Making a Narrative in the Darkness: A Conversation with Samantha Hunt
Samantha Hunt discusses her new collection, The Dark Dark, why she became a writer, and the freeing quiet of darkness.
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Posts Tagged: FSG
Band Names for Books
Spoiler alert: there are no cannibals in Mike Roberts’s new post-9/11 novel Cannibals in Love, but there’s a lot to admire. Over at FSG Originals, Will Chancellor gets granular in conversation with Roberts on the episodic nature of memory, and the ways that terrorism forces a very physical response in its victims, at the same time “trigger[ing] […]
...more“A Hologram of Self”
Kristin Dombek’s The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism is just out from FSG, and over at n+1 she writes beguilingly, with humor and aplomb, about narcissists as hollow selves who become genius-tricksters at copying and adopting the brightest parts of the selves of others. Beware! They take what they think […]
...moreMany Roads to Worship
Erik Reece, author of Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea, writes a lively review of Thomas More’s 1516 novel, Utopia, for FSG’s Work in Progress. More’s Utopians “revere religious tolerance above all else…in keeping with the sentiments of their founder, Utopos, who ‘considered it possible that God made different people believe […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Whitney Terrell
Whitney Terrell discusses war, gender, and fiction vs. reality in his new novel, The Good Lieutenant, about a female soldier in Iraq.
...moreC.E. Morgan’s Three Rs: Readers, Regionalism, and Race
“There is an extraordinary freedom to make your own intellectual choices that’s part of the reading process,” says C.E. Morgan, of her readers and her own reading process, in conversation with Lisa Lucas of the National Book Foundation. Lucas has big questions for Morgan, such as, “What is your desired relationship between the reader and […]
...moreThe Zen of Twins
Clay Byars—author of Will & I, his recently released memoir about being an identical twin—tackles big life questions and the writing process with Drew Broussard for FSG Originals. Edited by Byars’s friend John Jeremiah Sullivan, Will & I explores “the sense that I was more than myself,” as a twin, as Byars puts it, and the meta-conscious act […]
...moreUnforbidden but Still Hidden
Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips talks with his editor, Ileene Smith, about unforbidden pleasures and his new book of the same title at FSG’s Works in Progress. Phillips respectfully declines Freud’s narrow of view of the origins of desire, pleasure, and inhibition, and hopes for new illumination. He ends by saying, “So I think that […]
...moreTelling Your Own Truth
The art of storytelling is largely about choosing what is to be conveyed and—most importantly—what is to be left out. For FSG’s “Works in Progress,” Guillermo Erades, author of the just-released Back to Moscow, writes about the persistently bedeviling give-and-take of fiction of nonfiction. By comparing Hemingway’s bookend works, The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast, […]
...morePoets in Place
Poet Ange Mlinko responds to a challenge from FSG’s Works in Progress series, to “tackle a question—or invent a new one—that lies within [Rilke’s] Letters to a Young Poet.” Mlinko muses on poets and places: do writers of beautiful lines need to be in beautiful places? Her answer, not surprisingly, pivots on the power of language.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
It seems impossible to say that someone was quietly assembling a story collection over a decade and a half when they’ve been publishing each of the stories one by one over at a little place called The New Yorker. And yet, that appears to be exactly what Donald Antrim has done. Farrar Strauss and Giroux […]
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The Secret of Evil, by Roberto Bolaño
In one of the stories in Roberto Bolaño’s new collection The Secret of Evil, the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, whose arresting and beastly Jupiter and Seleme graces the American jacket of Bolaño’s 2666, is referenced by a man “present at a gathering of madmen.”
...moreFictional Pointillism
Tupelo Hassman’s debut Girlchild is an emotionally rich and complex picture of a smart girl brutalized and circumscribed by circumstances.
...more“A Small Party for Insiders”
Bottles of infused vodka were upturned last night at Russian Samovar for the return of the FSG Reading Series. With Lydia Davis and David Means slated to read, the bar on the second floor was papered with poets, writers and confederates of the publishing industry.
...moreAdventures in Russian Literature: An Upcoming Adventure
“They couldn’t figure out exactly where the book fit. Part literary criticism, part travel writing, part memoir, Batuman’s collection of seven nonfiction pieces moves from the campus of Stanford University to Uzbekistan, contemplating everything from Isaac Babel to an overweight mathematician in Florence who confides in an e-mail to Batuman: “I haven’t had sex with […]
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