Poets & Writers Theater

Sophie Mackintosh reads from her debut novel, The Water Cure (Doubleday, 2019), at Waterstones bookstore and talks about being influenced by Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides, Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Dogtooth, Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, and the recent sociopolitical climate.

“Each book that you write, you swim a long way from the pier at a certain point. You just don’t know what’s going to happen.... If you keep going, you’ll figure out how to shape the thing.” Jeffrey Eugenides recalls his experience writing his first book, The Virgin Suicides (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), for the Paris Review’s “My First Time” video series. Eugenides’s first story collection, Fresh Complaint (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. 

“There is no perfect ethical status/identity that you exist in.” Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides discuss their own approaches to writing and what they've learned from their experiences at the 2016 New Yorker Festival.

Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard was well known for his fiction in his native country, but his six-volume, 3,600-page autobiography, My Struggle, has made him a literary sensation, with some calling his long form and brutal honesty ground-breaking. In this clip, author Jeffrey Eugenides interviews Knausgaard on what it was like to write without shame. "It felt like a rush, is it possible to say this? And if it is, that's freedom."

”I have a fair amount of fear when I am writing a book. You need to hate your work, but if you hate it too much it will stop you from writing," says Jeffrey Eugendies in this conversation with Jonathan Safran Foer, moderated by journalist Martin Krasnik and filmed at the Louisiana Literature Festival in 2012.

"How does reading about love affect how we fall in love today?" Jeffrey Eugenides, who wrote his third novel, The Marriage Plot, around that very question, discusses his new book, the influence of Nabokov, and the pressure of following up his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex.