Poets & Writers Theater

In this virtual event for Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina, the late Randall Kenan, author of the story collection If I Had Two Wings (Norton, 2020), and Ron Rash, author of In the Valley: Stories and a Novella Based on Serena (Doubleday, 2020), read from their books and discuss growing up in the South and their writing. Kenan’s If I Had Two Wings is longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in fiction.

“The police will tell her anyone might have missed these things, and she has no reason to feel responsible. She does, nevertheless.” From his home, Stephen King reads from the title novella of his new collection, If It Bleeds (Scribner, 2020).

Charles Dickens’s classic 1843 holiday novella, A Christmas Carol, has been adapted into a new BBC television drama. The three-part fantasy miniseries is directed by Nick Murphy, and stars Joe Alwyn as Bob Cratchit, Jason Flemyng as the Ghost of Christmas Future, Stephen Graham as Jacob Marley, Guy Pearce as Ebenezer Scrooge, Charlotte Riley as Lottie (the Ghost of Christmas Present), and Andy Serkis as the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Actor and musician Daveed Diggs explains the historical premise of Rivers Solomon’s Afro-futurist science fiction novella, The Deep (Saga Press, 2019), which is inspired by the Hugo Award–winning song of the same name written by Diggs’s rap group Clipping.

“I would read out loud and tried to check in my own breath, in my own body how the sentence was feeling and what kind of experience it was giving me as the first reader.” Marci Vogel reads from her books At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody (Howling Bird Press, 2015) and Death and Other Holidays (Melville House, 2018) and discusses her writing process both with poetry and prose in this Poetry.LA interview with Mariano Zaro.

"There are traditional distinctions and there is a cultural distinction [between genre and literary fiction], but I think at the moment it's breaking down quite a lot." China Miéville, author of the new novella, This Census-Taker (Del Rey, 2016), talks about current perspectives in contemporary literature and his own creative inspirations.

This short film is one of twenty in Christos Chrissopoulos’s Look Twenty project, which each consist of twenty photographs projected at equal intervals to create a visual narrative. Chrissopoulos’s first novella, The Parthenon Bomber (Other Press, 2017), translated from the Greek by John Cullen, is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It's a fun process—I really enjoy it, because it’s nerdy but it’s also very creative.” In this interview, Dorthe Nors talks to Ali Millar about the experience of working in collaboration with translators for her short story collection, Karate Chop, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, and her novella Minna Needs Rehearsal Space, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra, which were released together in an edition by Pushkin Press in 2015.

"What fascinates me about recovering forgotten stories is how often they are the real tipping points for much bigger cultural, defining moments." Journalist Julianne Schultz moderates a discussion about the importance of the novella as a literary form at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, Australia.