Poets & Writers Theater

“I am now at the age where my father calls me brother / when we say goodbye.” In this Voices Underground video, Joshua Bennett reads his poem “America Will Be,” which appears in his collection Owed (Penguin, 2020), for the 2021 Chester County Juneteenth Festival at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. For more from Bennett, read his essay “A Shed Full of Golden Shovels” from our Craft Capsules series.

"As a writer, I love the irresponsibility of the short story.... There's something beautifully free and single gesture about writing a short story." Tessa Hadley, author of the new novel, The Past (Harper, 2016), and whose work appears in The Penguin Book of the British Short Story (Penguin, 2015), talks about her experience writing both short stories and novels.

With an introduction by poet Naomi Shihab Nye, Carrie Fountain reads from her books Burn Lake (Penguin, 2010) and Instant Winner (Penguin, 2014) as part of the Lannan Foundation's Poetry Sundays in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Fountain and Nye will be panelists at Poets & Writers Live in Austin, Texas on January 9.

"I'm pursuing a kind of language which is just as complicated, and also as transparent, as human experience." The MacArthur Genius Grant–recipient reads from his new poetry collection, How to Be Drawn (Penguin, 2015), and speaks about his musical influences and how he continues to develop his voice.

In a talk at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth discusses her memoir Girl in a Band (Dey Street Books, 2015) with Carrie Brownstein of the band Sleater-Kinney. Brownstein's memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, is forthcoming in October from Penguin.

Phil Klay, a former U.S. Marine, reads from his debut book, Redeployment (Penguin, 2014), a collection of stories whose characters are veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book is on the longlist for the 2014 National Book Award in Fiction.

The author most recently of Gossamurmur (Penguin, 2013) reads from "Manatee/Humanity" as part of Poet-to-Poet, an educational project from the Academy of American Poets for National Poetry Month 2014.

In this video, Hamish Hamilton, the distinguished British publishing house founded in 1931 and now an imprint of Penguin, reveals archival footage of personal letters, memos, and scraps of paper that capture the humanity of prestigious authors such as George Orwell, J. D. Salinger, Albert Camus, and Jean Paul Sartre.

This book trailer is for Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge, which is being released on September 17. Otherwise, the rest of the information conveyed in the clip is up to your own imagination.  

The Penguin Press has released eight novels by Thomas Pynchon, including Gravity's Raindbow, Vineland, and Against the Day, as e-books. If that news doesn't excite you, perhaps this rockin' trailer will.

Terrance Hayes, who on Wednesday took home the National Book Award in poetry for his latest collection, Lighthead (Penguin), read one of his poems at the Jazz Poetry Concert in Pittsburgh.