Poets & Writers Theater

In this Enoch Pratt Free Library event in Baltimore, Lydia Millet reads from her story collection Atavists (Norton, 2025) and discusses the humor in her writing in a conversation with Betsy Boyd. Atavists is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, Ricardo Hernandez, assistant director of Programs & Partnerships at Poets & Writers, hosts a celebratory reading by the 2025 fiction cohort of Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early career authors. Introduced by writer and publicist Jennifer Huang, readers include Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Roohi Choudhry, Kerry Donoghue, Lacey N. Dunham, Shasta Grant, Laura Venita Green, Benedict Nguyễn, Miranda Schmidt, and Daniel Tam-Claiborne.

In this Strand Book Store event, Torrey Peters reads from her book Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories (Random House, 2025) and talks about the experience of transitioning and how literature can broaden understandings of self beyond identity in a conversation with essayist and critic Andrea Long Chu. “A lot of these stories are invitations to a reader to identify with these characters who are probably not like the reader,” says Peters.

Jennifer Acker, founder and editor in chief of the Common, answers questions about the journal’s mission, slush piles, and her editorial process in this virtual event with Becky Tuch for the Lit Mag News Roundup. An interview with Acker about the Common’s fifteenth anniversary is featured in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The only counsel that is acceptable is to work! To work very hard until you discover the kind of writer that you want to be.” Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa dispenses advice to emerging writers in this Louisiana Channel interview with Christian Lund. Vargas Llosa died at the age of eighty-nine on April 13, 2025.

In this video from the University of South Carolina Irvin Department of Rare Books & Special Collections, scholars talk about their special exhibit celebrating 100 years since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published with items ranging from first editions of the novel, editions owned by writers like Sylvia Plath, and ephemera from the author’s life.

In this interview for The Thread documentary series, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about his childhood experiences as a refugee and overcoming trauma, his parents’ complicated reaction to his writing career, and how storytelling and writing changed his life from an early age. Read about Nguyen’s essay collection To Save and Destroy: Writing as an Other (Belknap Press, 2025) in our Best Books series.

In this Penguin Random House video, Lev Grossman, author of The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur (Viking, 2024), and Dan Jones, author of Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King (Viking, 2024), share insights into their writing and research processes.

In this episode of the Ehkili podcast, Sahar Mustafah talks to author and editor Susan Muaddi Darraj to discuss her anthology, Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing From the Diaspora (Palestine Writes Press, 2024), and the significance of amplifying Palestinian literary voices.

In this Off Book video for the Richland Library in South Carolina, R. F. Kuang speaks about her research process, the importance of reading literature with diverse characters, and the first time she accidentally got caught for damaging a library book. “I freaked out. I thought I was going to be banned from libraries forever,” Kuang says.

In this Green Apple Books event, Muriel Leung reads from her debut novel, How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster (Norton, 2024), and discusses the possibilities of love and care in Chinese American families and communities in a conversation with K-Ming Chang.

In this episode of NPR’s Wild Card podcast hosted by Rachel Martin, author Zadie Smith reflects on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her debut novel, White Teeth (Random House, 2000), and talks about her forthcoming book of essays and her generation’s struggle with the notion of time. “I’ve always felt there wasn’t enough time. I would like to accept time and also love it,” she says.

Written and directed by Laura Piani, this French romantic comedy follows a bookseller at the legendary bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, who dreams of experiencing love akin to a Jane Austen novel and becoming a writer. The film stars Camille Rutherford, Pablo Pauly, Charlie Anson, and Annabelle Lengronne.

In this BBC News interview, Ann Patchett speaks about her journey as a writer, the shared themes in her novels, and the unexpected joy she found from owning a bookshop. “There are always going to be people who want to read,” she says. “I’m here to serve the people who still want to read a book.”

In this Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast episode hosted by Miwa Messer, author Laila Lalami talks about the quickly evolving nature of surveillance technology and how a conversation with her husband about data privacy led her to write her novel The Dream Hotel (Pantheon, 2025).

Watch the trailer for The Friend, a film adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s National Book Award–winning novel of the same name. Written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the film stars Ann Dowd, Bill Murray, Naomi Watts, and Bing the Great Dane.

In this Green Apple Books event, Atlantic senior editor Jeremy Gordon reads from his debut novel, See Friendship (Harper Perennial, 2025), and talks about the decision to write a book of fiction amidst a career in journalism in a conversation with New Yorker staff writer and author Jay Caspian Kang.

In this Late Night With Seth Meyers interview, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses the process of writing Dream Count (Knopf, 2025), her first novel in ten years, and how turning to poetry and the memories of her mother inspired her. “I have always felt that poetry nurtures your language and I read it to remind me of the magic of language,” she says.

In this Knopf video, John Nathan speaks about his translation process, his personal relationship with Yukio Mishima, and the historical context of Voices of the Fallen Heroes: And Other Stories (Vintage, 2025), a newly published collection of Mishima’s work with an introduction by Nathan, edited by Stephen Dodd.

In this Louisiana Channel interview, Mohsin Hamid talks about how his writing process has changed over the years with each novel he’s written, the importance of form and structure to a reader’s understanding of narrative, and the responsibility of writers to establish and shape reality. “We talk about reality as though it is real, but we are aware that we are creating it,” he says.