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In this Penguin Random House video, Andy Weir talks about how his novels often emerge from daydreaming, and the origins of his 2021 novel, Project Hail Mary, which has been adapted into a film directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and starring Ryan Gosling.
In this City Club of Cleveland event, Namwali Serpell reads from her book On Morrison (Hogarth, 2026) and discusses Toni Morrison’s use of literary forms as well as her frustration with critics during her career in a conversation with poet Kortney Morrow.
A pivotal scene in the first season of Jacob Tierney’s hit television series Heated Rivalry, an adaptation of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers queer hockey romance novel series, occurs when Russian hockey star Ilya invites his Canadian rival Shane to his house for the first time in their relationship and offers to make him a tuna melt. While the scene lasts less than a minute and the actual assembly of the sandwich is not even depicted, the notably caring gesture struck a chord with fans, inspiring new attention to—and even recipes for—the unassuming sandwich. Write a short story in which an act of care, perhaps revolving around the sharing of food, communicates something significant about your characters’ personalities, states of mind, or relationship. Does this simple act melt hearts?
“Don’t rush the writing, and enjoy it for itself.” —Tara Menon, author of Under Water
In this Politics and Prose event, Lauren Groff reads her short story “Annunciation,” which appears in her new collection, Brawler (Riverhead Books, 2026), and talks about the time and process of putting together a story collection in a conversation with Danielle Evans.
Watch the trailer for the television series Vladimir, adapted from the 2022 novel of the same name by Julia May Jonas. Starring Rachel Weiss and Leo Woodall, the eight-episode series follows a writer and professor who becomes obsessed with a new colleague as her life starts to unravel.
“Upside Down, Anyways,” “An Economy of a Murder,” “The Beauty and the Shed,” “Bend Over Pac-Man,” and “The Big Girl” are all mistaken movie titles that theatergoers have requested to see according to a box office staff in New York who has kept track of these amusing and sometimes perplexing blunders. The correct titles are, respectively, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Anatomy of a Fall, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Bend It Like Beckham, and The Beguiled. Take inspiration from one of these wrong movie titles, or perhaps a mistake of your own or one that you’ve overheard, and write a short story that follows the direction of the erroneous phrase. What would happen if Pac-Man was a source of inspiration for a soccer film? How would “an economy of a murder” be explained? Allow yourself to be experimental with humor and imagery, perhaps moving toward a fabulist or speculative mode.
In this Gays Reading podcast interview with host Jason Blitman, T Kira Madden talks about the events that led to writing her debut novel, Whidbey (Mariner Books, 2026), and how exploring different points of view of a crime offered new insights. A profile of Madden appears in the March/April 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this episode of Cannonball With Wesley Morris, the host speaks with Parul Sehgal, critic at large at the New York Times, and Sasha Weiss, deputy editor at the New York Times Magazine, about the power of Toni Morrison’s writing and they share some of their favorite passages from her novels.
Whether created due to convenience or to traverse through mounds of snow, desire paths are made when people diverge from official walkways to get to their desired destination, and others follow along. It might be a trail of worn grass beside a concrete walkway or a narrow, squiggly line through unplowed snow. “Desire lines are inherently subversive. They remind us that we have a choice, and that we can veer away from what was laid out for us. And the paths are personal, uneven and meandering,” writes Anna Kodé in a recent New York Times article. Write a short series of vignettes that imagines the first person who created a certain desire path, and the subsequent users of that pathway. What are the motivations of the characters who go off the beaten path?
