“When you’re sick, the act of living is more act than living.” Meghan O’Rourke reads from her book The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (Riverhead Books, 2022) and discusses how the book changed as her illness changed in this virtual event with Jonathan M. Adler for the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Book Talks series.

“Literature is there to show us how there can be beauty in meaning, and this is what makes the literary experience so unique...and I’m hunting for this feeling all the time.” Hernan Diaz, author most recently of Trust (Riverhead Books, 2022), speaks about his relationship with reading, writing, and language in this Louisiana Channel interview with Marc-Christoph Wagner at the New York Public Library.

Akwaeke Emezi talks about their love of romance novels, exploring stories of grief, and writing seven books in four years, including Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir (Riverhead Books, 2021) and You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty (Atria Books, 2022), in this interview for The Daily Show With Trevor Noah. For more from Emezi, read their installment of our Ten Questions series.

“When I fell for the video girl in Omarion’s ‘Touch,’ I never thought I would come to know her name,” reads Carina del Valle Schorske from the first chapter of her debut essay collection, The Other Island, forthcoming from Riverhead Books, in this Poetry Project reading with poet Sheila Maldonado, author of that’s what you get (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2021).

“Bread pudding was the first thing that I baked after I came out to my parents,” says Bryan Washington in this New Yorker video about his personal connection to the dish. For more on Washington, read his installment of Ten Questions, in which he speaks about his debut story collection, Lot (Riverhead Books, 2019).

“I am a product of this country that I interrogate in this book,” says Albert Samaha, author of Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes (Riverhead Books, 2021), in this episode of Coffee & Conversations with Enrique Rosell, program manager at Florida International University’s Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab. Samaha’s debut memoir is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Poets & Writers Live virtual event, Kristen Arnett walks through the revision process of select scenes from her latest novel, With Teeth (Riverhead Books, 2021), with Spencer Quong, the assistant editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. For more Arnett, read her contributions to our Craft Capsules series on writing humor in fiction.

“Didn’t they know, low in their bones, that as long as they moved and the land unfurled, that as long as they searched, they would forever be searchers and never quite lost?” reads C Pam Zhang from her debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (Riverhead Books, 2020), in this conversation with writer and comedian Karen Chee hosted by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

In this virtual craft talk, Patricia Lockwood reads from her debut novel, No One Is Talking About This (Riverhead Books, 2021), and talks about her writing process and how her poetry influences her prose writing with Zach Powers, novelist and director of communications at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. 

“Roberto was brown and his people lived next door so of course I went over on weekends.” Listen to Bryan Washington read an excerpt from his debut story collection, Lot (Riverhead Books, 2019), for this Penguin Random House video series, which encourages listening to audiobooks before bed to help with sleep.