Poets & Writers Theater

In this Books Are Magic event, Patricia Engel reads from her story collection The Faraway World (Avid Reader Press, 2023) and speaks with Naima Coster about writing habits and what inspires her to write. The Faraway World is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Books Are Magic event, Ada Calhoun reads from her memoir Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove Press, 2022) and discusses her writing process, New York City, and parenting with Emma Straub.

In this Books Are Magic event moderated by Denne Michele Norris, Rosemary Donahue reads from their essay “Thank U, Ex” and Nichole Perkins reads from her essay “Confessions of a Lonely Feminist” both published in the anthology Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic (Harper Perennial, 2022) edited by Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson.

“Is it okay to begin with the obvious? I am full of stones,” reads Ada Limón from “The Magnificent Frigatebird,” a poem from her latest collection, The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2022), in this reading and conversation with Patricia Smith at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn.

“For a long time, I worked day jobs that were different from the one I have now.” In this Books Are Magic recorded event, Jami Attenberg reads from her memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home (Ecco, 2022), and speaks about her writing process with author Kristen Arnett. For more Attenberg, read “1000 Words of Summer: How an Accountability Project Opened Up My Writing Life” in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It was September: autumn only in advertisements, cartoon-orange leaves and red backpacks lining the signs for back-to-school sales, the warmth whittling down but still keeping us in short sleeves.” In this Books Are Magic event, Kyle Lucia Wu reads from her debut novel, Win Me Something (Norton, 2021), and speaks with Crystal Hana Kim about her writing process.

In this Books Are Magic event celebrating the book launch of Ashley C. Ford’s debut memoir, Somebody’s Daughter (Flatiron Books, 2021), she talks to Jason Reynolds, who tries not to drop any spoilers. The memoir is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“There’s always going to be something to say about the push-pull that New York City exerts on its inhabitants,” says Sari Botton, editor of the revised edition of Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York (Seal Press, 2021), in this Books Are Magic virtual event with author Isaac Fitzgerald and contributors to the anthology Leslie Jamison, Lisa Ko, Emily Raboteau, and Rosie Schaap.

In this Books Are Magic video, authors Katherine Angel, Jo Ann Beard, Dantiel W. Moniz, and Jeannine Ouellette discuss the theme of desire for the Red Ink series, a quarterly series focused on women writers curated and moderated by Michele Filgate and cosponsored by Literary Hub.

“I am the blue chair island. I rock and the island rocks. I pull at a blue thread on the chair’s arm. I pull a hangnail from the third finger on my right hand.” In this Books Are Magic virtual event, Nadia Owusu reads from her debut memoir, Aftershocks (Simon & Schuster, 2021), and speaks with author Catherine E. McKinley.

“The theater goes dark. I’m watching characters move across the screen, but thinking more about Noah holding my hand, rotating the knuckle of my thumb with his own.” Paul Lisicky reads from his memoir Later: My Life at the Edge of the World (Graywolf Press, 2020) in this online reading event for Books Are Magic with Susan Choi. For more Lisicky, read his installation of Ten Questions.

“If I understood Marx, I thought, I could understand my mother.” At Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, Jordy Rosenberg reads from his essay “The Daddy Dialectic,” which was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rosenberg speaks about his debut novel, Confessions of the Fox (One World, 2018), in “The Business of Relationships” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Authors and independent bookstore owners Louise Erdrich, owner of Birchbark Books & Native Arts, and Emma Straub, owner of Books Are Magic, offer their recommendations for summer reading including books by Natalie Diaz, Sarah Gerard, and Lesley Nneka Arimah.

In this video, writers and book lovers—including Rumaan Alam, Ann Patchett, Jacqueline Woodson, Neil Gaiman, Mira Jacob, Benjamin Percy, and Peter Straub—help celebrate Independent Bookstore Day and the opening of Books Are Magic. The new bookstore is run by novelist Emma Straub and her husband Michael Fusco-Straub in Brooklyn.