Poets & Writers Theater

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.

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.

For the “Seriously Celebrating the New Yorker’s 100th Anniversary: Fiction” event hosted by the House of SpeakEasy at Joe’s Pub in New York, Yiyun Li weaves together stories about connecting with hairdressers in salons over the years and how real-life stories can sometimes transform into different stories through fiction writing. “People tell us stories and our stories live in their memory. And hair grows, life goes on,” says Li.

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 Books Are Magic event, Lana Lin reads from her book The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam (Dorothy, a Publishing Project, 2025) and discusses how she uses both Gertrude Stein and Audre Lorde’s genre-bending approaches to autobiography in order to highlight Asian diasporic narratives in a conversation with Monique Truong.

In this event hosted by City Lights Bookstore, Harryette Mullen reads from her latest poetry collection, Regaining Consciousness (Graywolf Press, 2025), and talks about how her poetics remain playful even in the face of disaster in a conversation with Tonya M. Foster.

In this interview for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Patti Smith offers advice to young artists and talks about her award-winning memoir, Just Kids, and her new memoir, Bread of Angels (Random House, 2025).

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 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 Politics and Prose event, Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo reads from her debut novel, The Tiny Things Are Heavier (Bloomsbury, 2025), and talks about how writing a coming-of-age story helped her understand her own experiences in migrating to the United States from Nigeria in a conversation with Gbenga Adesina.

In this CBS Mornings segment with cohost Gayle King, Oprah Winfrey announces her latest book club pick, A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf, 2025), and speaks with author Megha Majumbar about the themes of her novel and how becoming a parent changed how she viewed her characters. Read Majumbar’s installment of our Ten Questions series.

In this PBS NewsHour video, Malcolm Brabant speaks with archivists and scholars about discovering lost stories written by Virginia Woolf before her first novel was published. The discovery culminated into a newly published collection of three comic stories, The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories (Princeton University Press, 2025), edited by Urmila Seshagiri.