LitLit 2024 Festival | On Adaptation with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Anna Dorn, Jane Hu, Jonathan Ames, and moderated by Paul Thompson
Los Angeles Review of Books presents “On Adaptation,” a conversation on the experience of taking a book to the screen. Authors Viet Thanh Nguyen and Anna Dorn, author and TV writer Jonathan Ames, and cultural critic Jane Hu will discuss what it’s like to see their work, and others, be adapted for Hollywood. The conversation will be led by Paul Thompson, an editor and critic. Join us as we discuss how Hollywood’s interests have influenced the literary landscape, from what gets published to what gets written, and why we’ve seen such a rise in adaptation in recent years.
This panel is made possible with the support of the Department of Cultural Affairs. This panel is a part of LITLIT 2024! Join us at The Pit LA on November 2 for LITLIT, the Little Literary Festival, a celebration of West Coast Literary Arts.
Jonathan Ames is the author of twelve books, including most recently A Man Named Doll and The Wheel of Doll. His third book in the ‘Doll Series’, Karma Doll, comes out this January. His novels The Extra Man and You were Never Really Here have been adapted as films, and he is the creator of two television series, Bored to Death and Blunt Talk. He lives in Los Angeles.
Anna Dorn is the author of the novels Vagablonde, Exalted, and Perfume & Pain. Exalted was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her next book, American Spirits, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2026. She lives in Los Angeles. Her latest book, Perfume & Pain, is being adapted by Clea Duvall.
Jane Hu is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Southern California. Her cultural criticism, including film & TV coverage, has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, The Nation, Harper’s, The Ringer, and The Awl, among other places. Her scholarship has been published in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Modern Language Studies, Textual Practice, Victorian Studies, Modernism/modernity Print+, and Post45. She is an assistant editor at n+1.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other awards, and was turned into an HBO limited series. His other books include The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer, and Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction). He is also the author of the best-selling short story collection The Refugees, and two children’s books, Chicken of the Sea (written with his son Ellison) and Simone. Besides editing The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, he teaches at the University of Southern California, where he is a University Professor. His next book is To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2025. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.
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Paul Thompson is a senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has written widely on music, TV, and film. His work can be found in Pitchfork, GQ, Rolling Stone, The Ringer, and The Washington Post, among others.