Poets & Writers Theater

“An unhappy childhood is a treasure for a writer,” says Hilary Mantel in this CBS Saturday Morning interview about her story collection Learning to Talk, which was first published in England in 2003 and published in the U.S. for the first time by Henry Holt this month. The stories feature young characters growing up in mid-twentieth-century England and are inspired by Mantel’s childhood.

“We claimed it first, this little mountain. Me and MaViolet and a scattering of neighbors,” reads Jocelyn Nicole Johnson from the title novella of her debut story collection, My Monticello (Henry Holt, 2021), which is featured in Page One in the November/December 2021 of Poets & Writers Magazine, in this reading and conversation with Walter Mosley for Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Missouri.

“If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?” Hilary Mantel reads from The Mirror and the Light (Henry Holt, 2020), the final novel in her trilogy, which began with her Booker Prize–winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.

In this interview, Susan Choi talks to Paul Peppis at the University of Oregon about her fifth novel, Trust Exercise (Henry Holt, 2019), her previous four novels, which include A Person of Interest (Viking, 2008) and My Education (Viking, 2013), writing Asian American characters, and her nonfiction work.

“Sometimes I’ll write for two weeks straight and not write for six months….” Sheila Heti, author of the novel Motherhood (Henry Holt, 2018), talks about her lack of a writing routine and the benefits of letting feelings, ideas, and energy build up and become more complex.

“I work on the paragraph as if it’s a little poem, as if it’s a musical composition...” In this interview with Louisiana Channel, Paul Auster talks about his writing habits, aging, creative obsession, his recent and upcoming projects, and the one-on-one intimacy that makes books different from other art forms.

“The book...started with a question about confronting mortality.” Rachel Heng speaks about creating the dystopian world of her debut novel, Suicide Club: A Novel About Living (Henry Holt, 2018), and society’s obsession with immortality.

In this debut novel by Helen Phillips, a young wife's new job, which consists of entering numbers into something only known as the Database, is linked to a larger mystery.The Beautiful Bureaucrat is forthcoming from Henry Holt in August.

"Is it that bad to write genre?" David Simon, writer and producer of the HBO drama The Wire, speaks with novelist Richard Price about his choice to release his latest book, The Whites (Henry Holt, 2015), under the pseudonym Harry Brandt.

Sharma Shields introduces and reads from her novel The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac from the woods of Spokane, Washington. The book was released today by Henry Holt.

Thirty years after the publication of The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster returns to the memoir form with Winter Journal, one of the twelve titles included in this issue's Page One. In this video, Auster reads from the first chapter of the memoir, published this month by Henry Holt.

Paul Auster reads from his sixteenth novel, Sunset Park, published earlier this month by Henry Holt.