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In this Service95 Book Club conversation hosted by Dua Lipa, author Vincent Delecroix talks about the 2021 English Channel disaster that inspired his novel Small Boat (Hope Road Publishing, 2025), translated from the French by Helen Stevenson, and his decision to write from the perspective of a bystander observing calamity.
Literature has a long history of narratives that are built around fictionalized letters and correspondence—Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther from the eighteenth century, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the nineteenth century, and more contemporary novels such as Stephen King’s Carrie, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. This week compose an epistolary short story incorporating letters, postcards, e-mails, texts, social media posts, news articles, receipts, and other tidbits of written documents. How do these disparate elements work together to create a story that has to be puzzled together?
“I think every writer carries with them someone they wish they could’ve told all their stories to.” —Katie Yee, author of Maggie; Or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar
In this 2021 virtual craft talk hosted by the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama, author and professor Victoria Redel speaks about narrative structure and the use of collage in fiction and how fragmented, nonlinear storytelling can deepen emotional impact and thematic complexity.
The author of Restitution (Regal House Publishing, September 2025) recommends writers use time as a tool to shape the emotional stakes of novels.
In this Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination event, Guadalupe Nettel, Ayşegül Savaş, and Maylis de Kerangal talk about their recent story collections and how short story collections are received in the current publishing industry. Savaş’s first story collection, Long Distance, is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this 2022 Books Are Magic event, Jonathan Escoffery discusses his debut story collection, If I Survive You (MCD, 2022), and how he explores themes of identity, immigration, and belonging through storytelling in a conversation with novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn. Escoffery introduces Jemimah Wei in “First Fiction 2025” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In the 2014 Swedish film Force Majeure directed by Ruben Östlund, a family on a ski vacation in the French Alps has a scare when a controlled avalanche threatens the lodge where they are staying and the father runs away from the oncoming snow, leaving behind his wife and two young children. All remain safe but the event causes tension in their marriage. Over dinner with friends, they discuss how in moments of crisis one would hope to do the heroic thing, but one never really knows until something actually happens. Write a short story that begins with an intense and startling event and build your story around each character’s response. What sorts of personality traits are revealed in the aftermath? You might play around with incorporating different characters’ perspectives or versions of what happened to provide tension.
“I tend to work across these different forms, on different projects at the same time.” —Issa Quincy, author of Absence
Watch the trailer for Washington Black, a Hulu series adaptation of the 2018 novel of the same name by Esi Edugyan. The series, which stars Eddie Karanja, Ernest Kingsley Jr., Tom Ellis, Iola Evans, and Sterling K. Brown, follows the life of an enslaved boy who flees the sugar plantation in Barbados where he was born.
