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In this LIVE From NYPL event, director Clint Bentley screens clips from his latest film, Train Dreams, and discusses the timeliness of its release amidst concerns about ecological disaster and racial violence. The film is an adaptation of the 2011 novella of the same name by Denis Johnson.
Recent and unusual, “fish out of water” animal sightings include a coyote swimming through the San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz Island, and a rare Galápagos albatross flying high up above the Pacific off the central coast of California, likely having traveled over three thousand miles beyond its typical range. This week write a short story about a character who takes off on a journey of vast distances, possibly one filled with potential risks and unknown factors. Will you reveal your character’s motivations right off the bat, gradually, only in the final moments of the narrative, or at all? You might decide to experiment with writing sections of the story from different points of view and shifting from more zoomed-out descriptive passages to moments of interior monologue.
“I think that you kind of put everything into a first novel.” In this event hosted by the University of Notre Dame’s Creative Writing Program, Madeline Cash reads from her debut novel, Lost Lambs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026), and talks about her range of influences, including artist Henry Darger and filmmaker Wes Anderson.
“Look around, have courage, and learn to say yes to things you are unfamiliar with from time to time.” —April Reynolds, author of The Shape of Dreams
Watch the trailer for the new film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, directed and written by Emerald Fennell. The film, which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, opens in theaters on February 13, 2026.
In this Gays Reading podcast interview with host Jason Blitman, Gabriel Tallent speaks about what inspired his second novel, Crux (Riverhead Books, 2026), which is featured in Page One in the January/February 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“The nice thing about writing fiction is that we can put our characters through things we’d never be brave—or foolhardy—enough to do,” writes Larissa Pham in a recent essay published on Literary Hub about how her debut novel, Discipline (Random House, 2026), was inspired by writing about a subject that scared her. “Through our writing, we leap into the unknown.” This week consider some of your greatest fears, anything from creepy crawlies to the loss of loved ones to melodramatic betrayal. Write a short story that revolves around one of these fears, concocting an arc that fluctuates between moments of slow, modulated actions and descriptions of higher tensions. Do you find yourself inclined to take the story to intense extremes or to end things on a simmer?
“One day, all that sacrifice will have been worth it.” —Alice Evelyn Yang, author of A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing
In this New York Public Library event, Isaac Fitzgerald moderates a discussion with authors Angela Flournoy, Katie Kitamura, and Sebastian Castillo about their novels published in 2025, the current state of literary fiction, and what challenges them to write the next book.
Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl (Hogarth, 2025), follows the life of a young artist living in Berlin, who grapples with the history and contemporary racial tensions of both the country in which she resides, and her cultural identity as a Muslim woman and the daughter of Afghan refugees. In an interview for the Creative Independent, Aber talks about exploring her relationship to shame and desire through writing the novel, and how desire can be an antidote to shame but also come with a feeling of shame. “To want something is inherently embarrassing and risky,” says Aber. Write a short story with a character who has a deeply buried or previously uninterrogated feeling of shame. What are the roots of this shame? Is it tied to national, global, or cultural expectations?
