Jaipur Literature Festival: The Written World with Martin Puchner and The Poetic Imagination: Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason

Tuesday, 4:00 pm EDT September 12, 2023

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

4pm ET: The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization with Martin Puchner and Sanjoy K Roy

Writer Martin Puchner’s book, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization, is a fascinating account of how great texts and technologies have shaped cultures, civilizations and altered human history. In a captivating conversation with Sanjoy K. Roy, Puchner explores how literature is central to the development of religions, politics and nations while also playing a decisive role in how we view the world.

5:15pm ET: The Poetic Imagination: Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason with Vijay Seshadri, Arundhathi Subramaniam, and Nandana Dev Sen

A series of multivocal poetry readings where different rhythms and styles converge in a joyous celebration of imaginative possibility. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist, and literary critic Vijay Seshadri’s poetry collection, That Was Now, This Is Then, weaves through the paradoxes of time and space, offering refuge in emotionally turbulent times. Sahitya Akademi Award-winning poet and author Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poetry collection, Love Without A Story, celebrates an expanding kinship: of passion and friendship, mythic quest and modern-day longing, in a world animated by dialogue and dissent, delirium and silence. In conversation with celebrated writer Nandana Dev Sen, whose latest work, Acrobat, is a radiant collection of poetry about womanhood, intimacy, and the body politics that together evoke the arc of an ordinary life.

Presented in partnership with the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Featuring

Martin Puchner

Martin Puchner

Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor at Harvard University. His prize-winning books range from philosophy to technology and the arts, and include The Written World, a WSJ bestseller that has been translated into twenty languages. His most recent book is Culture: The Story of Us, from Cave Art to K-Pop.
Sanjoy K. Roy

Sanjoy K. Roy

Sanjoy K. Roy is Managing Director of Teamwork Arts, which produces over 33 festivals in 42 cities and 17 countries, including the world’s largest literary gathering — the Jaipur Literature Festival and international editions of JLF. He is a founder-trustee of Salaam Baalak Trust, the Co-chair of the Art and Culture Committee of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and former President of Event and Entertainment Management Association. He has been conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of the University honoris causa by University of York, UK.
Vijay Seshadri

Vijay Seshadri

Vijay Seshadri is the author of five collections of poems: Wild Kingdom, The Long Meadow, The Disappearances, 3 Sections, and That Was Now, This Is Then; and many essays, reviews, and memoir fragments. His work has been recognized with a number of honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Arundhathi Subramaniam

Arundhathi Subramaniam

Described as “one of the finest poets writing in India today” (The Hindu, 2010), Arundhathi Subramaniam is a leading Indian poet and writer on spirituality. Her thirteen books of poetry and prose include the recent poetry volume, Love Without a Story, and a book of conversations with female sacred travellers, Women Who Wear Only Themselves. Other works include the anthology of sacred poetry, Eating God, and the bestselling biography, Sadhguru: More Than a Life. Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2015, she is the winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2020, the Khushwant Singh Poetry Prize, the Raza Award, the Il Ceppo Award in Italy, among others. Her new work as editor is a poetry anthology, forthcoming from Penguin India, entitled Wild Women (on the female presence in Indian mystic poetry).
Nandana Dev Sen

Nandana Dev Sen

Nandana Dev Sen is a writer, actor, and child-rights activist. She has authored six children’s books, translated and edited two books of poetry, and starred in twenty international feature films. Sen is the Artist Ambassador for Save the Children India, Author Advocate for Room to Read, and a Director of the Women’s Refugee Commission, New York.

Featured Books

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The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization

By Martin Puchner

Published by Random House

PURCHASE

The story of literature in sixteen acts—from Homer to Harry Potter, including The Tale of Genji, Don Quixote, The Communist Manifesto, and how they shaped world history

In this groundbreaking book, Martin Puchner leads us on a remarkable journey through time and around the globe to reveal how stories and literature have created the world we have today. Through sixteen foundational texts selected from more than four thousand years of world literature, he shows us how writing has inspired the rise and fall of empires and nations, the spark of philosophical and political ideas, and the birth of religious beliefs.

We meet Murasaki, a lady from eleventh-century Japan who wrote the first novel, The Tale of Genji, and follow the adventures of Miguel de Cervantes as he battles pirates, both seafaring and literary. We watch Goethe discover world literature in Sicily, and follow the rise in influence of The Communist Manifesto. Puchner takes us to Troy, Pergamum, and China, speaks with Nobel laureates Derek Walcott in the Caribbean and Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, and introduces us to the wordsmiths of the oral epic Sunjata in West Africa. This delightful narrative also chronicles the inventions—writing technologies, the printing press, the book itself—that have shaped people, commerce, and history. In a book that Elaine Scarry has praised as “unique and spellbinding,” Puchner shows how literature turned our planet into a written world.
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That Was Now, This Is Then

By Vijay Seshadri

Published by Graywolf Press / Macmillan

PURCHASE

No one blends ironic intelligence, emotional frankness, radical awareness, and intricate humor the way Vijay Seshadri does. His fourth collection takes on the paradoxes of time and space, destabilizing highly tuned lyrics and elegies with sharp and exquisite turns in poems steeped in the complexities of being a self in the world, and being a human among other humans. In these poems, Seshadri’s speaker becomes the subject, the reader becomes the writer, and the multiplying refracted narratives yield an “anguish so pure it almost / feels like joy.” That Was Now, This Is Then affirms Seshadri’s place as one of America’s greatest living poets.

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Love Without a Story

By Arundhathi Subramaniam

Published by Bloodaxe Books

PURCHASE

Subramaniam’s latest collection celebrates an expanding kinship: of passion and friendship, mythic quest and modern-day longing, in a world animated by dialogue and dissent, delirium and silence. Circling themes of intimacy and time, they return to the urgency of conversation: that fragile bridge across the frozen attitudes that divide our world.

Here are poems that celebrate an expanding kinship: of passion and friendship, mythic quest and modern-day longing, in a world animated by dialogue and dissent, delirium and silence. Circling themes of intimacy and time, they return to the urgency of conversation: that fragile bridge across the frozen attitudes that divide our world. But at the heart of the collection is a deeper preoccupation, with those blurry places where humans might walk with gods, where the body might touch the beyond, where the enchanted might intersect effortlessly with the everyday. Where one stumbles upon what the poet simply calls ‘love without a story’.

Arundhathi Subramaniam’s previous book from Bloodaxe, When God Is a Traveller, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Love Without a Story is her fourth collection of poetry. Her earlier work is available in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems.