“If you’re not happy, you’re nothing at all.” In this new television adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel, Brave New World, a seemingly perfect society is challenged and begins to unravel. Starring Alden Ehrenreich, Jessica Brown Findlay, Hannah John-Kamen, Harry Lloyd, and Demi Moore, the series premiered on the new Peacock streaming service on July 15.

“On the day we met, she told me she was named after the sexiest country music star alive. And that she knew how to fire a gun. And that she was one hundred percent Cherokee.” In this video, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips reads “Shania” from her debut story collection, Sleepovers (Hub City Press, 2020). Phillips is featured in “First Fiction 2020” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“We are // more vulnerable / by far // than is realized / by even our // least sung, / furthest flung, // and most / compromised.” This Motionpoems short film directed by Calum Macdiarmid features a poem written by Motionpoems founder Todd Boss, the first in a series that specifically speaks to a pandemic-ridden world which was commissioned by the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Center for the Art of Medicine.

In this episode of Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction show cohosted by V. V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell, author and pulmonary and critical care specialist Daniela Lamas talks about coronavirus patients seeking recovery or end-of-life care, and poet and radiation oncologist C. Dale Young speaks about the variety of American responses to the pandemic and reads from his book The Affliction: A Novel in Stories (Four Way Books, 2018).

“Something that has survived damage can be considered more valuable, more beautiful.” In this book trailer, Andrés Neuman narrates a selection from his latest novel, Fracture (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, a cross-cultural story set against the backdrop of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Corinne Manning talks about their debut story collection, We Had No Rules (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), and the journey to write freely and openly while considering “all the ways in which we might erase ourselves by trying to hit mainstream ideals” in this virtual event for the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center’s 2020 Queer Novel miniseries. Manning is featured in “First Fiction 2020” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“What I was interested in was the idea of this character committing to whiteness as this act, and the idea that race can be performed but at the same time it has these real implications in your life.” In this Politics and Prose virtual event, Brit Bennett speaks about the topics of duality, passing, and family in her latest novel, The Vanishing Half (Riverhead Books, 2020), with New York Times Magazine editor Jazmine Hughes.

“This is a poem I wrote nearly fifty years ago in response to the war that the Metropolitan Police force had declared against the Black youth of my generation,” says Linton Kwesi Johnson in this video for the Geraldine Connor Foundation’s Generations Dreaming online event last month. The recent PEN Pinter Prize–winner reads his poems “All Wi Doin is Defendin,” “It Dread inna Inglan (for George Lindo),” “Mekin Histri,” and “License fi Kill.”

“When she checked her boarding pass, she was in the middle of the row. There was a man in a blue suit on the aisle, who gave her a big bleached-white smile as he stood to let her past.” In this first installment of Vintage Books’ weekly Storytime series, Booker Prize–winning author Anne Enright reads her short story “The Weight” from her home.