Ten Questions for Jordy Rosenberg
“I am often wildly optimistic about my productivity in the mornings. This feeling lasts no later than noon.” —Jordy Rosenberg, author of Night Night Fawn
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Genre: Fiction
Interrogating Every Line
The author of Clutch (Tin House, February 2026) describes the rigorous line work that went into finishing her manuscript.
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Tayari Jones on the Power of History and Writing
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Tayari Jones discusses her new novel, Kin (Knopf, 2026), and the history she uncovered in her research for the book in a conversation with Jill Cox-Cordova, former Library Journal editor, for this virtual event of the Penguin Random House Winter Book and Author Festival. For more from Jones, read her installment of our Ten Questions series.
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Elizabeth Alexander on Support for Writers
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In this PBS NewsHour video, Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, speaks about the efforts to support literary nonprofits, including independent publishers, residencies, and fellowships for writers.
Surprising Connections
In a 2016 interview for the Film Stage, French director Mia Hansen-Løve, known for her philosophical drama films that revolve around familial and romantic relationships and loss, talks about an unexpected connection between her own works and Michael Mann’s 1995 blockbuster crime drama Heat, starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. She recognizes that the film about a detective and a career thief is actually about “action vs. melancholy and self-destruction—action becoming self-destruction,” themes Hansen-Løve sees in her own films “except in a very different way, in a very different world.” Think of a favorite film of yours with a genre that is, at least on the surface, extremely different from the type of fiction you tend to write. Consider the larger themes that are investigated in that work and write a short story that explores these themes in your own way, and in your own world.
Ten Questions for Tayari Jones
“I think that losing the joy of process causes writer’s block.” —Tayari Jones, author of Kin
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Manipulating the Shape of a Story
The author of Clutch (Tin House, February 2026) reflects on adjusting rising and falling action across time in fiction.
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Letters From a Rat
Argentine French author Copi introduces himself as the recipient and translator of a series of letters from a Parisian rat named Gouri to his former “master” in the 1979 novel City of Rats, translated from the French by Kit Schluter in a new edition forthcoming in March from New Directions. In the faux “Translator’s Preface,” Copi writes, “Decryption is not always a simple matter, although I think I’ve managed to the best of my ability here, even if certain passages penned in the rats’ language (two or three entire paragraphs of nothing but the letter ‘i,’ for example) fell away under my ruthless scissors.” Throughout the zany, fabulist narrative that is both whimsical and sexually obscene, the rat embarks on a reckless journey of adventure and crime. Write a short story in which you pose as the recipient of letters from a nonhuman character. As you select your character, consider the thematic possibilities that can be plumbed and how you might explore elements of conventional fables.
Blurring the Borders in Fiction: On Mapping and Naming, Unmapping and Unnaming
A novelist explores the decision to name real places in fiction, the way maps circumscribe those places, how locales heavily defined by tourism are susceptible to those projections, and what it means to push against those expectations.
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Poetry to Save Us: Boa at 50
Boa Editions celebrates a half century of independent publishing and releases a previously unpublished collection of Lucille Clifton’s poetry.
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