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In this 192 Books event at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City, Rachel Kushner reads from her new novel, Creation Lake (Scribner, 2024), and discusses the very real spies and saboteurs who inspired her noir characters in a conversation with Hua Hsu.
Airport security lines: a place for aesthetically pleasing arrangements of items or high stress rushing? A recent viral social media trend that involves taking photos of meticulously curated TSA bins presents the possibility that there are those who view an airport security line as an influencer opportunity rather than a time-consuming and inconvenient obligation. Write a short story that focuses on a confrontation of opposing viewpoints set in an airport, a locale where people are oftentimes stressed about getting to their flights on time, running into delays, and scrutinizing the plans for their trips. Try incorporating some humor, light or dark, into the situation or tease out an element of suspense.
In this PBS Books virtual event celebrating the release of the fortieth anniversary edition of The House on Mango Street, published by Everyman’s Library, author Sandra Cisneros discusses the novel and how it has touched many lives and affected the literary landscape in a conversation with Heather-Marie Montilla.
In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, author Juliet Grames speaks about her new novel, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia (Knopf, 2024), which is set in an isolated Italian village in the 1960s.
In this virtual event, Sofia Samatar reads from and discusses her book Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life (Soft Skull Press, 2024), and the chaos and strangeness of writing with Zach Powers, novelist and artistic director at the Writer’s Center.
In this Green Apple Books event, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) presents the Then & Now: Vietnamese American Literature reading series with opening remarks by executive director Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, followed by readings by Lan Duong, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Anastasia Le, Angie Chau, Frank Thanh Nguyen, and Carolyn Huynh with introductions by chief operating officer Kathy Nguyen.
Earlier this month, Science journal published an article detailing findings that linked the death of bats to higher human infant mortality rates. In U.S. counties where bat populations decreased due to a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome, farmers increased their use of pesticides to compensate for the insect population control that bats typically provide, and putting more pesticide into the environment led to increased infant deaths. Write a short story that demonstrates the unfolding of a chain reaction that occurs when the population of one animal in our interconnected ecosystem either significantly increases or decreases the human population. You might experiment with incorporating elements of certain genres, like science fiction, mystery, romance, or even comedy into your story.
In this Poets & Writers event, novelist Garth Greenwell reads from his new book of fiction, Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and joins frequent Poets & Writers Magazine contributor Brian Gresko for a discussion on the book’s themes of mortality and meaning-making, and what it takes to live a full life oriented toward art. A profile of Greenwell by Gresko appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“There is no point in learning how to sculpt if you don’t know where to get the clay.” —Devika Rege, author of Quarterlife.
In this event hosted by the Royal Society of Literature, Claire Messud, author most recently of This Strange Eventful History (Norton, 2024), and Anne Michaels, author most recently of Held (Knopf, 2024), speak about the shared themes of history and memory in their new novels in a conversation with novelist Elif Shafak.
