I take it as a compliment when people say my writing about music makes them interested in hearing the work I have described. The comment may not always be intended as a compliment. It may well be meant to say that the words on...

There is a familiar voice narrating the audiobook of Iterating Grace—familiar, that is, if you listen to podcasts, or watch The Daily Show, or if you ever turned on your TV between 2006 and 2010. It is the voice of John Hodgman: actor,...

There's something about Etgar Keret's short stories that sound great when read aloud. Fortunately for us, a few of his notable friends have volunteered to read pieces from his latest collection, Suddenly, A Knock on the Door. You can also read Keret's story "Mystique" along with Willem Dafoe, should you so choose. "What Animal Are You?" Read by Jonathan Safran Foer "Mourner's Meal" Read by Shalom Auslander "Mystique" Read by Willem Dafoe

There's something about Etgar Keret's short stories that works especially well online. Perhaps it's their terseness, their easy vernacular, or their wry approach to the fundamental oddness of modern life. Also, magic goldfish. Gary Shteyngart—novelist, Twitterer, and illiteracy advocate—reads "What, of This Goldfish,...

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire spans just four years in New York City, but that's all Will Hermes needs to showcase the explosion of progress between rock, salsa, hip hop, dance, jazz, and classical music. To take just one example: during a seven-day stretch in 1973 you could catch a Soho loft performance by Phillip Glass, the New York Dolls at CBGBs, or a Bronx block party powered by DJ Kool Herc's homemade sound system. Hermes created a few chronological playlists, for lack of a better term, highlighting one-month spans in 1973, 1974, and 1975. From Lou Reed to Jon Gibson, Al Green to Kraftwerk, Patti Smith to Miles Davis. Enjoy.

Jeffrey Eugenides stopped by the FSG offices a couple weeks ago, in advance of his book tour for The Marriage Plot. We used the opportunity to let his Facebook fans ask a few questions, some of which are featured in the video below. Q. In the introduction for My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead you speak of the concept of a “love story” and provide a selection of short stories in that vein. Which novels do you believe also fit the mold of a “love story,” and did they influence your writing of The Marriage Plot?

This newly translated piece by Jorge Luis Borges appears in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry. Ilan Stavans, the book's editor and the translator of "Borges and I," stopped by the FSG offices to record the piece in Spanish and English for us: [audio:https://fsgworkinprog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/borges-y-yo.mp3] The other one, Borges, is to whom things happen. I walk through Buenos Aires, stop, maybe a bit mechanically, to look at the arch of an entrance way and a grillwork door; I have news from Borges by mail or when I see his name in a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson’s prose; the other shares those preferences but with a vanity that turns them into an actor’s attributes. It would be an exaggeration to affirm that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can plot his literature and that literature justifies me. It doesn’t cost me anything to confess he has achieved a few valid pages, but those pages can’t save me, perhaps because what’s good no longer belongs to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and traditions.

There's a passage in Don DeLillo's Americana where he describes walking down a busy sidewalk among a throng of New Yorkers. He captured this feeling with such perfect articulation that now I think about the sentences every time I pass through Times Square. Thanks to Broadcastr, anyone can experience this sensation in real-time. Visiting Rockefeller Center? Use the Broadcastr app to hear Joey Berglund's impressions from Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.

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

[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...

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:

It's a privilege to help usher in Nelson Mandela's Conversations with Myself, an international publishing event. We've selected President Barack Obama's foreword to the book as our monthly exclusive for Work in Progress readers. A preview is excerpted below. -Ryan Chapman "Like many people around the world, I came to know of Nelson Mandela from a distance, when he was imprisoned on Robben Island. To so many of us, he was more than just a man – he was a symbol of the struggle for justice, equality, and dignity in South Africa and around the globe. His sacrifice was so great that it called upon people everywhere to do what they could on behalf of human progress.

Dan Bejar is something of a musical polymath. He releases albums as the front man for Destroyer while collaborating with the New Pornographers and playing as a member of indie supergroup Swan Lake. Bejar’s music contains myriad allusions to pop songs and contemporary literature, in addition to tongue-in-cheek wordplay (“She had the best legs in a business built for kicks”). He’s also the only musician I know of with a song about a certain publishing house. —Ryan Chapman Chapman: I have to get this out of the way: Is there a story behind naming the song “Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Sea of Tears)”? Dan Bejar: Ten years ago I was thinking of making an album whose song titles were all named after established American publishing houses. I don’t know why, it was maybe based on the idea of rejection, or social failure. Also, they all sounded so archaic to me, like books themselves, and therefore pretty mysterious. I was into enclosed sets of terms back then, though I was coming out of it, which is probably why I ditched the idea. The album ended up being called Streethawk: A Seduction, and the song titles were all over place, though FS&G stuck. I now just generally call it by its parenthetical title “(Sea of Tears).” I guess ten years later I like things in their simplest, saddest terms. Still think Farrar, Straus and Giroux rolls off the tongue real pretty, though. Audio: "Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Sea of Tears)" [audio:https://fsgworkinprog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/farrar_straus_giroux.mp3] (Courtesy of Merge Records) Chapman: There are a handful of musicians who strike fans as “literary,” whatever that word means in this context. You quote Ezra Pound, Albert Camus, and others in your songs, and the settings recall Graham Greene, Roberto Bolaño, even Borges. Are there certain literary antecedents you’d like to discuss? Put another way, do you have writers you read and reread?

A few months before Charming Billy's publication in December 1997, Alice McDermott recorded a brief interview about the novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux then distributed the audio - on cassette - to sales representatives and interested booksellers as to drum up interest. While this is...

"It is difficult, as you know, to create interest in new writers." -FSG letter introducing Susan Sontag's first book, 1963 FSG has published Susan Sontag since her debut novel The Benefactor. Here are a few selections from an archive of almost fifty years of material. Note the pitch-perfect location for the Volcano Lover publication party, and the lines from the teenage Sontag's diary on the back of At the Same Time. Audio: Sontag at the Prague Writer's Festival in 2000 with Robert Stone and William Styron [audio:http://media.us.macmillan.com/video/olmk/fsg/sontag_pwf.mp3] © Prague Writers' Festival, 2000