Literary Arts
The Remarkable Jonathan Plutzik
Introduction to Jonathan Plutzik. 5:53 min. Drone video: Zachary Plutzik. Music: The (New) Beethoven Quartets. The 32 Piano Sonatas Reimagined. By Jeffery Briggs. Piano Sonata in C-minor, op. 13. Performed by the Amernet String Quartet. Photo & Design: Raymond Elman. How does the son of a poet become the owner of the most culturally advanced hotel in the world? Practice, practice, practice. (The hyperbole is mine until proven otherwise.) And with a “little” help from his family and friends — for the glorious cultural...
read moreThe Classic That Changed Christmas
The Man Who Invented Christmas trailer. 2:40 min. Editor’s Note: Mitchell Kaplan, the founder of both Books & Books and the Miami Book Fair, joined forces with award-winning Hollywood producer Paula Mazur to create The Mazur/Kaplan Company, with the objective of identifying, optioning, and producing literary properties for film and TV. The Man Who Invented Christmas is their first film to be distributed nationwide, beginning November 22, 2017. The film is based on the book The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles...
read moreInto the Deep with Author Patricia Posner
Introduction to Patricia Posner: 1:58 min. Photo & Design: Raymond Elman. Music: Orlando Jacinto Garcia, Music for Berlin. Patricia Posner was born in London and spent half of her life in the U.K. and half in the U.S.A. For thirty years Posner worked on 12 books of investigative historical nonfiction with her husband, bestselling author Gerald Posner. On those projects, she conducted every interview with him, sifted through thousands of pages of original documents in government and private archives, and worked on the early...
read moreA Video Chat with Author Jay McInerney – Capturing the Zeitgeist
Introduction to Jay McInerney 2:14 min. Photo and design by Raymond Elman. Music: Carmen Cicero Jay McInerney Jr. (b. 1955) is a New York Times Best Selling American novelist. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City; Ransom; Story of My Life; Brightness Falls; The Last of the Savages; Model Behavior; The Good Life; and Bright, Precious Days. He edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices, wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City, and co-wrote the screenplay for the television film Gia, which...
read moreDanielle Flood: The Unquiet Daughter
Introduction to Danielle Flood. 3:23 min. Photo & Design by Raymond Elman. Danielle Flood’s true story, The Unquiet Daughter, could be called the sequel to Graham Greene’s classic novel The Quiet American, which has been taught on college campuses all over the world for decades. “Passionate and unflinchingly honest, The Unquiet Daughter is a fascinating memoir that explores the tangled connections between Graham Greene’s fictional version of wartime Indochina and the real people there whose actions have haunted...
read moreKingfolk
Excerpt from Kingfolk, a novel. This excerpt takes place midway through Kingfolk, a historical novel. Kingfolk is set in 1874 in a fictional town of ex-slaves in Southern Louisiana during the Reconstruction Era. The novel follows Beah, a freedwoman traveling to the town of Banias, Louisiana in hopes of finding her mother; Prophet Moon, an itinerant vision-seer who offers to help Beah with her goal; and the founder of the town, Claude Banias, who struggles to protect Banias from bloodthirsty radicals. The three lives intertwine and...
read moreFive More Poets
Poetry from Miami reflects the diversity of the city itself. We don’t just mean writers’ nations of origin, ethnicity, and subculture. There is no single style one could identify as a Miami school of poetry. There are no factions either. One dip of the stick into the poetic wetlands and up comes narrative drama, fragmentation, spoken word, formalism, and more. Such factions and schools are foolish anyway. Miami is an organic case in point. — Annik Adey-Babinski — Michael Martin Inspicio Poetry Editors Caroline Cabrera Ariel...
read moreOur Lady of Clarity
Editor’s Note: Although Inspicio has published fiction by James Gilbert in the past, we have decided to become more systematic in our approach, and we are pleased to introduce a new fiction section featuring short stories, excerpts from novels, excerpts from works in progress – all written by people with connections to Miami and South Florida. For our first offering, Inspicio fiction editor Jamie Eubanks selected a chapter from a novel in progress by Fabienne Josaphat, author of Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow. We meet Mary Marthe at a...
read moreA Video Chat with Eric Bogosian — Actor, Dramatist, Director, Author — But Not a Poet
Introduction to Eric Bogosian. 4:25 min. Photo: Raymond Elman. Music mix: Marleau Eric Bogosian (b.1953) is an Armenian-American actor, dramatist, monologuist, novelist and historian. He grew up in Woburn, Massachusetts, setting for the book and movie A Civil Action, but left his blue-collar roots to attend the University of Chicago. Bogosian is the author of six produced plays, including Talk Radio at the New York Shakespeare Festival, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and subsequently adapted to film by Oliver Stone, garnering...
read moreA Video Discussion with
Dr. Mark B. Rosenberg,
the 5th President of
Florida International University
Introduction to Dr. Mark B. Rosenberg, 5th President of Florida International University: 1:33 min. Photos: FIU. Design: Raymond Elman. Music: Tony Succar. Dr. Mark B. Rosenberg is the fifth president of Florida International University and former Chancellor of the State University System of Florida (SUS). Florida International University (FIU) is an American metropolitan public research university in Greater Miami, Florida. FIU has two major campuses in Miami-Dade County, with its main campus in University Park and another large...
read more