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In this PBS NewsHour video, Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, speaks about the efforts to support literary nonprofits, including independent publishers, residencies, and fellowships for writers.
In a 2016 interview for the Film Stage, French director Mia Hansen-Løve, known for her philosophical drama films that revolve around familial and romantic relationships and loss, talks about an unexpected connection between her own works and Michael Mann’s 1995 blockbuster crime drama Heat starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. She recognizes that the film about a detective and a career thief is actually about “action vs. melancholy and self-destruction—action becoming self-destruction,” themes Hansen-Løve sees in her own films “except in a very different way, in a very different world.” Think of a favorite film of yours with a genre that is, at least on the surface, extremely different from the type of fiction you tend to write. Consider the larger themes that are investigated in that work and write a short story that explores these themes in your own way, and in your own world.
“I think that losing the joy of process causes writer’s block.” —Tayari Jones, author of Kin
The author of Clutch (Tin House, February 2026) reflects on adjusting rising and falling action across time in fiction.
Boa Editions celebrates a half century of independent publishing and releases a previously unpublished collection of Lucille Clifton’s poetry.
T Kira Māhealani Madden’s new novel, Whidbey, asks challenging questions about how we as a society treat and talk about both the survivors and perpetrators of sexual abuse.
Argentine French author Copi introduces himself as the recipient and translator of a series of letters from a Parisian rat named Gouri to his former “master” in the 1979 novel City of Rats, translated from the French by Kit Schluter in a new edition forthcoming in March from New Directions. In the faux “Translator’s Preface,” Copi writes, “Decryption is not always a simple matter, although I think I’ve managed to the best of my ability here, even if certain passages penned in the rats’ language (two or three entire paragraphs of nothing but the letter ‘i,’ for example) fell away under my ruthless scissors.” Throughout the zany, fabulist narrative that is both whimsical and sexually obscene, the rat embarks on a reckless journey of adventure and crime. Write a short story in which you pose as the recipient of letters from a nonhuman character. As you select your character, consider the thematic possibilities that can be plumbed and how you might explore elements of conventional fables.
The first lines of a dozen noteworthy books, including Night Owl by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Frog: And Other Essays by Anne Fadiman.
A novelist explores the decision to name real places in fiction, the way maps circumscribe those places, how locales heavily defined by tourism are susceptible to those projections, and what it means to push against those expectations.
