I was on The Takeaway today sharing my summer reading recommendations with host Tanzina Vega. My picks: Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, There There by Tommy Orange, Pretty Things by Virginie Despentes, Banthology, edited by Sarah Cleave, Air Traffic by Gregory Pardlo, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. Listen here for more about what makes these books so great.
Tag Archives: WNYC
Print is Back, Back Again
The radio version of my New Yorker story on South Korean literature airs this week in a special hour I’ve been working on for On the Media, which is all about the state of the publishing industry and the enduring presence of physical books in a digital world.
Check out Laura Marsh’s brilliant look at the subversive history of adult coloring books, Rob Salkowitz on why Amazon might be opening physical bookshops, Bob Garfield’s visit to a massive warehouse selling books by the foot, and more!
Brooklyn Book Festival: WNYC’s Book Swap Beer Spectacular
Join me Thursday, September 17th at WNYC’s Greene Space for a night of beer, books, and conversation with special guest Naomi Jackson, author of The Star Side of Bird Hill.
Details and tickets: http://www.thegreenespace.org/events/thegreenespace/2015/sep/17/book-swap-beer-spectacular/
Muslim/American: Storytelling
Tomorrow night at The Greene Space, I’ll be hosting a conversation with three particularly brave and brilliant Muslim-American New Yorkers who have each made tremendous journeys– with their families, and alone; across the world, and deep into their own hearts.
Sadia Shepard is the author of The Girl from Foreign: A Memoir, in which she investigates her grandmother’s childhood among the Bene Israel, the small Jewish community she belonged to in Mumbai before converting to Islam when she married.
Comedian and performer Alaudin Ullah has been featured on HBO, Comedy Central, MTV, BET and PBS. His one-man show “Dishwasher Dreams” is the story of how his father, a Bengali steamship worker, landed in New York in the 1920s.
Kenan Trebincevic was born in a town called Brcko in what today is Bosnia and Herzegovina to a Bosnian Muslim family in 1980. He came to the United States in 1993 while his country was in the midst of war, went to college in Connecticut, and became an American citizen in 2001. He is the author of a memoir, The Bosnia List.
UPDATE: Video of the event is now online! http://livestream.com/thegreenespace/events/4083076
Pulitzer Winner Gregory Pardlo on Life as a Poet in Bed-Stuy
I recently spent a glorious spring afternoon with Gregory Pardlo, the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in poetry. We chatted on his stoop, and then we walked to a few of the neighborhood spots that feature prominently in his poetry– including the Fulton Street Foodtown, which is the setting for his poem “Problema 3.” There, we talked about Baltimore, Toya Graham and being a black parent. Hear my story for The Takeaway and listen to him read and discuss a few other poems on The Takeaway’s site.
UPDATE: A second version of the story I filed for the WNYC newsroom is now online too. In it, we talk about the changing visual landscape of his neighborhood, and why his young daughters have mixed feelings about his Pulitzer.
Tales of Toxic Mushrooms and Dirty Bombs in New York
In 
my latest piece for WNYC, novelists Jill Ciment and Adam Sternbergh reflect on New York real estate, iconic scary movies, and what it would take to bring the city to a standstill.
Sternbergh’s new book Near Enemy and Ciment’s novel Act of God each imagine strange disasters befalling a New York City of the future.
If you missed it on the radio, you can listen here.
The Steve Jobs of the Renaissance: Meet The Man Who Set Books Free
I was on The Takeaway on Monday talking about Renaissance publishing innovator Aldus Manutius and why technophiles like Robin Sloan consider him the Steve Jobs of his era. Manutius, who died in 1515, is the subject of a 500th anniversary exhibition at the Grolier Club in Manhattan running through the end of April. The story’s also airing as a feature on WNYC.
‘Preparation for the Next Life’ in Flushing, Queens
I wandered around the Flushing Mall with Atticus Lish (author of the brilliant novel Preparation for the Next Life) for a story that aired on WNYC this morning. You’ve got to read this book!
A Night at the Brooklyn Museum
Thank you to everyone who came out to the Brooklyn Museum for a night of conversation with Yelena Akhtiorskaya (Panic in a Suitcase), Jason Reynolds (When I Was the Greatest), Mark Chiusano (Marine Park: Stories) and Evan Hughes (Panic in a Suitcase)! It was fantastic to see WNYC join forces with the Brooklyn Book Festival.
UPDATE: The audio from the full event is now online here: http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/brooklyn-bound-writing-kings-county/
Brooklyn Bound: Writing Kings County
Mark your calendars for September 18th!
I’m thrilled to be hosting an interactive discussion on literature, identity, and geography at the Brooklyn Museum in a special WNYC Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend event.
The event is called Brooklyn Bound: Writing Kings County and it centers around writers past and present who have taken inspiration from the expansive borough.
The evening will feature Evan Hughes, author of Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life), plus three emerging writers whose work focuses on three distinct Brooklyn neighborhoods. Yelena Akhtiorskaya‘s debut novel Panic in a Suitcase is set in the Brighton Beach of her immigrant childhood; Jason Reynolds writes about the pressures of life in Bed-Stuy in his young adult novel When I Was the Greatest; and Mark Chiusano (Marine Park: Stories) examines the far reaches of the borough in his new collection of stories.
See WNYC’s events page for details and tickets. I hope to see you there!
Mythili G. Rao 