Megan Abbott speaks about her interest in prodigies, her novel You Will Know Me (Little, Brown, 2016), and her thoughts on the superficiality of genre distinctions for Nashville Public Television’s A Word on Words.

Middlemarch: The Series is a web series adaptation of George Eliot’s 1871 novel Middlemarch, written and directed by Rebecca Shoptaw, an undergraduate film student at Yale. Spanning seventy short episodes, the series is set in a contemporary fictional college in Connecticut and incorporates LGBTQ themes.

“It’s a notebook, it’s not a collection of poems, it’s not exactly a novel, no fiction, what is this? Nobody knows.” In this video, Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa talks about being influenced by Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Agualusa won the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award for his novel A General Theory of Oblivion (Vintage, 2016) with Daniel Hahn, who translated the book from the Portuguese. 

“Language is tough. Using the right words is so important to me.” Paul Beatty, author of the Man Booker Prize–winning novel, The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), speaks about the labor of writing and his advice to students on Late Night With Seth Meyers.

In this film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 supernatural horror novel, It, seven children are terrorized by a shape-shifting being that appears in the form of an evil clown. Directed by Andrés Muschietti, the film stars Chosen Jacobs, Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgård, and Finn Wolfhard.

“I had a million wishes too, but more than that, regrets...” Debora Kuan reads her poem “Fertile” from her collection Lunch Portraits (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016) for the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series.

“Most of my works, I’m delving deeper into the stories of women because we’re so used to being silenced.” Nicole Dennis-Benn, who won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction for her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun (Liveright, 2016), speaks about exploring dynamics of race, money, class, culture, and gender in Jamaica in her writing.

“So much of my writing is supposed to fend off the autobiographical that I’ve managed to fend it off within myself as a personal practice.” Joshua Cohen, author of the novel Moving Kings (Random House, 2017) and one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2017, talks about playing with the autobiographical impulse and writing as an existential practice.

Will is a television drama about the imagined life of William Shakespeare in his early twenties in London as he struggles to get his plays onto the stage. Created by Craig Pearce, the series stars Laurie Davidson as Shakespeare and Jamie Campbell Bower as his rival Christopher Marlowe.