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In this Politics and Prose Bookstore event, Rumaan Alam reads from his fourth novel, Entitlement (Riverhead Books, 2024), and discusses how writing about race, class, and age encourages readers to interrogate these identities in a conversation with Jason Reynolds. Entitlement is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Earlier this summer, while on a camping trip in Yellowstone National Park with his owners, a two-year-old Siamese cat named Rayne Beau ran off into the Wyoming woods and went missing. After several days of searching the area, the owners returned to their California home devastated only to receive a phone call two months later that the cat had been spotted wandering around three hours north of their home, traversing more than eight hundred miles. Write a short story that imagines the trials and tribulations that a pet might experience embarking on a long journey home. You might decide to use multiple perspectives throughout the narrative, considering the people and terrain the animal encounters along the way.
In this PBS NewsHour video, Danzy Senna discusses her latest novel, Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024), and the ways in which she uses comedy and satire to shed light on the reality of race in America in a conversation with Jeffrey Brown.
In this Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event at Books Are Magic, the Institute of American Indian Arts presents readings by students, alumni, and faculty of the program, including program director Deborah Jackson Taffa, m.s. RedCherries, Lily Philpott, and Julianne Warren.
In this virtual event, Banned Books Week honorary chair and award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay joins youth honorary chair Julia Garnett, a student activist who fought book bans in her home state of Tennessee, for a conversation about advocacy and fighting censorship.
“Censors never go after books unless kids already like them.” In this 2011 video for Banned Books Week, frequently censored author Judy Blume speaks about the negative effect that book banning has on children.
Why did the chicken cross the road? In Tad Friend’s 2002 New Yorker piece “In Search of the World’s Funniest Joke,” he details the work of Dr. Richard Wiseman, a British psychologist who conducted a global humor study that included an experiment comparing scores for the same joke with different animals inserted in it. “We found that the funniest animal of all is a duck,” said Wiseman. “So science has determined that, if you’re going to tell a talking-animal joke, make it a duck.” Write a short story that involves a duck, whether in a main role, or in a minor appearance. See if you can facilitate the duck’s function as a humorous device: Is its appearance unexpectedly wacky or quirky? Do the human characters respond in a humorous way, or does the hilarity extend from a deadpan atmosphere?
“Take a year, pursue it, and see what happens.” —Afabwaje Kurian, author of Before the Mango Ripens
In this Buzz Books virtual event, Cebo Campbell discusses how the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Toni Morrison inspired his debut novel, Sky Full of Elephants (Simon & Schuster, 2024), in a conversation with Simon & Schuster senior editor Olivia Taylor Smith.
