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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 interview for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Roxane Gay talks about how the word feminism has been defined through the centuries, the work included in her new anthology, The Portable Feminist Reader (Penguin Classics, 2025), and writing a romance novel with Channing Tatum.
Among the thousands of structures that were destroyed in the devastating Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year was one home in Altadena. The house had been slated for renovations to become a foundation and residency honoring the late author and critic Gary Indiana, who died in October 2024. A shipment of hundreds of books constituting the writer’s personal library arrived at the home hours before the Eaton Fire, the entirety of which is now lost. Along with the library was an irreplaceable record of the authors who inspired Indiana’s work. In an act of reparative imagination, write a personal essay about a literary hero of yours and reflect on what might drive their creativity. If there are interviews and other materials available in which your subject reveals their muses, allow yourself the freedom to focus on your own speculations and connections.
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 New Orleans Book Festival event hosted at Tulane University, authors Sarah M. Broom and Tracy K. Smith speak about the origins of their writing practices, the cultural impact of their respective literary works, and the power of storytelling to reach the truth in a conversation with Vann R. Newkirk II, senior editor at the Atlantic.
April is National Humor Month, which means it’s the perfect time to be reminded that everyone has a funny bone. The annual observance was conceived to heighten public awareness of the therapeutic value of humor, laughter, and joy. This week, consider what others have said about your sense of humor over the years. Does it lean toward puns or dad jokes? Is it witty or dark, laconic or bizarre, goofy or lighthearted? Write a short series of poems that showcases your specific sensibility around amusement and how you value humor and joy in your life. You might find it helpful to recount recent experiences and images that made you chuckle or guffaw and try to manifest in your poem what specifically made you laugh out loud.
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.
Written and directed by Laura Piani, this French romantic comedy follows a bookseller at the legendary bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, who dreams of experiencing love akin to a Jane Austen novel and becoming a writer. The film stars Camille Rutherford, Pablo Pauly, Charlie Anson, and Annabelle Lengronne.
