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In this Books Are Magic event, Maggie Millner, Lynne Tillman, and Ann Stephenson discuss the life and legacy of author and playwright Jane Bowles in celebration of the reissue of two of her books, Plain Pleasure and Two Serious Ladies, published by Picador.
The subject of Cover-Up, a documentary directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, is Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist for the past fifty years who first gained fame when covering the My Lai massacre and exposing U.S. war crimes during the Vietnam War. The film’s footage blends interviews with the journalist and materials from his archives revealing Hersh’s tenacious sense of purpose, as well as controversies from his writing career. Together, this creates a complex portrait of journalistic integrity and responsibility, and of the role of a free press amid corrupt government politics. Write a short story that imagines an investigative journalist who is attempting to cover—or uncover—a controversial scandal. What components of your character’s personal background contribute to the urgency of their pursuit? Does their commitment to serve the public good come at a cost in other areas of their personal life?
For the 2025 lecture in the Bedri Distinguished Writers Series at the University of California in Berkeley, Joy Williams reads from her story collection Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael (Tin House, 2024) and speaks about the importance of fiction’s art.
Colosseum Books, Wiseblood Books, The Colosseum
One Battle After Another, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, has been lauded by many film critics for managing to blend tones of absurdist comedy with a moving depiction of familial bonds and an examination of larger themes around revolution, fascism, and contemporary politics. Taking inspiration from this mixture of registers and tones, write a short story that revolves around a consequential aspect of current world events, whether real or imagined. Allow yourself the freedom to bestow your characters with zany personality traits and idiosyncrasies, and to veer off into the cartoonish and absurd. How might incorporating some questionable details into the world of your story imbue it with a feeling of realism?
In this New York Public Library event, Isaac Fitzgerald moderates a discussion with authors Angela Flournoy, Katie Kitamura, and Sebastian Castillo about their books published in 2025, the current state of literary fiction, and what challenges them to write the next book.
“Many unknown things are possible, many unexpected turns of events will arise.” —Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle
In this CBS Sunday Morning interview, Salman Rushdie speaks about encountering mortality and the pivotal moments that have shaped his life and upbringing, and about the stories and themes in The Eleventh Hour (Random House, 2025), his first book of fiction since the 2022 attack that nearly took his life.
In Maria Stepanova’s novel The Disappearing Act, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale, forthcoming in February from New Directions, the narrator, like the author, is a writer navigating the challenges of living in exile after her home country invades a neighboring state. Ambiguity or the absence of identity is prevalent throughout the novel—the protagonist, cities, and countries are never explicitly named. “The foreign city where M now lived was full of people fleeing from both countries, and those who’d been attacked by her own compatriots regarded their former neighbors with horror and suspicion, as if life before the war had ceased to have any meaning,” writes Stepanova. Compose a short story that makes use of this type of anonymity to create a narrative that circles around themes of alienation, disappearance, escape, and loneliness. In the world of your story, how does this anonymity serve the journey that your character is embarking on?
In the 2019 coming-of-age comedy film Booksmart, directed by Olivia Wilde, two best friends who have spent their high school years studying and pursuing other bookish activities in order to get into Ivy League universities are shocked to discover that their peers have also gotten into prestigious schools despite their hard-partying ways. To rectify the injustice of this, they decide to attend a party on the last day of school, the night before their graduation, which sends them on a wild and chaotic adventure. Write a short story that takes place during a brief, contained period of time—perhaps just a day or two—when a character attempts to infiltrate a tight social group after feeling left out. How does an outsider’s perspective bring about new realizations of what’s important in life? What kinds of interactions unfold that impact your characters?
