Poets & Writers Theater

“Read the books they don’t want you to. That’s where the good stuff is,” says LeVar Burton in this video from The Daily Show With Trevor Noah on some of the latest banned children’s books which include themes on race and racism, and LGBTQIA+ characters.

“I should share with you that I did not intend to be a fiction writer, I did not intend to write a historical novel…I did intend to always, however, tell the truth,” says Min Jin Lee about writing her novel Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing, 2017), which has been adapted into a television series, in this 2018 reading and conversation with Claire Messud at Harvard University.

“It’s a story that traces three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her legacy.” In this video, Tara M. Stringfellow talks about her debut novel, Memphis (Dial Press, 2022), and her writing process, which involves listening to opera and jazz music. Memphis is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It’s not as though I want to change the past. It’s really trying to understand how these things come together to bring you where you are.” Amy Tan speaks about her creative process in this video from PBS and American Masters previewing her documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir directed by James Redford.

Watch Alexander MacLeod read from and discuss his latest short story collection, Animal Person (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), with Richard Ford in this virtual conversation hosted by Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. MacLeod’s story collection is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It’s the nature of the segregation [in Bristol] that makes it so interesting to write,” says Moses McKenzie in this video about bringing the city of Bristol, England to life as a character in his debut novel, An Olive Grove in Ends (Little, Brown, 2022).

Watch the trailer for Conversations With Friends, a television series based on the best-selling novel by Sally Rooney, starring Alison Oliver, Joe Alwyn, Sasha Blane, and Jemima Kirke. The series will air on Hulu in the United States and on BBC Three in the United Kingdom.

In this interview with Simon & Schuster president and CEO Jonathan Karp, Jennifer Egan speaks about the pros and cons of technology and choosing the right title for her new novel, The Candy House, which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this virtual reading and conversation examining the multitude of identities, authors Usha Akella, Manuel Muñoz, and Suzi Q. Smith read their work and speak with Aruni Kashyap for the 2021 Jaipur Literature Festival Colorado. Akella, cofounder of the Matwaala collective, is featured in “Building Solidarity Through Poetry” by Swati Khurana in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I think the books that I wish I’d written are all super personal books where the person manages to metabolize their personal experience into something more universal,” says Elif Batuman in this interview for The Graham Norton Book Club podcast about first books read, books to be jealous of, and books to recommend. A Q&A with Batuman by Porochista Khakpour is featured in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“My mother thought that if she taught me to read, I would become interested to read my books and leave her alone,” says Jamaica Kincaid about her experience reading as a child and how it influenced her as a writer in this interview from the 2021 Louisiana Literature Festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

Drive My Car is a film adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and starring Hidetoshi Nishijima and Toko Miura. The film, which won best screenplay at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and the 2022 Oscar for best international feature film, follows the relationship between a widowed theater actor-director and a young woman hired to be his chauffeur.

From William Shakespeare to Dr. Seuss, this episode of Otherwords, a PBS Storied web series hosted by sociolinguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky, digs deep into verbal innovations and the history of words created by writers.

Watch the trailer for the HBO series The Time Traveler’s Wife, based on the best-selling 2003 novel by Audrey Niffenegger. The six-episode series stars Rose Leslie and Theo James and premieres in May.

In this installment of the Creative Writing and Critical Thought series, novelist Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies (Riverhead, 2021), speaks with professor Emily Apter, author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (Verso Books, 2013), about the complexity and consequences of translation and the paradoxes and power of language. The series is cosponsored by New Literary History and the Center for Fiction.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is a television series adaptation of the 2010 novel of the same name by Walter Mosley. With a screenplay written by Mosley, the Apple TV+ miniseries stars Samuel L. Jackson as a man struggling with dementia who receives a treatment to regain his memory, helping him uncover mysteries from his family’s past.

“Some people wore their difference honestly, but my parents were liars,” reads Sarah Manguso from her first novel, Very Cold People (Hogarth, 2022), in this virtual reading event for The Booksmith with author Heidi Julavits. For more from Manguso, read her installment of Ten Questions.

“Everything is untranslatable if what translation means is making something new that stays the same. But that’s not what translation is,” says Jennifer Croft in this House of SpeakEasy video about her origins as a translator and what led her to the Polish language and to work with author Olga Tokarczuk. The Man Booker Prize–winning translator is featured in “Giving Translators Their Due” in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Based on the best-selling historical novel by Min Jin Lee, Pachinko is an eight-episode series that follows a Korean immigrant family across four generations. The highly anticipated Apple TV+ series stars Yuh-Jung Youn, Lee Minho, Jin Ha, and Minha Kim and will be told in three languages—Korean, Japanese, and English.

“The crime is murder.” Watch the trailer for the film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery novel Death on the Nile, directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Tom Bateman, Annette Bening, Russell Brand, Gal Gadot, and Armie Hammer.