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In this episode of The Interview, a podcast from the New York Times, Arundhati Roy speaks with host Lulu Garcia-Navarro about government censorship and political repression, the role of the artist amidst crisis, and the challenges of writing about her mother in her new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (Scribner, 2025), which is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“When an impediment arrives, I try writing about it. This helps me remain patient.” —Jeannie Vanasco, author of A Silent Treatment
In an essay in the New York Review of Architecture, Elvia Wilk writes about light pollution and the extensive effects and detriments of artificial lighting. “Everyone suffers, from bats—which are essential pollinators, predators, and fertilizers—to birds, to coral reefs, to orchids. The disruption occurs not only on the scale of the day, but on the scale of the season,” writes Wilk. “In cities, trees positioned next to streetlamps wait to shed their fall leaves for three weeks longer than trees unlit by lamps.” Write a personal essay that reflects on your own relationship to the various types of lighting around you, both artificial and natural. Describe the way sunlight affects you throughout the seasons and explore how lamps, overhead lighting, and streetlights shape your days and nights.
“Translate literature and it will teach you how to write.” In this American Library in Paris event, Jhumpa Lahiri reads from her essay collection Translating Myself and Others (Princeton University Press, 2022) and talks about her latest book, Bone Into Stone (Sylph Editions, 2024), which details her experiences translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the Latin in partnership with the classicist Yelena Baraz.
In I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, translated from the Chinese by Jack Hargreaves and forthcoming in October from Astra House, Hu Anyan collects essays he began writing while feeling stuck and unfulfilled in the many short-term jobs he moved through as a young man. Turning to reading and writing for solace, he began sharing his stories and connecting with readers. “Supposing work is something we are compelled to do, a concession of our personal will,” writes Hu, “then the other parts of life—those that remain true to our desires, that we choose to pursue, in whatever form they take—might be called freedom.” Compose a series of vignettes that look back on several past jobs you’ve had. What do they say about your work-life balance?
In this PBS NewsHour interview, Nicholas Boggs speaks about his new book, Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), a biography which looks at the ways James Baldwin’s personal relationships shaped his life and work.
In this Books Are Magic video, Amanda Hess reads from her debut memoir, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age (Doubleday, 2025), and speaks with Wesley Morris about her experiences using the internet for information and support during her pregnancy. Hess is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2025” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Chloé Caldwell reads from her second memoir, Trying (Graywolf Press, 2025), in this Green Apple Books event with Ariel Gore and Mia Arias Tsang in which they speak about the meaning of failure, the nuances of writing about relationships, and the process of representing queerness on the page. Caldwell’s book is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Think of an ordinary object you see almost every day: a chipped coffee mug, a frayed doormat, or the traffic light you always catch red. Write an essay that treats this object as if it were a silent witness to one chapter of your life. Give this object a voice and allow it to narrate this portion of your history in fragments, in terms of what it has seen you gain, what it has seen you lose, and the small, private moments it holds for you. Allow the object’s “voice” to reveal something about you that you rarely admit to others.
A new nonfiction series from Ig Publishing encourages authors to reflect on the films that have transformed their lives.
