I took a quick trip to Boston last weekend to produce our teleforum event with Harvard's Michael Sandel and his book Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? By our accounts, the experiment was successful. If you've seen his TV series, you know about Sandel's interactions with his audiences - he solicits audience members' opinions and then explores the principles of justice below the surface - and this style translated seamlessly to the teleforum format. Sandel polled the listening audience with questions about income distribution and, later, about affirmative action, then investigated people's arguments through several exchanges with individual callers. Curious to see how it went? Listen below:

As this glimpse at the proofs of my versions of Leopardi’s Canti suggests, a translation, like an original poem, is never finished, only abandoned. And that remains true even after the book is published—I’ve already started collected "improvements" for a future printing. There’s usually a way to say what needs to be said more concisely, more pithily, more beautifully. That’s why I’ve found translation over the years to have been an incredible education in writing.

Here are just a few of the images, objects, and papers that Sam Steward left behind when he died, and which I used in reconstructing his life in Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. The collection remains largely intact, and will hopefully go on display at the Museum of Sex in New York in February 2011, with a planned exhibition time of six months. Steward's executor has not yet determined where the collection will go, but we hope that it will enter a special collections archive within the next few years. It has been a great honor to work with these materials over the past decade, and a pleasure to share some of them now with FSG readers. --Justin Spring

Daniel Swift is the author of Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot's War. [caption id="attachment_494" align="alignright" width="120" caption="Photograph © by Deborah Copaken Kogan"][/caption] On October 30th, at a press conference in London, Julian Assange—the founder of Wikileaks—announced the leak of 391,832 secret military documents about the war in Iraq. This represents, he said, “the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.” Here are tortures, newly revealed; here are awful rates of civilian deaths (perhaps 66,000)—and all presented in clipped, oddly formal, occasionally redacted fragments (here, for example, is the record of a friendly-fire incident from January 2008: “CAV REPORTS THAT SMALL ARMS FIRE ENSUED BECAUSE OF A DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN CLC AND IA. NO ENEMY INVOLVEMENT”).

[caption id="attachment_621" align="alignright" width="120" caption="Joseph Brodsky © Nancy Crampton"][/caption] We've noticed a surge of interest in Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky centered around the recent New York Times article "Venice in Winter" and the use of poetry as travel guide. The following...

We are thrilled to feature New Yorker "20 Under 40" writer David Bezmozgis reading from his forthcoming novel The Free World (April, 2011). His previous book, Natasha, has become something of a favorite around the offices.

With the recent spate of articles debating MFA programs and the kind of writing they produce (including Elif Batuman's "Get a Real Degree" in the London Review of Books and Chad Harbach's "MFA vs. NYC" in Slate), we asked novelist Emily Barton to share her thoughts. The following originated as advice for her undergraduate students and has been reprinted with her permission. Emily Barton is the author of Brookland and The Testament of Yves Gundron. When Should I Apply to MFA Programs?

[caption id="attachment_605" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="© Cormac Scully"][/caption] Paul Murray is the author of the novels Skippy Dies (shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Award) and An Evening of Long Goodbyes. Simultaneously the best and the worst gift I ever received was a Batman kite my father bought me when I was seven. We had gone to the local newsagent to buy the paper; I found the kite among the shelves of low-grade newsagent-type toys—bubble mix, plastic dinosaurs, translucent guns that sparked inside when you pulled the trigger. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen: Batman in his opaque, implacable DC Comics incarnation (this was still a few years before the first Tim Burton movie) on an appropriately bat-shaped canvas.

Two of our writers contacted us about creating a video for the "It Gets Better" national campaign to educate and help struggling LGBT teenagers. Here, Justin Spring and Wendy Moffat talk about the trials Sam Steward and E. M. Forster faced in their lives, and how they rose above them.

To coincide with David Levithan's The Lover's Dictionary, he's asking readers to create their own entries in the style of the book. Here's a preview of what we mean:

Heavenly Questions, Gjertrud Schnackenberg's recently published sixth book of poems, is a remarkably moving and, perhaps surprisingly, exhilarating work, given that it is an elegy for the poet's late husband, the philosopher Robert Nozick, who died in 2002. In the exchange that follows, I ask Trude to talk about some of the sources and inspirations that inform this complex and deeply beautiful book. -Jonathan Galassi, President and Publisher of FSG

Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.” Peru's foremost writer, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, The Bad Girl, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War of the End of the World, and The Storyteller. He lives in London. This essay, making its U.S. debut, is excerpted from Touchstones: Essays on Literature, Art and Politics. There are certain naïve people who believe that a fear of flying is, or can be explained by, a fear of death. They are wrong: fear of flying is fear of flying, not of death, a fear as particular and specific as a fear of spiders, or of the void, or of cats, three common examples among the thousands that make up the panoply of human fears. Fear of flying wells up suddenly, when people not lacking in imagination and sensitivity realise that they are thirty thousand feet in the air, travelling through clouds at eight hundred miles an hour, and ask, 'What the hell am I doing here?' And begin to tremble.

On February 8th, over a thousand people turned out to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the poet Elizabeth Bishop at the Cooper Union in New York. Paul Muldoon and Alice Quinn read selections from the New Yorker correspondence, and twenty poets shared their favorite Bishop poems.

Last week brought the good news that Eliza Griswold's The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam has been named a finalist in the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award For Excellence In Journalism. The winner will be announced June 7th. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this previously unseen recording of Eliza at the Russian Samovar for our FSG Reading Series.

As a special offer to Work in Progress subscribers, our friends at BOMB Magazine are offering their complete online interview with controversial French writer Tristan Garcia. This will be available only for a short time. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do so here; you'll receive a link to the interview in your inbox shortly thereafter. Garcia's novel, Hate: A Romance, won the prestigious Prix de Flore. He has previously written a book of philosophy. -Ryan Chapman "To me, a novel is specifically defined as an experience—concerning morality and knowledge—that takes the shape of a story. Like any experience, it runs the risk of having imperfect results, but it must always allow us to know a little more than what we already knew, than what we have personally experimented with in our own life. It is truly a moral adventure. The experience must particularly—and this is the specific power of the novel—give us the means to escape the limits of our morality (individual, familial, national, of class, or species) to adopt that of an Other (the character) who can truly begin to exist there where our own actions end." -Tristan Garcia

Mark your calendars: Nerd Jeopardy is back for round two. If you've ever sought public validation for your deep knowledge of obscure literature*, your time has come. Since we had an overflow crowd at Lolita Bar, this time we’re taking over the great Housing Works Bookstore in Soho. We’ll provide wine and beer until it runs out, then it’s a cash bar. A cash bar that will make you feel good about yourself: all proceeds fight AIDS and homelessness. There are two ways to participate. You can form a three-person team and compete for respect (and prizes of serious cash value) against two other teams. You can also play as an audience member during the speed quiz at intermission. Either way there should be plenty of glory and humiliation. In addition to said glory, winners will receive prizes from Housing Works and BOMB Magazine. And there just may be a surprise FSG author or two in the Video Daily Doubles.

Geoff Dyer is the author of But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Paris Trance, and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He lives in England. The following essay is excerpted from Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, coming from Graywolf Press in March 2011. Don't read much now. Philip Larkin, "A Study of Reading Habits” Could I have become a symptom, or is this an entirely personal indisposition?

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In 1949 Theodor Adorno famously said that “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” How, Adorno seemed to be asking, could existing forms of artistic representation be expected to convey something so aberrant, so distant from normal human behavior? Adorno’s comment thus represents a challenge to artists who seek to present the horror of the Holocaust in general and of Auschwitz in particular: to do so, they must move beyond traditional modes of representation and create new structures and forms.

Rahul Bhattacharya, who lives in New Delhi, is the author of Pundits from Pakistan, a book of reportage, and The Sly Company of People Who Care, a first novel to be published by FSG in May. He answers some questions about the desire to escape home, the visceral energy of Creole, and V.S Naipaul. -Eric Chinski, Editor in Chief Chinski: Your first book was a work of reportage on the India-Pakistan cricket rivalry. Why did you decide to turn next to writing your first novel? Rahul Bhattacharya: I didn’t, actually. The form came afterward, at the moment of writing. What I was responding to was the impulse to get away. It’s a terribly seductive impulse: What are the consequences? In part I was getting away from writing about cricket as well. But I’m grateful to cricket-writing, without which I may not ever have had a chance to visit the Caribbean.