This landmark book explores the 21st century live literature scene and its cultural value. Wiles, a novelist and anthropologist, crafts immersive evocations of two contrasting events: Hay, a major literary festival; and Polari, an intimate literary salon, showcasing a new experiential and literary mode of ethnography. Evocative descriptions are skillfully interwoven amongst conversations with well-known author-performers and unknown reader-audience members, extracts of literary texts, and wide-lens reflections. Live literature participation is revealed to have a multitude of hidden impacts, among them shaping books' interpretation, and forging meaningful communities. The book probes connections between live literature events, books in various forms, publishing structures, social media, liveness, performance, neuroscience, and literary debates around diversity, cultural appropriation, celebrity, and impacts of the Coronavirus. It will take you on an enlightening journey into the world of live literature, and leave you thinking afresh about cultural value of embodied events in a digitalizing future.

Chapter 1: Speaking of Writing and Writing of Speaking: What, where, how, whyChapter 2: Hay Festival: The remote Welsh field that stages the global publishing industryChapter 3: Polari Salon: The revival of an Enlightenment tradition with an activist twistChapter 4: Experiential Literary Ethnography: A creative approach to revealing cultural valueChapter 5: Summing Up the Story: patterns, divergences, insights, ideas