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In this Green Apple Books event, Jemimah Wei reads from her debut novel, The Original Daughter (Doubleday, 2025), and talks about her desire to write about two ambitious girls growing up in modern Singapore in a conversation with R. O. Kwon. “What I tell people about this book is that I’ve always thought it of as a love story, but like a really unromantic love story.”
“I think each project requires its own form, and the story itself demands the form.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Lauren Groff talks about how her novel Matrix (Riverhead Books, 2021) began as a thought experiment around toxic masculinity, and reflects on the ways fiction can challenge patriarchal storytelling traditions.
“Nothing happens without a reason. Everything was determined by something prior.” In Devs, a 2020 science fiction television miniseries written and directed by Alex Garland, the viewer is presented with heady questions around determinism and free will as more and more is revealed about a quantum simulation project at a cutting-edge tech company that appears to have the ability to simulate the world at any and all places and times, past and future. Write a short story in which you examine these ideas through characters with opposing opinions about the freedom to change the course of one’s life. You might choose to delve into science fiction or fantasy, or develop your story around a romance or a comedy of errors. What events in the past lead each character to their respective ways of thinking?
“Being a writer, creating stories, is my way of saying that I’m not marked by my history.” In this PBS NewsHour interview, Ocean Vuong talks about the power of writing and the working-class community of Hartford that shaped his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Press, 2025). For more from Vuong, read “Theater of Memories: A Conversation With Ocean Vuong” by Divya Mehrish.
The author of Duet for One (Regal House Publishing, May 2025) recommends rigorous revision strategies as writers polish their manuscripts.
“I wanted to write about a father and daughter in a building made of time.” Madeleine Thien talks about the genealogy of ideas and yearslong process of writing her novel The Book of Records (Norton, 2025) in this Toronto Public Library event with Elamin Abdelmahmoud. For more from Thien, read “Hopeless Hope: A Conversation With Madeleine Thien” by Renée H. Shea.
Earlier this month, the National Endowment for the Arts notified hundreds of independent publishers, theaters, museums, residencies, and nonprofit arts organizations about the termination of their funding, affecting countless writers, visual artists, dancers, performers, actors, and directors. How can artists continue to create when their support is suddenly taken away? Write a short story about an artist who finds themselves without the support they need—whether financial, emotional, or otherwise. Where does your character turn and how do they keep going? Will your story take on elements of fantasy, horror, tragedy, satire, or dark comedy?
With The Emperor of Gladness, forthcoming in May from Penguin Press, Ocean Vuong crafts a story of intergenerational connection—of labor, love, memory, and care—while bridging the intimate and the epic, the lyric and the narrative.
“Everything will take longer than you feel like it should, and this is a gift.” —Rickey Fayne, author of The Devil Three Times
In this event hosted by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System in Maryland, Kevin Nguyen talks about how his experiences in journalism, and the histories of Japanese American incarceration and the Vietnam War, shaped his second novel, Mỹ Documents (One World, 2025), and the ways in which he sees this book as “an imagination of policy” rather than speculative fiction.
