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In this Politics and Prose event, Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo reads from her debut novel, The Tiny Things Are Heavier (Bloomsbury, 2025), and talks about how writing a coming-of-age story helped her understand her own experiences in migrating to the United States from Nigeria in a conversation with Gbenga Adesina.
“How can we reach a higher truth in storytelling and art?” —Brandon Hobson, author of The Devil Is a Southpaw
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.
“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.
“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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
A single father living quietly with his daughter in a small mountain village in Japan finds his day-to-day routine and peaceful, self-sufficient existence disrupted by real estate developers in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2023 film Evil Does Not Exist. The collaborative systems of care and mutual exchange that characterize the villagers’ way of life clash with the corporation’s focus on capitalist profit, and the delicate balance of nature and civilization is called into question. This week write a short story that revolves around the disturbance of a balance between nature and culture. You might find it helpful to begin by brainstorming specific areas in your chosen setting where the natural environment and human-made spaces depend on each other or have had to adjust to make way for the other. What are the ramifications of a disruption to this balance?
