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“The book that I didn’t know I could do was the one I should be doing.” In this Penguin Random House video, author Colson Whitehead talks about the origins of his award-winning novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, and continuing the stories of his character Ray Carney through his two latest novels, Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto.
“The key to an amazing story is the heart of the story,” says novelist Daniel José Older in this segment of Penguin Random House’s Meet the Author series. “If you’re a writer, it’s your compass. It’s what’s going to guide you forward to finish the story.”
“Part of my purpose as a writer is to help make compassion the standard.” In this Penguin Random House video, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah talks about his research process, speculative fiction, and writing his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars (Pantheon, 2023).
In this Penguin Random House video, book designer Vi-An Nguyen narrates the progression of her cover options for The Prophets, Robert Jones Jr.’s debut novel about two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation who find refuge in each other.
Filmed at the Milwaukee Public Library, this video featuring local artists Genesis Renji, Klassik, and Marli Amor aims to raise awareness for Penguin Random House’s All Ways Black initiative, which is partnering with Little Free Libraries to build a number of free libraries with a curated selection of Black authors and classic stories. For every share of the video on social media, Penguin Random House has pledged to donate a book to the initiative.
“It took me a long time, a lot of books under my belt before I could finally sit down and say, I am now skilled enough and experienced enough and confident enough to write The Art of Prophecy.” In this video, Wesley Chu speaks about his love of fantasy and Wuxia, and combining these genres in his new novel, The Art of Prophecy (Del Rey, 2022), the book he’s always wanted to write.
“Knowing your true origins connects you to history, it tells you where you are in time, in the world,” says Carmen Rita Wong about discovering family secrets and facing the revelations as she wrote her memoir, Why Didn’t You Tell Me? (Crown, 2022), in this video for Penguin Random House’s Inside the Book series.
“Woman of Light is my heart song to my ancestors,” says Kali Fajardo-Anstine in this video in which she talks about her debut novel, out now from One World, and the research and stories of her Indigenous Chicano family that inspired her writing. A profile of Fajardo-Anstine by Rigoberto González is featured in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“This book is really a journey of these characters figuring out how to accept themselves and to find their place in the world as Chinese Americans,” says Grace D. Li about her debut novel, Portrait of a Thief (Tiny Reparations Books, 2022), in this video in which she discusses her love of heist movies and the true story that inspired her book.
In this National Centre for Writing video, Hannah Chukwu, assistant editor at Penguin Random House’s imprint Hamish Hamilton, speaks about receiving submissions from agents, pitching, and the editing process for the literary fiction and nonfiction authors she has worked with, including Bernardine Evaristo, Arundhati Roy, and Zadie Smith.
