Ten Questions for Brandon Hobson
“How can we reach a higher truth in storytelling and art?” —Brandon Hobson, author of The Devil Is a Southpaw
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Genre: Fiction
Oprah’s Book Club: Megha Majumdar
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In this CBS Mornings segment with cohost Gayle King, Oprah Winfrey announces her latest book club pick, A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf, 2025), and speaks with author Megha Majumbar about the themes of her novel and how becoming a parent changed how she viewed her characters. Read Majumbar’s installment of our Ten Questions series.
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Jade Chang: What a Time to Be Alive
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“I think I just really wanted to show a version of the city that we don’t see as often in popular culture.” In this live episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Jade Chang discusses the nuances of writing about Los Angeles in her latest novel, What a Time to Be Alive (Ecco, 2025). Read Chang’s installation of our Ten Questions series.
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Frenetic
“I arrived in the middle of the night to save you from the terrible smoke, I had a dream about you and so I decided to come and see you, I arrived just in time,” writes Ariana Harwicz in Unfit (New Directions, 2025), translated from the Spanish by Jessie Mendez Sayer. In the novel an Argentine migrant worker laboring as a grape picker in southern France is thrown into a tailspin after losing custody of her two young sons; she sets fire to her in-laws’ farmhouse, kidnaps her children, and embarks on a manic road trip. The terrifying and darkly humorous first-person narration is filled with contradictions and falsehoods and comma-filled run-on sentences, structured in frenzied, rambling paragraphs that mirror the protagonist’s delusionary state of mind. Write a story that plays with narrative voice in a similar way, aligning the mindset of your protagonist with a frenetic style of storytelling. Are there moments of levity that can provide a reprieve from the pacing?
New Stories by Virginia Woolf
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In this PBS NewsHour video, Malcolm Brabant speaks with archivists and scholars about discovering lost stories written by Virginia Woolf before her first novel was published. The discovery culminated into a newly published collection of three comic stories, The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories (Princeton University Press, 2025), edited by Urmila Seshagiri.
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The Artsy Raven Podcast: Yiming Ma
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In this episode of the Artsy Raven Podcast hosted by JF Garrard, author Yiming Ma talks about leaving the tech and finance world to write and the process of publishing his debut novel, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us (Mariner Books, 2025). Read “Writing in the Age of AI: The Case for Collective Resistance” by Ma in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Carson Faust: If the Dead Belong Here
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In this Magers & Quinn Booksellers event, Carson Faust reads from his debut novel, If the Dead Belong Here (Viking, 2025), and discusses the origins and power of the book’s unconventional structure and the surge in popularity of Indigenous horror literature in a conversation with Mona Susan Power. Faust’s novel is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Ten Superb Literary Magazines for Fiction
The author of the collection What We Fed to the Manticore highlights homes for short fiction that embrace new talent, spark dynamic conversations, and live the values of inclusion and representation.
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Long Live the Longer Short Story: Depth Without a Novel’s Commitment
The acclaimed fiction writer unpacks the art of the longer short story—a form with space for ambitious plot and rich characterization, with the pressure and punch of concision.
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50 Over 50: Celebrating a Decade of Debut Excellence
Since 2016, Poets & Writers Magazine has showcased authors who have made their literary debuts after the age of fifty in our annual 5 Over 50 series. These are the fifty writers and books that have been celebrated in our pages.
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