Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin
The first lines of a dozen noteworthy books, including Florida Water by aja monet and I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Hala Alyan.
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The first lines of a dozen noteworthy books, including Florida Water by aja monet and I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Hala Alyan.
Based in North Carolina, the independent publisher Blair champions local narratives, overlooked stories, and perspectives outside of traditional publishing. The press publishes ten to twelve books yearly in poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.
The author of How to be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir spotlights magazines and journals, such as Forge Literary Magazine and Kweli, that authentically welcomed excerpts of her work.
The Concord Free Public Library Writer-in-Residence Program offers a six-month residency from January to June to a poet, fiction writer, or creative nonfiction writer at the historic Concord Free Public Library (CFPL) in Concord, Massachusetts. The writer-in-residence is given a $10,000 stipend with the expectation that they will spend an average of eight hours a week at the library for the duration of the program and will develop public programming and social opportunities for the CFPL community.
Concord Free Public Library Writer-in-Residence Program, 129 Main Street, Concord, MA 01742. (978) 318-3383. Ricky Sirois, Assistant Library Director.
In this Center for Fiction event, author and critic Andrea Long Chu reads from her essay collection Authority (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) and talks about the inherent contradictions in the way people discuss and disagree about art, and traces the political and intellectual history of literary criticism in a conversation with Arielle Angel.
In this virtual event for the Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series, Lidia Yuknavitch reads from her memoir Reading the Waves (Riverhead Books, 2025) and speaks to Porochista Khakpour about the process of rearranging fragments of writing.
In the comedic documentary series The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder helps ordinary people rehearse difficult conversations they may be dreading by creating precisely replicated environments and hiring actors to prepare for each scenario. The elaborate sets include a fully functioning bar with patrons, a household with a child actor, and an exact reproduction of a Houston airport terminal. Compose a personal essay about a necessary conversation that has been weighing on you and write out several vignettes exploring potential ways the exchange might play out given your knowledge of your own mindset as well as the person you’re confronting. Consider incorporating thoughts about how some reactions or behaviors may be impossible to predict. How might this rehearsal of sorts help calm your nerves or provide an understanding of your own social tendencies?
“The price of the ride was listening to people talk.” This sentiment is expressed by the young narrator of Joe Westmoreland’s 2001 coming-of-age autofictional book, Tramps Like Us, reissued this week by MCD, to describe his hitchhiking adventures in search of queer belonging and identity. The novel portrays a wide range of characters Joe comes across, befriends, works with, sleeps with, and sometimes loses on the road and in various cities. Compose a memoiristic piece that recounts a cast of characters you’ve met in the past, perhaps only briefly as you traveled from one place to another, who had colorful tales about lives very different from your own. Incorporate snippets of dialogue, trying as best as possible to recall any idiosyncrasies in their speech or vocabulary. Reflect on what you learned from listening and why these stories have stayed with you through the years.