Poets & Writers Theater

“I like to have a story be just the essential.” Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black (Mariner Books, 2018), talks about why he enjoys the short story form, writing Black characters, and his connection with his students in this Late Night With Seth Meyers interview. 

“If you’ve never read my work before, then I would hope when you read it, that you felt the way you did when you were a kid, that you felt a sense of wonder.” Kelly Link, a 2018 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship recipient, talks about her literary influences and why she incorporates the fantastic into stories of contemporary life.

“This book is very much about climate change…the collision between the human in nature, between internal and external, between domesticity and the wild.” Lauren Groff speaks about her short story collection Florida (Riverhead Books, 2018) with Rich Fahle of PBS Books at the 2018 AWP Annual Conference & Book Fair in Tampa. “Severe Weather in the Sunshine State,” a profile of Groff by Bethane Patrick, is in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“A few years ago I used to tell myself I wanted to marry a cowboy.” In this short film produced by Park Pictures, director Alison Maclean adapts Lydia Davis’s short story about an English professor who fantasizes about a life of adventure. “The Professor” is included in Davis’s collection The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

“If you read it, I hope you enjoy it.” In this short video, Tom Hanks sits in front of his collection of vintage typewriters to announce the publication of his debut short story collection, Uncommon Type: Some Stories (Knopf, 2017).

“They’re unwanted where they come from, they’re unwanted when they arrive, but we have a great tradition of welcoming refugees and turning them into Pulitzer Prize winners.” Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks about his experience as a refugee and the significance of refugees in the United States on Late Night With Seth Meyers. Nguyen’s first short story collection, The Refugees (Grove Press, 2017), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The kids were as close to feral as you can get, like animals dressed up in camouflage jumpsuits.” Kevin Wilson, whose second novel, Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads his short story "An Arc Welder, a Molotov Cocktail, a Bowie Knife."

Filmmakers Gareth Smith and Jenny Lee adapt Kevin Wilson's short story "Worst Case Scenario" in this short film about a man who predicts all the things that can go horribly wrong in a home. Wilson's novel Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this book trailer for her debut story collection, Know the Mother (Wayne State University Press, 2016), Desiree Cooper reads from "In the Ginza." Cooper is featured in "5 Over 50 Reads" in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“They’re not the same as any other books I’ve read.” Visitors of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, located in Dahl’s home village Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, England, share their love of the author’s classic books and characters.

Rumaan Alam reads from his short story "A Certainty" at an event for the Center for Fiction's literary magazine, The Literarian, alongside Terese Svoboda and Sigrid Nunez. Alam is featured in "First Fiction 2016" in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine and reads from his debut novel, Rich and Pretty (Ecco, 2016), on Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.

"The promise and the danger of a short story is that it can be perfect." At the 2013 New Yorker Festival, Junot Díaz and Karen Russell speak about the unique challenges of writing short stories.

"As a writer, I love the irresponsibility of the short story.... There's something beautifully free and single gesture about writing a short story." Tessa Hadley, author of the new novel, The Past (Harper, 2016), and whose work appears in The Penguin Book of the British Short Story (Penguin, 2015), talks about her experience writing both short stories and novels.

This trailer reveals a sneak peek of Memoranda, a video game inspired by twenty of Haruki Murakami's short stories and created by development team Bit Byterz. Currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, the 2-D point-and-click adventure game is a series of puzzles where players try to find what each character has lost.

This animated film, narrated by the late actor Christopher Lee, is part of an anthology composed of five stories by Edgar Allan Poe, each with a different visual style to evoke the unique tone of the tales. Extraordinary Tales is directed by Raul Garcia and features the voices of Bela Lugosi, Julian Sands, Roger Corman, and Guillermo del Toro.

This book trailer for Lincoln Michel's debut short story collection, Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press, 2015), presents humorously offbeat testimonials of the author's prowess as a "short story social media guru and a flash fiction consultant czar."

In this video, Jennifer Baker, editor of the short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018), speaks with Nana Brew-Hammond about her story “Wisdom.” The anthology is a collective of work by established and emerging writers of color, including Mia Alvar, Alexander Chee, and Mitchell S. Jackson. 

Denis Johnson reads a selection of short stories to a captive audience as part of the Spring 2016 Barbara and David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series at Cornell University. Johnson died at the age of sixty-seven on May 25, 2017.

“...this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard...” In this video from 2014, Jamaica Kincaid reads her short story "Girl," and speaks about her life and writing career as part of Journeys, the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the Chicago Humanities Festival.

“Halfway between you and me is a long ways away, but there is a small town where we will not be seen, where we will hide in plain sight, where we will be strangers until we are not.” In this video from 2015, the Loft Literary Center and BUST Magazine presents Roxane Gay, who reads tweets and from her short story, “Do You Have a Place for Me?”