Poets & Writers Theater

In this Penguin Random House video, Andy Weir talks about how his novels often emerge from daydreaming, and the origins of his 2021 novel, Project Hail Mary, which has been adapted into a film directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and starring Ryan Gosling.

In this City Club of Cleveland event, Namwali Serpell reads from her book On Morrison (Hogarth, 2026) and discusses Toni Morrison’s use of literary forms as well as her frustration with critics during her career in a conversation with poet Kortney Morrow.

In this Politics and Prose event, Lauren Groff reads her short story “Annunciation,” which appears in her new collection, Brawler (Riverhead Books, 2026), and talks about the time and process of putting together a story collection in a conversation with Danielle Evans.

Watch the trailer for the television series Vladimir, adapted from the 2022 novel of the same name by Julia May Jonas. Starring Rachel Weiss and Leo Woodall, the eight-episode series follows a writer and professor who becomes obsessed with a new colleague as her life starts to unravel.

In this Gays Reading podcast interview with host Jason Blitman, T Kira Madden talks about the events that led to writing her debut novel, Whidbey (Mariner Books, 2026), and how exploring different points of view of a crime offered new insights. A profile of Madden appears in the March/April 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this episode of Cannonball With Wesley Morris, the host speaks with Parul Sehgal, critic at large at the New York Times, and Sasha Weiss, deputy editor at the New York Times Magazine, about the power of Toni Morrison’s writing and they share some of their favorite passages from her novels.

Tayari Jones discusses her new novel, Kin (Knopf, 2026), and the history she uncovered in her research for the book in a conversation with Jill Cox-Cordova, former Library Journal editor, for this virtual event of the Penguin Random House Winter Book and Author Festival. For more from Jones, read her installment of our Ten Questions series.

In this PBS NewsHour video, Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, speaks about the efforts to support literary nonprofits, including independent publishers, residencies, and fellowships for writers.

In this Gays Reading podcast interview with host Jason Blitman, Gabriel Tallent speaks about perseverance and 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.

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.

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 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.

In this Waterstones interview, Maggie O’Farrell talks about the process of cowriting the screenplay for the film adaptation of her novel Hamnet (Knopf, 2020) with director Chloé Zhao. “The film sits alongside the book, and that’s exactly as it should be,” says O’Farrell.

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.

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.

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.

As the end of the year approaches, Ann Patchett, author and owner of Parnassus Books, and Maureen Corrigan, professor and book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, reveal their favorite books of 2025 for PBS Newshour, which include The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hogarth, 2025) by Kiran Desai, The Antidote (Knopf, 2025) by Karen Russell, and A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction (Ecco, 2025) by Elizabeth McCracken.

In this video, Ricardo Hernandez, assistant director of Programs & Partnerships at Poets & Writers, hosts a celebratory reading by the 2025 Fall Fiction cohort of Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early career authors. Introduced by writer and publicist May-Zhee Lim, readers include Hillary Behrman, Denise Derya Brandt, Kim Coleman Foote, Sophia Huneycutt, Rachel León, Kat Lewis, Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay, Radhika Singh, Grace Spulak, and Diana Xin.

In this Green Apple Books event, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) presents a night of readings featuring writers François Luong, Aimee Phan, Minnie Phan, and Thien Pham, sponsored by the San Francisco Public Library and San Francisco Arts Commission.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Bryan Washington speaks about how his experiences in Tokyo and Osaka informed his latest novel, Palaver (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), and how third-person narratives reflect the estrangement of being in a different country.