In Ryan Gattis’s Safe, Ricky ‘Ghost’ Mendoza, Jr. has put his old ways behind him—he’s sober and has a good job as a DEA safecracker. But when the most important person in his life gets into serious financial trouble, Ghost is forced to...
We're pleased to present a new poem from Gjertrud Schnackenberg, "Afghan Girl.” Schnackenberg sat down with poet Susan Gillis (The Rapids, 2013) and professor Gregory Fried to discuss the process of writing the poem, the inspiration from Steve McCurry’s iconic war photograph, and the...
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Developing Stories, the new series from Work in Progress, invites authors to carry a disposable camera and document whatever compels them—a reading, a walk in the woods, a tour of the writer's hometown. As Samantha Hunt says in the first installment of Developing Stories,...
I wrote The Dharma of The Princess Bride because I wanted to address the myths and difficulties that modern people, especially those of us interested in living mindfully, face regarding relationships. I wanted to look deeply at friendship, romance, and family without having to come...
William Shawn and Roger W. Straus Jr., the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, were friends across the years, and in 1987 Roger actually hired Mr. Shawn, setting up an office for him in Union Square, after new owners of The New Yorker accomplished...
As a symbol of both excess and access, food plays a large role in shaping American life and culture. In Lindsay Hunter’s book Eat Only When You’re Hungry, a...
I dare to imagine the general public learning to write code. I do not mean that knowledge of programming should join the ranks of subjects that represent basic literacy: languages, history, philosophy, the fundamentals of science and mathematics. I mean it the other way...
English needs a word for the loneliness you feel when no one else hears what sounds to you like the loudest noise in the room. It happens when your personal receiver is set to a frequency no one else seems to be aware of;...
With more than 500 interviews and over twenty years of research, Sam Stephenson presents his newest masterpiece Gene Smith’s Sink—an extraordinary look into the life of W. Eugene Smith, a revolutionary photojournalist who both captured some of history’s most powerful images and chronicled...
The questions of where a story should go can be paralyzing, especially in the beginning, when anything is possible, and especially if you’re not the type of writer to make a plan, which I’m not. To get through this hairy time, I’m likely to...
MCDxFSG would like to thank everyone who participated in the Borne Fan Art Contest. The works we received ranged from precocious and comical to stunning and skillful, with the occasional oddment in between. As a group, they captured nearly every iteration of...
In Catherine Lacey’s The Answers, the protagonist takes a job as the “Emotional Girlfriend” of a wealthy actor in “The Girlfriend Experiment,” a project conducted by biotech researchers to find the algorithms for the...
I grew up in the untouchable slum of Elwin Peta in Kakinada. All around me was abject poverty. When you are surrounded by so much misery, you don’t see it as anything extraordinary. I remember when one of my friends in the neighborhood told...
FSG is proud to reveal the cover for our reissue of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue, a collection of three of the most beloved, revolutionary, and notorious Irish novels of the 20th century, with a new introduction by...
We donated my dad’s eyes. They were very pretty. What eyes aren’t? Somewhere, I suppose, they still are very pretty. The Eye Donation Bank sent a note thanking us for our gift, the eyes, creating an idea of a gruesome jewelry box. The Bank...
When Rimbaud was a little boy, he used to sit at the kitchen table at home in Charleville. He would sit on his chair without moving, his elbows on the table, his chin in his hands, his eyes blank, and stare out of the...
Fiction almost always gets Artificial Intelligence wrong. The AI narratives are generally Frankenstein (“It’s gone rogue!” e.g. Skynet) or Pinocchio (“I just want to be a real boy!” e.g. Commander Data), both of which are a little banal, and neither of which have much...
There were many amazing moments on my recent five-week Borne book tour—yet the opportunity to visit independent bookstores remains foregrounded in my mind. The experience was sublime on multiple levels. Each adventure begins with that marvelous instant of arrival, when you...