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In this video from the University of South Carolina Irvin Department of Rare Books & Special Collections, scholars talk about their special exhibit celebrating 100 years since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published with items ranging from first editions of the novel, editions owned by writers like Sylvia Plath, and ephemera from the author’s life.
In this interview for The Thread documentary series, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about his childhood experiences as a refugee and overcoming trauma, his parents’ complicated reaction to his writing career, and how storytelling and writing changed his life from an early age. Read about Nguyen’s essay collection To Save and Destroy: Writing as an Other (Belknap Press, 2025) in our Best Books series.
A mysterious lunch meeting at a restaurant in the financial district between a middle-aged actress and a handsome, much younger man opens the story of Katie Kitamura’s novel Audition (Riverhead Books, 2025). The reader is momentarily left in the dark as the unnamed first-person narrator recounts this lunchtime assignation and it’s not until the third chapter of the book that the details and reasons for their initial meeting come to light. Start a new short story in which two characters meet and the nature of their connection is kept ambiguous. Are they friends, lovers, family, colleagues, or something else? How can you use shifting points of view and dialogue to maintain an atmosphere of suspense and inscrutability?
In this Penguin Random House video, Lev Grossman, author of The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur (Viking, 2024), and Dan Jones, author of Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King (Viking, 2024), share insights into their writing and research processes.
In this episode of the Ehkili podcast, Sahar Mustafah talks to author and editor Susan Muaddi Darraj to discuss her anthology, Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing From the Diaspora (Palestine Writes Press, 2024), and the significance of amplifying Palestinian literary voices.
In this Off Book video for the Richland Library in South Carolina, R. F. Kuang speaks about her research process, the importance of reading literature with diverse characters, and the first time she accidentally got caught for damaging a library book. “I freaked out. I thought I was going to be banned from libraries forever,” Kuang says.
“The difficulty of living through long minutes is a central concern of Cléo From 5 to 7, a film set in real time and real space, which follows an aspiring young pop star as she endures time—the real running time of the film—waiting for the results of a biopsy,” writes Laura McLean-Ferris about Agnès Varda’s 1962 film in an essay published in frieze magazine. “Subjective time periodically bloating and stretching in confusion and loneliness, while objective time ticks on.” Unlike with a film or play, the reader of a story sets the timing of their engagement with the work by their reading pace, on their starts and stops. But the writer, too, has many tools to bloat and stretch time within the confines of a story. Write a short story that moves slowly and in “long minutes” to allow certain moments to stretch or contract according to your main character’s state of mind.
In this Green Apple Books event, Muriel Leung reads from her debut novel, How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster (Norton, 2024), and discusses the possibilities of love and care in Chinese American families and communities in a conversation with K-Ming Chang.
In this episode of NPR’s Wild Card podcast hosted by Rachel Martin, author Zadie Smith reflects on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her debut novel, White Teeth (Random House, 2000), and talks about her forthcoming book of essays and her generation’s struggle with the notion of time. “I’ve always felt there wasn’t enough time. I would like to accept time and also love it,” she says.
The author of Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird (Norton, 2025) encourages writers to consider a deeper definition of diversity and embrace alternative storytelling styles and structures.
