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“I had to become a different person in order to write the version of this book that readers will hold in their hands, and for a long time I wasn’t that person yet.” —Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of Fat Swim
The author of Unstuck: A Writer’s Guide (Tin House, April 2026) offers insight on how to make time for writing when it feels like there’s no time to spare.
In Sarah Wang’s debut novel, New Skin (Little, Brown, 2026), a young woman named Linli Feng is drawn back to her hometown to tend to her mother in the aftermath of her latest string of disastrous plastic surgeries. Through the eyes of Linli, the environment around her reflects components of her own reality, full of signs of destruction and disrepair, including grass that is “as brown and dry as any in Los Angeles,” a fruitless fig tree that has been damaged after her mother backs her car into it, and a thicket of bougainvillea with “deep magenta bracts” dying and falling to her feet. Write a short story in which the setting displays characteristics that reveal both the mindset of your main character and themes you wish to interrogate in your narrative. How might elements that may conventionally be seen as positive or beautiful take on hints of menace or darkness through the story’s landscape?
The author of Unstuck: A Writer’s Guide (Tin House, April 2026) encourages writers to embrace being an amateur in all corners of their lives.
The author of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction reveals how every debut author’s dream of landing an agent is matched by the hunger of every young agent to land a successful debut and establish themselves.
Stories that revolve around a love triangle often presume the presence of would-be binaries: a hero and a villain, the righteous and the evil, the good and the bad. But what happens when the roles are blurred and no one is out to hurt the other? In Ida Lupino’s 1953 drama The Bigamist and the recent dark comedy television series DTF St. Louis, the focus is on the humanity of all three characters within their marriages and the ambiguity of their actions. Taking a cue from the sympathetic nature of these characters, write a short story that involves a love triangle that is similarly even-keeled. How can you experiment with point of view, humor, or dramatic circumstances to create a narrative in which all members of the triangle are imbued with equally powerful traits of complexity and pathos?
In this trailer for PBS’s American Masters documentary Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined, the life and work of the acclaimed Dominican American poet and novelist is explored through interviews, photographs, and archives. A profile of Alvarez about her new poetry collection, Visitations (Knopf, 2026), appears in the May/June 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
While writing a novel containing themes of sexual abuse, an author worked hard to earn and sustain her readers’ trust, which was reciprocated by readers in the form of unexpected, personal disclosures at launch events.
The author of Unstuck: A Writer’s Guide (Tin House, April 2026) encourages writers to write without an outside reader in mind.
