Poets & Writers Theater

“I’m not there to serve the author or serve the text, I’m there to interpret it.” In this video, writer and translator Anton Hur speaks about the role of the translator, Korean literature, and his work on the novel Counterweight (Pantheon, 2023) by the pseudonymous South Korean science fiction author Djuna.

“Part of my purpose as a writer is to help make compassion the standard.” In this Penguin Random House video, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah talks about his research process, speculative fiction, and writing his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars (Pantheon, 2023).

In this PBS NewsHour video, NPR’s Maureen Corrigan and the Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada highlight their favorite books for summer reading, which include Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019), Jill Ciment’s The Body in Question (Pantheon, 2019), and José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal (Haymarket Books, 2018).

“Many stories with real urgency and momentum grow out of a simple request; someone says to someone else, ‘There's something I want you to do.’” Charles Baxter, author of the short story collection There’s Something I Want You to Do (Pantheon, 2015), delivers a lecture on dramatic structure and how to create urgency and momentum in stories for the Word Works series at Hugo House.

"It's an exploration, an homage, and a critique." Margo Jefferson talks to Jeffrey Brown about her memoir, Negroland (Pantheon, 2015), at the 2015 Miami Book Fair. Jefferson is a finalist in the autobiography category for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award.

“People think of English as this monolithic thing but it’s really not, it’s much more like a river.” Kory Stamper, associate editor at Merriam-Webster and the author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (Pantheon, 2017), explains what it’s like to define English words and why there are those dots in the middle of words in the dictionary.

"Filling the blank page is agony." Daniel Kehlmann, author of Measuring the World (Pantheon, 2006), shares his feellings on first drafts and the joyful satisfaction of writing in longhand.

“There is a particular contract that gets established between reader and writer.” Laila Lalami, whose novel The Moor’s Account (Pantheon, 2014) is longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, discusses the intricacies and differences in writing fiction and nonfiction.

Ali Smith reads from her dual-narrative novel involving a British teenager mourning her mother's death and a fifteenth-century Italian painter. The novel, released tomorrow by Pantheon, was a finalist for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Last month Smith was awarded the Goldsmiths Prize, an award recognizing fiction that breaks the mold.

"When I read Dostoevsky, I understand better the psychology of the human being." Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic memoir Persepolis (Pantheon, 2004), speaks with Paul Holdengräber at the New York Public Library about how reading Fyodor Dostoevsky's work changed her life.

The cartoonist and author of the graphic novel Building Stories speaks with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's Bookworm.

The author of the new story collection Sorry Please Thank You (Pantheon), who is profiled in the current issue of the magazine by contributing editor Kevin Nance, talks about "not writing" as a means to being more productive, counterfeit writing, and writing that "slips out like a burp."

Chip Kidd, the associate art director at Knopf and Pantheon, talks about his cover design for Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84. Note the Spirograph drawings behind his desk (three of them were featured in Kidd's design of the January/February 2010 cover of Poets & Writers Magazine). And read Ken Gordon's take on the girth of Murakami's huge book and others in the current issue.