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“Editing down is something I dread in the abstract because I know I can lose motivation easily. But this book has ingrained the lesson in me fully.” —Dennis E. Staples, author of Passing Through a Prairie Country
In this Louisiana Channel interview, Mohsin Hamid talks about how his writing process has changed over the years with each novel he’s written, the importance of form and structure to a reader’s understanding of narrative, and the responsibility of writers to establish and shape reality. “We talk about reality as though it is real, but we are aware that we are creating it,” he says.
The author of Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird (Norton, 2025) recommends writers embrace circuitous storytelling structures, typical of nonwestern literature.
In this Poets & Writers event, Karen Russell reads from her new novel, The Antidote (Knopf, 2025), and joins frequent Poets & Writers Magazine contributor Brian Gresko for a discussion on the Dust Bowl research that went into the book and the competing histories of the so-called American Dream of westward expansion. A profile of Russell by Gresko appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this Brookline Booksmith event, Shuba Sunder reads from her first novel, Optional Practical Training (Graywolf Press, 2025), and speaks about the process of writing her “immigrant novel” in a conversation with Neema Avashia. Optional Practical Training is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this Nobel Foundation interview, Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature, talks about her writing process and how she draws inspiration from being present in everyday life. “Reading books, and especially reading literature, enables you to enter the depths of another human,” she says. “It’s a very direct way to enter the other’s heart or soul.”
In Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words (The MIT Press, 2025), linguist and author Michael Erard examines the beginnings of language in infancy and the endings in aging and death from a range of angles: common and idiosyncratic utterances, perspectives on their importance, and the beliefs and practices underpinning first words and last words from different eras, cultures, and religions. Write a short story that revolves around either someone’s first or final words—perhaps a sentence, phrase, or fragment that could be interpreted in multiple ways or is somehow cryptic. How do the other characters respond? Are there disagreements about the significance or meaning of these words?
In this Politics and Prose Bookstore event, Caryl Phillips reads from his latest novel, Another Man in the Street (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), and talks about his immigrant characters and how “the idea of the outsider is very much rooted in British life.”
“The magic happens in the writing, on the page. That’s the high.” —Mariam Rahmani, author of Liquid: A Love Story
In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, author Eric Puchner talks about the yearslong process of writing his second novel, Dream State (Doubleday, 2025), and how he felt urged to write about the lives and landscapes of Montana and climate change.
