Jump to navigation Skip to content
In this Jaipur Literature Festival event moderated by Nadini Nair, novelists David Nicholls, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Geetanjali Shree, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Andrew O’Hagan discuss their respective writing processes, as well as how the novel voice can be used to interrogate the histories established by colonial powers.
“[Y]ou should write, or at the very least revise, with a reader always in mind.” —Robert P. Baird, author of The Nimbus
Watch the trailer for The Life of Chuck, a film adaptation of the novella of the same name by Stephen King. Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, the film stars Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Jacob Tremblay, and Mark Hamill.
In this McNally Jackson Books event, Polly Barton reads from her English translation of Mai Ishizawa’s debut novel, The Place of Shells (New Directions, 2025), and talks about her experience researching the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in order to capture the historical, emotional center of Ishizawa’s writing in a conversation with Eliza St. James.
In the dystopian world of Hon Lai Chu’s novel Mending Bodies (Two Lines Press, 2025), translated from the Chinese by Jacqueline Leung, a Conjoinment Act has been passed by the government wherein people are encouraged to have their bodies surgically joined to another person, creating couples who purportedly become more fulfilled beings while providing improvements for economic and environmental states. The novel’s structure alternates between sections detailing the narrator’s struggles with her own thinking and decision-making around “conjoining” and sections of her dissertation on the program’s history, including case studies and the origins of bodily “conjoinment.” Taking inspiration from this format, create a dystopian premise in which a society’s government has instituted an optional, controversial policy. Write a short story which intersperses bits of fictionalized research within the in-scene action for a touch of surrealism.
“A book takes a long time to write, and a long time to publish. So, you know, take a breath!” —Lucas Schaefer, author of The Slip
In this Politics and Prose bookstore event, Christina Li, author of The Manor of Dreams (Avid Reader Press, 2025), talks about her decision to write a family saga with gothic sensibilities and how the Mandarin and Cantonese languages affected her writing process in a conversation with Martha Anne Toll.
Miss Austen is a four-part historical television series produced by PBS Masterpiece, an adaptation by Andrea Gibb of the novel of the same name by Gill Hornby. Directed by Aisling Walsh, the series stars Keeley Hawes as Cassandra Austen, the sister of late Jane Austen, who searches for Jane’s letters in order to protect her reputation.
Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage (Algonquin Books, 2018), and A. M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven (Viking, 2012), talk about how the definition of women’s literature has evolved over time in this live episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer celebrating thirty years of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
“This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” concludes T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” described in his obituary in the New York Times as “probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English.” When considering the ending of something enormously consequential, the expectation might be that the external drama of that conclusion match one’s internal turmoil, however the sorrow of Eliot’s sentiment comes through in the idea of ending not with something explosive and abrupt, but with something much smaller, anticlimactic, and quiet. Write a short story that revolves around an ending of some sort—whether it be the world, a war, or a relationship—and include some portion of these last four lines of Eliot’s poem.
