Marilynne Robinson’s mythical world of Gilead, Iowa—the setting of her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, and now Jack—and its beloved characters have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions, and the wonders of a...

We are excited to announce Christopher Skaife's tour dates to support his highly anticipated book, The Ravenmaster, which hits shelves October 2, 2018. His book brings us the first behind-the-scenes account of life as a Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London, keeping...

We’re excited to announce John Darnielle’s tour dates to support his highly anticipated second novel, Universal Harvester, which hits shelves February 7, 2017. The Mountain Goats’ front man and author of Wolf in White Van (a New York Times bestseller and a...

Authors in Conversation A heartfelt introduction by Björk is a hard act to follow. But when Sjón and Hari Kunzru took the stage at Scandinavia House, The Nordic Center in America, they pulled out all the stops: David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, and the relationship between punk rock and surrealism; the moment the great god Pan stepped into our world at the beginning of the 21st century (not to mention Poseidon); the enviable lives of the "hidden people" of Iceland, who look just like us except they only have one nostril; the joy of the trickster; the value in translation; and, most pressingly, the danger of the furry trout ("The furry trout looks exactly like a normal trout, but it’s got fur.") Which is a long way of saying, read on, we dare you. Hari: Sjón is a pen name. I read in various places that it means vision or sight. Is that a family name? Sjón: Sjón is the name that I took when I was fifteen. I published my first book the summer I turned sixteen. I had discovered Icelandic modernist poetry the winter before. Even though I had seen Modernist surrealist poetry in translation before, it was when I saw it written in Icelandic and written by Icelanders that I realized that you were actually allowed to do those amazing things with words, in Icelandic.

Scandinavia House, The Nordic Center in America, 2013 Dear friends, I’d like to introduce a dear friend of mine, Sjón. I met him first when I was sixteen. With others he had started the first and only surrealist movement in Iceland, a group of six or so members called Medúsa. I was in a punk band at the time. Medúsa wrote poetry, did scandalous food performances around the city, ran a gallery (which was actually kind of a shed), had exhibitions of paintings, drawings, and sculpture, and played music. They were all around twenty years old, which, at that age, was a lot older than me. I guess I became sort of the only female unofficial member.

Attention English majors and desultory graduate students: your time has come. Our infrequent literary trivia night returns to McNally Jackson for a night of wine, revelry, and rhetoric.

Warm up with wine and the humiliation of your literary peers at the first "Nerd Jeopardy!" of 2012. As always, three teams of three will compete for glory and prizes in a very familiar game show setting. Therein we'll test everyone's knowledge of literature...

John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay collection Pulphead ranges across America, from Christian rock festivals to Axl Rose, from unheralded blues musicians to the WB show "One Tree Hill." (TIME's Lev Grossman calls Sullivan the next Tom Wolfe: "JJS, as I have come to think of him, may be the best essayist of his generation.") Sullivan's book tour is taking him across the United States, during which he's posting photos on Tumblr. A few highlights:

Nerd Jeopardy returns to the McNally Jackson basement to test your bookish acumen and ability to phrase answers in the form of a question. Wine will be served. This may help or hinder your chances. Q. What is Nerd Jeopardy? A. Glad you asked. Much...

The last Nerd Jeopardy went so well, we decided to bring it back for the annual Lit Crawl. It's essentially a bar crawl with literary events added on top. As such, there will be a few key...

We'd like to invite our New York friends to the third round of our semi-frequent literary trivia night. If you've ever wanted to scrap the "Jeopardy!" game show's categories and replace them with questions about Proust, the New Yorker, and Jennifer Egan, this...

At BookExpo America, the annual conference for booksellers, librarians and publishers, novelist Jeffrey Eugenides previewed The Marriage Plot, his much anticipated follow-up to Middlesex. (Astute Work in Progress readers may remember his conversation with editor Jonathan Galassi from our debut issue.)The author shared the stage with Mindy Kaling, Diane Keaton, and Charlaine Harris.

The last week of April means two things in New York: inclement weather and the wonderful PEN World Voices Festival. There's an entire week of diverse programming with celebrated authors from all corners of the globe, but the audience favorite would have to be the Moth storytelling night. This year Jonathan Franzen shared an autobiographical anecdote about the dangers of using your life in your writing:

We invite you to join our second national teleforum, this time with John D. Kasarda, co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next. The live event takes place Friday, April 15th, at 2:00PM EST / 11:00AM PST; participation is free. As you may remember from our Justice teleforum in November, this is a new format for authors and readers to dive deeper into the book. Unlike a webinar, you don't have to be tied to a computer to join—a phone is all you need. Pico Iyer in Time recently called Kasarda's aerotropolis one of "10 ideas that will change the world." So, what is the aerotropolis? In the 20th century, airports were built outside of cities, and roads connected one to the other. This pattern—city in the center, airport on the periphery—has shaped life across the globe. Today however, jet travel, round-the-clock workdays, overnight shipping, and global business networks have turned the pattern inside out. A new urban form, the "aerotropolis," has emerged, placing airports in the center with cities growing around them, connecting workers, suppliers, executives, and goods to the global marketplace. The aerotropolis model is re-shaping life in China and India, Seoul and Amsterdam, Dallas and Memphis, and it could be the economic answer for a city like Detroit.

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.

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.

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:

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:

I met with Richard Howard on a bright October morning in his apartment near Washington Square Park. He welcomed me as he always does, standing on the threshold, one foot in, one foot out, watching me walk down the corridor with a smile on his face. We kissed hello à la française. On that Saturday morning, he wore a striped shirt of subtle shades of blue and elegant black trousers. His round glasses, of which he owns an astonishing collection (same model, in a Pantone-like array of colors) were deep blue, matching the darkest of his shirt's stripes. His socks, light blue, matched the other shade. The walls in Richard Howard's home are lined with books, from floor to ceiling, dimming the place with an opaque silence. Behind me, as I sat on the sofa, battered editions of Cioran, Gide, Baudelaire in the original—authors whose works Richard Howard translated or taught. Roland Barthes was one of them, as well as a longtime friend. -Marion Duvert, Editor and Associate Director of Foreign Rights Duvert: Samuel Beckett once wrote that there was no need of a story. Roland Barthes would have probably agreed with that, and yet I think I would like to hear it—the story of you and Barthes. How did you come to meet him? Did you meet the man first, and then the work? Or the work first, and then the man?

Would you sacrifice one life to save five? Is it okay to steal a drug your child needs to survive? These are the questions Professor Michael J. Sandel poses in his legendary course and New York Times-bestseller Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? Sandel's class on moral philosophy is consistently the most popular at Harvard, with over 1,000 students at a time. On November 7th, we're taking his accessible approach directly to readers with a national, live, interactive format called teleforum. It's a new form of the traditional author reading, one where readers can join in from anywhere in the country. All you need to participate is a telephone. Broadnet's teleforum enables readers to interact with an author directly, answering his questions and responding with your own. Simply sign up in advance and we call you as the event begins. It's completely free. Sandel debating "The Moral Side of Murder":