Winfrey picks Leila Mottley’s ‘Nightcrawling’ for book club

NEW YORK » Oprah Winfrey has chosen 19-year-old Leila Mottley’s “Nightcrawling,” a debut novel about a young Black woman from East Oakland and her battles with poverty, racism and the police, for next book club pick.

A spokesperson for Winfrey said Mottley is the youngest author ever selected for Oprah’s Book Club, founded in 1996.

“It brings me great joy to introduce readers to new authors, and this young poet Leila Mottley wrote a soul-searching portrait of survival and hope,” Winfrey said in a statement Tuesday.

Mottley, born and raised in Oakland, served as the city’s youth poet laureate in 2018. Her book was published Tuesday and has been praised by James McBride and Tommy Orange among others. Kirkus Reviews called “Nightcrawling” a “lovely and poetic” evocation of an “underclass and the disposable women just trying to survive.”

Kyiv theater reopens, plays sell out: ‘You continue living’

KYIV, UKRAINE » A theater in Ukraine’s capital reopened over the weekend for the first time since Russian forces invaded the country, and tickets quickly sold out.

Theater on Podil was the latest cultural institution in Kyiv to resume operations. Movie theaters and the National Opera opened their doors at the end of May.

“We were wondering how it would be, whether spectators would come during the war, whether they think at all about theater,” said one of the actors, Yuriy Felipenko, on Sunday. “And we were happy that the first three plays were sold out.”

Filipenko said the theater was putting on plays with just a few actors.

His colleague Kostya Tomlyak had hesitated to perform in wartime. But the influx of people returning to Kyiv since hostilities there have lessened persuaded him that it’s necessary “to learn how to live during the war, to live with theater, cinema, cafes. You continue living, although you don’t forget that there is the war.”