The Atlantic, Granta, and several other publications. His photography has been exhibited in India and the US, published in a number of journals, and will be the subject of a solo exhibition in Italy.

Born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents, and raised in Nigeria, Cole currently lives in Brooklyn. A recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction, Teju Cole is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and is currently at work on a book-length nonfiction narrative of Lagos, Nigeria.

In this episode, he joins in conversation with Amitava Kumar. The companion Reading episode may be found here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.

Teju Cole with Amitava Kumar, Reading, 3 February 2016 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 3, 2016.

This was a Lannan Literary event.

Teju Cole, writer, art historian, photographer and photography critic of The New York Times Magazine, is the author of the novella Every Day is for the Thief, named a book of the year by The New York Times. Of his novel Open City, Time Magazine said, “A powerful and unnerving inquiry into the human soul. Cole has earned flattering comparisons to literary heavyweights like J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald and Henry James, but Open City merits higher praise: it’s a profoundly original work, intellectually stimulating and possessing of a style both engaging and seductive.”

Teju Cole has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Financial Times, Aperture, The Atlantic, Granta, and several other publications. His photography has been exhibited in India and the US, published in a number of journals, and will be the subject of a solo exhibition in Italy.

Born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents, and raised in Nigeria, Cole currently lives in Brooklyn. A recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction, Teju Cole is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and is currently at work on a book-length nonfiction narrative of Lagos, Nigeria.

In this episode, he is introduced by Amitava Kumar and then reads from his work. The companion Conversation episode may be found here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.

Teju Cole with Amitava Kumar, 3 February 2016 – Audio

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 3, 2016.

Teju Cole with Amitava Kumar, 3 February 2016

This was a Lannan Literary event.

Teju Cole, writer, art historian, photographer and photography critic of The New York Times Magazine, is the author of the novella Every Day is for the Thief, named a book of the year by The New York Times. Of his novel Open City, Time Magazine said, “A powerful and unnerving inquiry into the human soul. Cole has earned flattering comparisons to literary heavyweights like J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald and Henry James, but Open City merits higher praise: it’s a profoundly original work, intellectually stimulating and possessing of a style both engaging and seductive.”

Teju Cole has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Financial Times, Aperture, The Atlantic, Granta, and several other publications. His photography has been exhibited in India and the US, published in a number of journals, and will be the subject of a solo exhibition in Italy.

Born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents, and raised in Nigeria, Cole currently lives in Brooklyn. A recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction, Teju Cole is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and is currently at work on a book-length nonfiction narrative of Lagos, Nigeria.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also view the video recordings of this event there.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.

Claudia Rankine with Saskia Hamilton, Conversation, 6 May 2015 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 6, 2015.

This event was part of the Lannan Literary series.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2014) which continues Rankine’s unique genre and presents a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism on society. Another collection, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf, 2004), is a multi-genre experimental project, blending poetry, essays, and images, of which she writes, “Forgiveness, I finally decide, is not the death of amnesia, nor is it a form of madness as Derrida claims. For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead.” In praise, Jorie Graham wrote, “Rankine breaks out of virtual emotion, reawakens honesty, and exhibits such raw political courage and aesthetic bravery it sends tremors through the entire field of American poetry as she finds it.”

Her plays include Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, which was commissioned by the Foundry Theatre, and Existing Conditions (co-authored with Casey Llewellyn).

In this episode she is joined in conversation with Saskia Hamilton. The companion Reading episode may be found here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.

Claudia Rankine with Saskia Hamilton, Reading, 6 May 2015 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 6, 2015.

This event was part of the Lannan Literary series.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2014) which continues Rankine’s unique genre and presents a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism on society. Another collection, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf, 2004), is a multi-genre experimental project, blending poetry, essays, and images, of which she writes, “Forgiveness, I finally decide, is not the death of amnesia, nor is it a form of madness as Derrida claims. For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead.” In praise, Jorie Graham wrote, “Rankine breaks out of virtual emotion, reawakens honesty, and exhibits such raw political courage and aesthetic bravery it sends tremors through the entire field of American poetry as she finds it.”

Her plays include Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, which was commissioned by the Foundry Theatre, and Existing Conditions (co-authored with Casey Llewellyn).

In this episode she is introduced by Saskia Hamilton and then reads from her work. The companion Conversation episode may be found here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.