Poets & Writers Theater

At this Japanese Literature Night event hosted by the Japan Society, Keiichiro Hirano delivers his keynote speech titled “The Question of Selfhood” in which he shares how his upbringing in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka during the eighties and nineties inspired his interest in literature and how he attempts to tackle questions of the individual’s place in modernity through his novels.

In this Jaipur Literature Festival event moderated by Nadini Nair, novelists David Nicholls, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Geetanjali Shree, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Andrew O’Hagan discuss their respective writing processes, as well as how the novel voice can be used to interrogate the histories established by colonial powers.

Watch the trailer for The Life of Chuck, a film adaptation of the novella of the same name by Stephen King. Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, the film stars Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Jacob Tremblay, and Mark Hamill.

In this McNally Jackson Books event, Polly Barton reads from her English translation of Mai Ishizawa’s debut novel, The Place of Shells (New Directions, 2025), and talks about her experience researching the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in order to capture the historical, emotional center of Ishizawa’s writing in a conversation with Eliza St. James.

In this Politics and Prose bookstore event, Christina Li, author of The Manor of Dreams (Avid Reader Press, 2025), talks about her decision to write a family saga with gothic sensibilities and how the Mandarin and Cantonese languages affected her writing process in a conversation with Martha Anne Toll.

Miss Austen is a four-part historical television series produced by PBS Masterpiece, an adaptation by Andrea Gibb of the novel of the same name by Gill Hornby. Directed by Aisling Walsh, the series stars Keeley Hawes as Cassandra Austen, the sister of late Jane Austen, who searches for Jane’s letters in order to protect her reputation.

Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage (Algonquin Books, 2018), and A. M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven (Viking, 2012), talk about how the definition of women’s literature has evolved over time in this live episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer celebrating thirty years of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Watch the trailer for A Pale View of Hills, a film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1982 novel of the same name. Directed by Kei Ishikawa, the film stars Suzu Hirose, Fumi Nikaido, and Yoh Yoshida, and explores a widow’s memories spanning post-war Nagasaki in the 1950s and England during the 1980s Cold War era.

In this Green Apple Books event, Jemimah Wei reads from her debut novel, The Original Daughter (Doubleday, 2025), and talks about her desire to write about two ambitious girls growing up in modern Singapore in a conversation with R. O. Kwon. “What I tell people about this book is that I’ve always thought it of as a love story, but like a really unromantic love story.”

“I think each project requires its own form, and the story itself demands the form.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Lauren Groff talks about how her novel Matrix (Riverhead Books, 2021) began as a thought experiment around toxic masculinity, and reflects on the ways fiction can challenge patriarchal storytelling traditions.

“Being a writer, creating stories, is my way of saying that I’m not marked by my history.” In this PBS NewsHour interview, Ocean Vuong talks about the power of writing and the working-class community of Hartford that shaped his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Press, 2025). For more from Vuong, read “Theater of Memories: A Conversation With Ocean Vuong” by Divya Mehrish.

“I wanted to write about a father and daughter in a building made of time.” Madeleine Thien talks about the genealogy of ideas and yearslong process of writing her novel The Book of Records (Norton, 2025) in this Toronto Public Library event with Elamin Abdelmahmoud. For more from Thien, read “Hopeless Hope: A Conversation With Madeleine Thien” by Renée H. Shea.

In this event hosted by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System in Maryland, Kevin Nguyen talks about how his experiences in journalism, and the histories of Japanese American incarceration and the Vietnam War, shaped his second novel, Mỹ Documents (One World, 2025), and the ways in which he sees this book as “an imagination of policy” rather than speculative fiction.

“It’s an opportunity for a character, whose story could not have been told by [Mark] Twain, to have his story told.” In this short video, Percival Everett speaks about his novel James (Doubleday, 2024), a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. Everett won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for James.

In this Enoch Pratt Free Library event in Baltimore, Lydia Millet reads from her story collection Atavists (Norton, 2025) and discusses the humor in her writing in a conversation with Betsy Boyd. Atavists is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, Ricardo Hernandez, assistant director of Programs & Partnerships at Poets & Writers, hosts a celebratory reading by the 2025 fiction cohort of Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early career authors. Introduced by writer and publicist Jennifer Huang, readers include Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Roohi Choudhry, Kerry Donoghue, Lacey N. Dunham, Shasta Grant, Laura Venita Green, Benedict Nguyễn, Miranda Schmidt, and Daniel Tam-Claiborne.

In this Strand Book Store event, Torrey Peters reads from her book Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories (Random House, 2025) and talks about the experience of transitioning and how literature can broaden understandings of self beyond identity in a conversation with essayist and critic Andrea Long Chu. “A lot of these stories are invitations to a reader to identify with these characters who are probably not like the reader,” says Peters.

Jennifer Acker, founder and editor in chief of the Common, answers questions about the journal’s mission, slush piles, and her editorial process in this virtual event with Becky Tuch for the Lit Mag News Roundup. An interview with Acker about the Common’s fifteenth anniversary is featured in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The only counsel that is acceptable is to work! To work very hard until you discover the kind of writer that you want to be.” Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa dispenses advice to emerging writers in this Louisiana Channel interview with Christian Lund. Vargas Llosa died at the age of eighty-nine on April 13, 2025.

In this video from the University of South Carolina Irvin Department of Rare Books & Special Collections, scholars talk about their special exhibit celebrating 100 years since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published with items ranging from first editions of the novel, editions owned by writers like Sylvia Plath, and ephemera from the author’s life.