Poets & Writers Theater

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.

Watch the trailer for The Thing With Feathers directed by Dylan Southern and starring Benedict Cumberbatch. A film adaptation of the novel Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter (Graywolf Press, 2016), the film follows a grieving widow who is greeted by an unwanted house guest while struggling to raise two young sons.

In this discussion hosted by the University of Southern California, Elaine Hsieh Chou talks about playing with surrealism and absurdism in her new short story collection, Where Are You Really From (Penguin Press, 2025), and reflects on the impact of her debut novel, Disorientation (Penguin Books, 2022), in a conversation with Dr. Dorinne Kondo.

Watch the trailer for Hamnet, a film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name. Directed by Chloé Zhao and starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, the film follows the relationship between William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes, and the impact of their young son’s tragic death on their lives.

In this 60 Minutes interview, Margaret Atwood speaks about her response to book banning, her new memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (Doubleday, 2025), and why she says the popularity of her novel The Handmaid’s Tale is “not due to me or the excellence of the book. It’s partly the twists and turns of history.”

In this PBS NewsHour interview, director Raoul Peck speaks about his new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5, which examines the writings of George Orwell and interweaves clips, readings from the author’s diary, cinematic references, and modern-day footage to propose how prophetic his novels and work have become.

In this virtual reading and celebration, Poets & Writers Magazine features editor India Lena González introduces the 2025 cohort of “5 Over 50” debut authors: Princess Joy L. Perry, author of This Here Is Love (Norton, 2025); Vishwas R. Gaitonde, author of On Earth as It Is in Heaven (Orison Books, 2025); Yael Valencia Aldana, author of Black Mestiza (University Press of Kentucky, 2025); Lauren K. Watel, author of Book of Potions (Sarabande Books, 2025); and Jennifer Eli Bowen, author of The Book of Kin: On Absence, Love, and Being There (Milkweed Editions, 2025).

In this episode of the Fashion Neurosis podcast hosted by Bella Freud, Ocean Vuong speaks about how the Japanese concept of negative space, ma, influences his approach to the line in both prose and poetry, and why he wants to write eight books in total by the end of his career.

In this Service95 Book Club interview hosted by Dua Lipa, Margaret Atwood talks about the research she conducted in order to imagine the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 1986) while writing the novel in Berlin during the Cold War and how the current political landscape is reflective of the themes in her book.

In this New Yorker Festival event, George Saunders and Zadie Smith speak about their respective careers in writing and dissect some of their New Yorker stories in a conversation with the magazine’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman.

“My maker told his tale. And I will tell you mine.” Watch the new trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, and Christoph Waltz. The film is in select theaters for a limited run and will debut on Netflix on November 7.

In this Books Are Magic event, Jaquira Díaz reads from her debut novel, This Is the Only Kingdom (Algonquin Books, 2025), and discusses what inspired her to write a queer coming-of-age story in a conversation with Lupita Aquino and Angie Cruz. Díaz’s novel is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.