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In this Library of Congress National Book Festival event, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and Tiya Miles, author of Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (Penguin Press, 2024), discuss their books in a conversation moderated by Martha S. Jones.
In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast with host Jenna Seery, Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard talks about how his novel The Morning Star (Penguin Press, 2021) unexpectedly became a longer series and how he wrote the many characters and perspectives in the third book of the series, The Third Realm (Penguin Press, 2024).
“I was building up a writing life alongside working on this project, and for many of those years, I didn’t even know that it would look like this.” In this interview for the Otherppl With Brad Listi podcast, Nina Sharma talks about her writing practices while working on her debut essay collection, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown (Penguin Press, 2024).
“The correct line has that kind of ring of rightness to it. It’s like it’s always been there.” In this Merriam-Webster video, Celeste Ng talks about the sonic, literal, and emotional levels of words and reviews some choices made in her third novel, Our Missing Hearts (Penguin Press, 2022), with playwright Eboni Booth.
In this 2023 event hosted by the Chicago Humanities Festival, Zadie Smith reads from her latest novel, The Fraud (Penguin Press, 2023), and discusses the definition of historical fiction, the relationship between truth and emotion, and the impact of code-switching on her voice-driven writing with poet and novelist Chris Abani.
In this short video, Andrew Leland walks through the streets of Northampton, Massachusetts, and introduces his debut book, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight (Penguin Press, 2023), in which he writes about his experience with vision loss. Leland is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2023” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I think a theme in both The Idiot and Either/Or is sort of a disappointment with philosophy.” Elif Batuman speaks about the themes in both her novels and the real-life inspiration behind her second novel, Either/Or (Penguin Press, 2022), in this conversation with author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro filmed at Pioneer Works in New York City.
In this 2014 interview, Celeste Ng talks with Amazon senior editor Chris Schluep about becoming a mother while writing her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You (Penguin Press, 2014), elements of story inspiration, and the setting of her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (Penguin Press, 2017). Ng is one of the honorees for the 2023 Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award.
“A lot of this book was me figuring out, how do you hold on to hope when it feels like the world is falling apart?” In this Late Night With Seth Meyers interview, Celeste Ng talks about the process of writing her latest novel, Our Missing Hearts (Penguin Press, 2022). A profile of Ng by Renée H. Shea is featured in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“When I write, I feel much larger than the limits of my body,” says Ocean Vuong, author of Time Is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022), in this interview with his Danish translator Caspar Eric at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. “There is a mystery you tap into that is much bigger.”
