Poets & Writers Theater

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.”

In this event at the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum in San Francisco, Michael Luo talks about how a series of tweets reacting to a hate crime he experienced led to an exploration of early nineteenth-century Chinese immigration, which began the process for his debut book, Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America (Doubleday, 2025). “In order to understand this kind of present, you have to go back,” Luo says.

“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 episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, author Eric Puchner talks about the yearslong process of writing his second novel, Dream State (Doubleday, 2025), and how he felt urged to write about the lives and landscapes of Montana and climate change.
 

In this Late Night With Seth Meyers interview, Percival Everett talks about how Mark Twain, among others, influenced the sense of irony in his writing and how a game of tennis impacted the premise of his novel James (Doubleday, 2024), for which he won the 2024 National Book Award in fiction.

“I like being an outsider. It allows for that distance to enjoy the carnival for what it is.” In this event hosted by the Library of Congress, bestselling author Kevin Kwan speaks about his experiences as an author and the process of writing his latest novel, Lies and Weddings (Doubleday, 2024), with Library of Congress literary director Clay Smith.

“I’m very interested in taking away a lot of the traditional furniture of a novel and making it a shorter experience and a more intense experience.” In this Politics and Prose Bookstore event, Kevin Barry reads from his new novel, The Heart in Winter (Doubleday, 2024), and talks about Irish labor history, his time spent with Irish communities in Montana, and his experiences writing in different forms.

In this Green Apple Books event in San Francisco, Zach Williams reads from his debut story collection, Beautiful Days (Doubleday, 2024), and discusses the state of contemporary short stories in a conversation with author Kate Folk.

“The book that I didn’t know I could do was the one I should be doing.” In this Penguin Random House video, author Colson Whitehead talks about the origins of his award-winning novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, and continuing the stories of his character Ray Carney through his two latest novels, Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto.

In this 2007 Talks at Google event, Aimee Bender, the author of the short story collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (Doubleday, 1998) and Willful Creatures (Doubleday, 2005), reads from her work and discusses her writing regimen, favorite books, and her love of short stories.

In this New York Public Library event, Cullman Center fellow Hua Hsu reads from his debut memoir, Stay True (Doubleday, 2022), and speaks about writing through grief with Ken Chen. Hsu is the winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in memoir or autobiography.

In this Late Night With Seth Meyers interview, Margaret Atwood speaks about grief, unburnable books, and her latest story collection, Old Babes in the Wood (Doubleday, 2023).

“I read so much, still, because I want to learn how to tell the perfect story.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Alex Schulman, author most recently of the novel The Survivors (Doubleday, 2021), speaks about the impact reading has had on his life, the power of storytelling, and how he started his writing career as a blogger.

Watch this interview with Hanya Yanagihara on Late Night With Seth Meyers, in which she speaks about her novels To Paradise (Doubleday, 2022) and A Little Life (Doubleday, 2015), as well as how readers interact with her on social media.

“I love a story with an unreliable character where you’re not quite sure what’s going on. I really wanted to maintain that question and that tension throughout the book.” Rachel Yoder speaks about motherhood, publishing a book during the pandemic, and the writing process for her debut novel, Nightbitch (Doubleday, 2021), in this episode of A Mighty Blaze with Rachel Barenbaum.

Vinod Busjeet speaks about emigration versus immigration and how his debut novel, Silent Winds, Dry Seas (Doubleday, 2021), started out as a memoir in this virtual conversation with NYU Washington, DC lecturer Sydney Boyd. Busjeet is featured in “5 Over 50: 2021” in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It’s not all fun, you know, the usual terror of writing a book.” In this Waterstones interview, Colson Whitehead talks about his new novel, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, 2021), and how he gave himself permission to write a heist story. The novel is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“My daily life was one of hunger and fear, but all around me I saw skyscrapers and lights and beauty.” In this video, Qian Julie Wang talks about growing up as an undocumented child in New York City and what she hopes readers will take away from her debut memoir, Beautiful Country (Doubleday, 2021).

“Genre writing is an amazing place to try new words out as long as you provide good context.” In this video, Stacey Abrams discusses her love of language and word choice, as well as the writing process for her latest novel, While Justice Sleeps (Doubleday, 2021), with Merriam-Webster editors Ammon Shea and Adam Maid.

In this virtual event for Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina, the late Randall Kenan, author of the story collection If I Had Two Wings (Norton, 2020), and Ron Rash, author of In the Valley: Stories and a Novella Based on Serena (Doubleday, 2020), read from their books and discuss growing up in the South and their writing. Kenan’s If I Had Two Wings is longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in fiction.