Genre: Fiction

Tayari Jones on the Power of History and Writing

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Tayari Jones discusses her new novel, Kin (Knopf, 2026), and the history she uncovered in her research for the book in a conversation with Jill Cox-Cordova, former Library Journal editor, for this virtual event of the Penguin Random House Winter Book and Author Festival. For more from Jones, read her installment of our Ten Questions series.

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Surprising Connections

2.25.26

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.

Letters From a Rat

2.18.26

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.

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