Poets & Writers Theater

In this Late Night With Seth Meyers interview, Percival Everett talks about how Mark Twain, among others, influenced the sense of irony in his writing and how a game of tennis impacted the premise of his novel James (Doubleday, 2024), for which he won the 2024 National Book Award in fiction.

“I wanted to write something that dealt with Brexit and our relation to Europe, but in a very oblique way.” In this Waterstones interview, English author Alan Hollinghurst talks about the challenges in developing the gay, biracial protagonist in his latest novel, Our Evenings (Random House, 2024), and reflects on Britain’s changing nature across the book’s half century of time.

Watch the trailer for the television series adaptation of Charles Yu’s novel Interior Chinatown (Pantheon Books, 2020). Created by Yu, the series stars Jimmy O. Yang as Willis Wu, Ronny Chieng as Fatty Choi, and Chloe Bennet as Detective Lana Lee.

In this 192 Books event at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City, Rachel Kushner reads from her new novel, Creation Lake (Scribner, 2024), and discusses the very real spies and saboteurs who inspired her noir characters in a conversation with Hua Hsu.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, author Juliet Grames speaks about her new novel, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia (Knopf, 2024), which is set in an isolated Italian village in the 1960s.

In this Poets & Writers event, novelist Garth Greenwell reads from his new book of fiction, Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and joins frequent Poets & Writers Magazine contributor Brian Gresko for a discussion on the book’s themes of mortality and meaning-making, and what it takes to live a full life oriented toward art. A profile of Greenwell by Gresko appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this event hosted by the Royal Society of Literature, Claire Messud, author most recently of This Strange Eventful History (Norton, 2024), and Anne Michaels, author most recently of Held (Knopf, 2024), speak about the shared themes of history and memory in their new novels in a conversation with novelist Elif Shafak.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Dinaw Mengestu discusses the complex characters with sometimes uncertain motivations in his latest novel, Someone Like Us (Knopf, 2024), the nature of diasporic communities in American cities, and the mainstream expectations placed upon immigrant stories.

“I’m very interested in taking away a lot of the traditional furniture of a novel and making it a shorter experience and a more intense experience.” In this Politics and Prose Bookstore event, Kevin Barry reads from his new novel, The Heart in Winter (Doubleday, 2024), and talks about Irish labor history, his time spent with Irish communities in Montana, and his experiences writing in different forms.

In this virtual event hosted by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System in Maryland, Jiaming Tang reads from his debut novel, Cinema Love (Dutton, 2024), and discusses writing about forbidden queer love and the immigrant experiences that were crucial to his work. Tang is featured in “First Fiction 2024” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“You really have to write as though this will be it, that there won’t be another chance with this, as though paper is scarce.” For this LIVE From NYPL event, award-winning author Colm Tóibín reads from his newest novel, Long Island (Scribner, 2024), and discusses the challenges of writing about extended families in a conversation with Caoilinn Hughes.

A Gentleman in Moscow is a television adaptation of Amor Towles’s 2016 best-selling novel of the same name. The Showtime limited series follows Count Alexander Rostov, played by Ewan McGregor, who is banished to an attic hotel room after the Russian Revolution.

Watch the trailer for the television series adaptation of Liu Cixin’s acclaimed science fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu and published by Tor Books in 2014. Created by David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo and starring Jovan Adepo, Rosalind Chao, Jess Hong, and Benedict Wong, the Netflix series follows the life of an astrophysicist during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and her encounters with extraterrestrial life.

Apples Never Fall is a mystery drama television adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s 2021 novel of the same name starring Annette Bening, Alison Brie, Jake Lacy, and Sam Neill. The Peacock miniseries follows the Delaney family as their lives unravel when the matriarch of their family goes missing.

“It’s an opportunity for a character, whose story could not have been told by [Mark] Twain, to have his story told.” In this short video, Percival Everett speaks about his new novel, James (Doubleday, 2024), a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Phillip B. Williams talks about the makings of his debut novel, Ours (Viking, 2024), and how his characters led him to shape the story. For more from Williams, read his installment of our Ten Questions online series.

In this PBS NewsHour video, Kaveh Akbar speaks about writing his first novel, Martyr! (Knopf, 2024), and how pop culture as well as Persian and contemporary literature mix into the narrative in an interview with Jeffrey Brown. The novel is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this event hosted by the Free Library of Philadelphia, Kiley Reid reads from her second novel, Come and Get It (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2024), and discusses what it means to have an artistic responsibility to truth in a conversation with Niela Orr. Come and Get It is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

One Day is a television adaptation of the novel of the same name by best-selling author and screenwriter David Nicholls. Directed by Molly Manners with an adaptation led by Nicole Taylor, the Netflix limited series stars Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall as two best friends finding themselves over the course of twenty years.

Expats is a drama television series adaptation of Janice Y. K. Lee’s best-selling 2016 novel, The Expatriates. Directed by Lulu Wang and starring Sarayu Blue, Nicole Kidman, and Ji-young Yoo, the six-episode limited series follows the lives of three American women in Hong Kong and their fateful, life-changing encounter.