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Watch the trailer for the new film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, directed and written by Emerald Fennell. The film, which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, opens in theaters on February 13, 2026.
“The nice thing about writing fiction is that we can put our characters through things we’d never be brave—or foolhardy—enough to do,” writes Larissa Pham in a recent essay published on Literary Hub about how her debut novel, Discipline (Random House, 2026), was inspired by writing about a subject that scared her. “Through our writing, we leap into the unknown.” This week consider some of your greatest fears, anything from creepy crawlies to the loss of loved ones to melodramatic betrayal. Write a short story that revolves around one of these fears, concocting an arc that fluctuates between moments of slow, modulated actions and descriptions of higher tensions. Do you find yourself inclined to take the story to intense extremes or to end things on a simmer?
“One day, all that sacrifice will have been worth it.” —Alice Evelyn Yang, author of A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing
In this New York Public Library event, Isaac Fitzgerald moderates a discussion with authors Angela Flournoy, Katie Kitamura, and Sebastian Castillo about their novels published in 2025, the current state of literary fiction, and what challenges them to write the next book.
Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl (Hogarth, 2025), follows the life of a young artist living in Berlin, who grapples with the history and contemporary racial tensions of both the country in which she resides, and her cultural identity as a Muslim woman and the daughter of Afghan refugees. In an interview for the Creative Independent, Aber talks about exploring her relationship to shame and desire through writing the novel, and how desire can be an antidote to shame but also come with a feeling of shame. “To want something is inherently embarrassing and risky,” says Aber. Write a short story with a character who has a deeply buried or previously uninterrogated feeling of shame. What are the roots of this shame? Is it tied to national, global, or cultural expectations?
In this Waterstones interview, Maggie O’Farrell talks about the process of cowriting the screenplay for the film adaptation of her novel Hamnet (Knopf, 2020) with director Chloé Zhao. “The film sits alongside the book, and that’s exactly as it should be,” says O’Farrell.
In this Books Are Magic event, Maggie Millner, Lynne Tillman, and Ann Stephenson discuss the life and legacy of author and playwright Jane Bowles in celebration of the reissue of two of her books, Plain Pleasure and Two Serious Ladies, published by Picador.
The subject of Cover-Up, a documentary directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, is Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist for the past fifty years who first gained fame when covering the My Lai massacre and exposing U.S. war crimes during the Vietnam War. The film’s footage blends interviews with the journalist and materials from his archives revealing Hersh’s tenacious sense of purpose, as well as controversies from his writing career. Together, this creates a complex portrait of journalistic integrity and responsibility, and of the role of a free press amid corrupt government politics. Write a short story that imagines an investigative journalist who is attempting to cover—or uncover—a controversial scandal. What components of your character’s personal background contribute to the urgency of their pursuit? Does their commitment to serve the public good come at a cost in other areas of their personal life?
For the 2025 lecture in the Bedri Distinguished Writers Series at the University of California in Berkeley, Joy Williams reads from her story collection Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael (Tin House, 2024) and speaks about the importance of fiction’s art.
Colosseum Books, Wiseblood Books, The Colosseum
