Yesteryear

Yesteryear

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“You’re reading what?!” echo my literary fiction friends, lighting up my DM’s like fireflies in the summer grass. What can I say. I caved. I dipped my feet in the Zeitgeist.

How much more delicious/genius/alluring could the premise be? A tradwife selling the fantasy of life in Yesteryear (a place and an idea) to her millions of followers, finds herself waking up one day in 1855 and having to contend with how life in said yesteryear actually felt like. Genius indeed. What follows is a thriller/satire/absurdist tale of the highest order, written with fury and acerbic bite, propulsive and unputdownable. Bookish crack cocaine. Halloween candy on overdrive.

The Beast in Me

The Beast in Me

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Starring CLAIRE DANES & MATTHEW RHYS · A Conversation with Showrunner, Exec. Producer HOWARD GORDON & Exec. Producer Writer DANIEL PEARLE

I think there's also something about an unfettered or uncensored id that is so captivating. We all have that fantasy of doing exactly what we want with no consequences and sort of letting that go. I think when you see an athlete at the peak of their game and living that dream, or when someone has actually done horrible things that you would never allow yourself to do, there is a fascination there.

On Storytelling & The Human Condition

On Storytelling & The Human Condition

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Booker Prize-winning Novelist PAUL LYNCH
Author of Prophet Song · Beyond the Sea · Red Sky in the Morning

We narrate the story of our lives to ourselves. We narrate it in linear fashion. And I know many writers have played with time in all sorts of amazing ways, but we're storytellers. This is what we do. And if you give the brain a story, a prepackaged story, you're giving a cheesecake. That's what it wants. That's why it loves stories. That's why our society is just built on stories. Politics is nothing but stories. Everything you do in the evenings – we sit down, we're watching Netflix – just stories. We consume them all the time. We are just machines for belief.

On Writing, America's Forever Wars & Challenging Power

On Writing, America's Forever Wars & Challenging Power

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A Conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning Author VIET THANH NGUYEN

What I've discovered as a writer is that fear is a good indicator that there is a truth. To speak the truth in a society is oftentimes an act that requires some courage. Those processes of being an other for me in the United States were obviously very fundamental to shaping who I am as a person and as a writer. It was very difficult to undergo, but to become a writer who could talk about those issues was also a lot of fun. Writing The Sympathizer was a lot of fun, and I hope that the novel was enjoyable and humorous to read as well, despite its very serious politics. When I wrote The Committed, I also had a lot of fun as an outsider to France. In writing the novel itself, The Committed, there was a lot of humor, satire, and these kinds of tools to confront the tragedy of othering. This is very important to me as literary and political devices. I think I could do that in both The Sympathizer and The Committed because I had a lot of distance from the time periods that those novels described. My challenge right now is to try to find my sense of humor in describing what the United States is undergoing and doing to other countries, its own immigrants, and its own people of color, and minorities in the present. That's proving to be a little more challenging at this moment.

Art, Performance & the Illusion of Agency

Art, Performance & the Illusion of Agency

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with KATIE KITAMURA · Author of Audition
Intimacies · A Separation

I'm really interested in the formal aspect of characters who are channeling language, who are speaking the words of other people, and in characters who are aware of how little agency they actually have, who have passivity forced upon them, who perhaps even embrace their passivity to a certain extent but eventually seek out where they can enact their agency.

Finding Humanity Through Storytelling

Finding Humanity Through Storytelling

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A Conversation with Author · Filmmaker ETGAR KERET
Winner of Cannes Film Festival’s Caméra d’Or · Charles Bronfman Prize & Sapir Prize

When I write my stories, I don't want to solve things in life. I just want to persuade myself that there is a way out. Maybe I am in a cell, maybe I'm trapped. Maybe I won't make it, but if I can imagine a plan for escape, then I'll be less trapped because at least in my mind, there is a way. I think that my parents are survivors. They always talked about this idea of humanity. My parents always said to me, when you look at people, don't look at their political views; that's not important. Look at the way that they look at you. If they see you, if they listen to you, if they can understand your intention, even if it's a failing one, they're your people. And if they can't, it doesn't matter.

I think that when I came with my mother and father, they thought there are people, there are human beings, and there are people who want to be human beings but are still struggling. And you go with humanity; you go with the person who can go against his ideology if his heart tells him something.

How the Arts Can Transform Our Health

How the Arts Can Transform Our Health

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DAISY FANCOURT · Author of Art Cure · Director of WHO Collaborating Centre on Arts & Health · Prof. Psychobiology & Epidemiology at UCL

Within society we seem to have separated the arts out, so they’re not so much a part of our daily lives. As I’ve become a mother and I have children now, it’s been really eye-opening to rediscover lots of arts things that I’d stopped doing in my own childhood. But now coming back to them I think probably the most meaningful one for me is one I describe in the book, which is about my younger daughter, Daphne, who was premature and unfortunately got incredibly ill with meningitis and was in intensive care when she was just a few days old.

Female Desire · Sex & Intimacy

Female Desire · Sex & Intimacy

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Emmy-nominated Producer, Writer, Playwright LAURA EASON on THREE WOMEN

I think the show conveys to the women watching that their lives matter. They don't have to be some gorgeous aspirational person, although Sloane absolutely fits that mold. But for others living in the Midwest, struggling and feeling unseen, hopefully, the mirrors of Lina and Maggie will help them not feel so alone and remind them that their stories are important and matter.

DON McKELLAR

DON McKELLAR

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Co-writer · Executive Producer · Co-showrunner of HBO’s The Sympathizer
with Hoa Xuande · Robert Downey Jr.

I think it's central to the message of the show and of the book. This idea that there's another side to every question. That's the central quandary. There's this problem with the whole Vietnam War. It's saying, to Americans at least, put yourself on the other side, the Vietnamese side, and then recognize that that side also has two sides and then within that, there are further divisions. And if you do that, I think what it's proposing is that you have to step back. It forces a sort of objectivity and humility, and it asks you to step back and allow the bigger human questions to resonate.

ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON

ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON

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Icelandic Writer & Documentary Filmmaker
On Time and Water · The Casket of Time · LoveStar · Not Ok · The Story of the Blue Planet

A letter to the future
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.
In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.

If you look at the Himalayas, the frozen glaciers are feeding 1 billion people with milky white water. The real tragedy is if the Himalayan glaciers go the same way as Iceland. In many places in the world, glaciers are very important for agriculture and the basic water supply of people.