Jump to navigation Skip to content
In this video, Samantha Harvey accepts the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital (Jonathan Cape, 2023), which snapshots one day in the lives of six astronauts traveling through space. “What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves, and what we do to life on Earth, human and otherwise, we do to ourselves,” says Harvey in her speech.
In this 2023 event cohosted by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF) and the Center for Fiction, Elizabeth Nunez speaks with Lauren Francis-Sharma about 5 Minutes With Elizabeth Nunez, an original BCLF short film series celebrating the author and her most revered novels. Nunez died at the age of eighty on November 11, 2024.
Autumn arrives with a multitude of textures and sensations: the wool fuzz of a cozy sweater or a favorite blanket, the dry crackle of crumbling leaves, sharply slanted golden sunlight, and a strong gust of wind. This week pick up a previously unfinished story, an in-progress story, or start one afresh, and begin by writing an autumnal scene that takes inspiration from an especially seasonal image or sensation. Include contradictory elements in your scene, such as light and dark, soft and sharp, silence and noise, warmth and coldness, that are often a part of fickle fall feelings. Does the specification of this time of year bring up fresh realizations about any of your characters, or how they’re inclined to behave? Or could it propel you toward a different narrative mood?
The author of Amphibian (Ig Publishing, October 2024) applies lessons in magical realism and metaphor from film to fiction.
To do something at the eleventh hour is to accomplish a task at the last possible moment. The origins of the phrase are unknown, although there is some indication it may come from a Bible parable or simply from the idea of the eleventh hour being close to the twelve o’clock hour at midnight signaling the end of a day. This week write a short story in which your main character manages to pull off a miraculous feat at the eleventh hour. It might be something seemingly mundane—a household chore, a work project, a last-minute gift for a special occasion—that turns out to have wider implications or consequences. Is waiting until it’s almost too late typical of your character or wildly unexpected? What drama is drawn from your character flying by the seat of their pants?
In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, author Abraham Chang talks about writing his debut novel, 888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers (Flatiron Books, 2024), after working for years in the publishing industry, as well as how Eastern traditions, pop culture, and growing up in the borough of Queens in New York influenced his book.
The author of Amphibian (Ig Publishing, October 2024) contemplates how lessons in screenwriting can be applied to fiction.
“Do a lot of people feel this monogamous guilt in their writing lives?”—Sharon Wahl, author of Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances
“‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.” The final sentence of Shirley Jackson’s classic short story “The Lottery” is included in a short list of “The Best Last Lines in Books” on Penguin Random House UK’s website, along with selections from a range of books by authors such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Franz Kafka, Ira Levin, and Virginia Woolf. Many of these lines are powerfully evocative and open-ended, whether darkly humorous, straight-up horrifying, or daringly hopeful. Jot down a list of your favorite last lines and use one of them as a prompt to provide either the first sentence of a new short story or to inspire a plot. How do the emotions, weight, and mood of this final sentence affect the way you use it in your own piece?
“I wanted to write something that dealt with Brexit and our relation to Europe, but in a very oblique way.” In this Waterstones interview, English author Alan Hollinghurst talks about the challenges in developing the gay, biracial protagonist in his latest novel, Our Evenings (Random House, 2024), and reflects on Britain’s changing nature across the book’s half century of time.
