Rob Franklin: Great Black Hope
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In this Daily Show interview, author Rob Franklin speaks about the themes of race, class, and privilege in his debut novel, Great Black Hope (Summit Books, 2025), with host Josh Johnson.
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Genre: Fiction
Real Life as Experiment: Letting Characters Play in Your Life
The author of Restitution (Regal House Publishing, September 2025) recommends writers use their own memories as a testing ground for their characters.
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Summer Reads From Ann Patchett and Maureen Corrigan
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In this PBS NewsHour video, Ann Patchett, author and owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, and Maureen Corrigan, professor and book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, offer recommendations for summer reading, including The Satisfaction Café (Scribner, 2025) by Kathy Wang, King of Ashes (Flatiron Books, 2025) by S. A. Cosby, and A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (Riverhead Books, 2025) by Sophie Elmhirst.
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Vincent Delecroix: Small Boat
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In this Service95 Book Club conversation hosted by Dua Lipa, author Vincent Delecroix talks about the 2021 English Channel disaster that inspired his novel Small Boat (Hope Road Publishing, 2025), translated from the French by Helen Stevenson, and his decision to write from the perspective of a bystander observing calamity.
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Correspondences
Literature has a long history of narratives that are built around fictionalized letters and correspondence—Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther from the eighteenth century, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the nineteenth century, and more contemporary novels such as Stephen King’s Carrie, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. This week compose an epistolary short story incorporating letters, postcards, e-mails, texts, social media posts, news articles, receipts, and other tidbits of written documents. How do these disparate elements work together to create a story that has to be puzzled together?
Ten Questions for Katie Yee
“I think every writer carries with them someone they wish they could’ve told all their stories to.” —Katie Yee, author of Maggie; Or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar
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Victoria Redel on Narrative Collage and Structure
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In this 2021 virtual craft talk hosted by the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama, author and professor Victoria Redel speaks about narrative structure and the use of collage in fiction and how fragmented, nonlinear storytelling can deepen emotional impact and thematic complexity.
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Using Time to Create Emotional Tension in Fiction
The author of Restitution (Regal House Publishing, September 2025) recommends writers use time as a tool to shape the emotional stakes of novels.
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Guadalupe Nettel, Ayşegül Savaş, and Maylis de Kerangal on Short Stories
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In this Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination event, Guadalupe Nettel, Ayşegül Savaş, and Maylis de Kerangal talk about their recent story collections and how short story collections are received in the current publishing industry. Savaş’s first story collection, Long Distance, is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Jonathan Escoffery: If I Survive You
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In this 2022 Books Are Magic event, Jonathan Escoffery discusses his debut story collection, If I Survive You (MCD, 2022), and how he explores themes of identity, immigration, and belonging through storytelling in a conversation with novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn. Escoffery introduces Jemimah Wei in “First Fiction 2025” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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