In Conversation | Work in Progress

FSG | Work in progress

DATE

TITLE

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04.04.19

Writing to a Single Listener

In Conversation

Writing to a Single Listener

In those days I began to see light under every bushel basket, light nearly splitting the sides of the bushel basket. Light came through the rafters of the dairy where the grackles congregated like well-taxed citizens untransfigured even by hope. Understand I was the one underneath the basket. I was...

Katie Peterson and Louise Glück In Conversation

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03.22.19

Saving Yourself from Time

In Conversation

Saving Yourself from Time

"David Means is a master of tense, distilled, quintessentially American prose...Each story by Means which I have read is unlike the others, unexpected and an unnerving delight." —Joyce Carol Oates Following the publication of his widely acclaimed, Man Booker-nominated novel Hystopia, David Means now...

David Means and Tara Westover In Conversation

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03.15.19

Borderlands

In Conversation

Borderlands

When Aida Hernandez was born in 1987 in Agua Prieta, Mexico, the nearby U.S. border was little more than a worn-down fence. Eight years later, Aida’s mother took her and her siblings to live in Douglas, Arizona. By then, the border had become one...

Aaron Bobrow-Strain and Alex Star In Conversation

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03.08.19

The Erosion of Culture

In Conversation

The Erosion of Culture

When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, the spiritual capital of Hinduism, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life...

Aatish Taseer and Karan Mahajan In Conversation

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01.31.19

In Place of Alternate Realities

In Conversation

In Place of Alternate Realities

It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is...

Rivka Galchen and Geraldine Harcourt In Conversation

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01.25.19

The Love of Fate

In Conversation

The Love of Fate

Hiking with Nietzsche is a tale of John Kaag's two philosophical journeys—one as an introspective young man of nineteen, the other seventeen years later as a husband and father. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his...

John Kaag and Mark Greif In Conversation

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01.11.19

Structural Options

In Conversation

Structural Options

Angie Kim's debut novel Miracle Creek will publish April 2019, and is about an experimental medical treatment device known as the "Miracle Submarine" that mysteriously explodes, killing two people. What follows is a thoroughly contemporary take on the courtroom drama, drawing on the...

Angie Kim and Lisa Gornick In Conversation

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12.06.18

A Tennis Odyssey

In Conversation

A Tennis Odyssey

In The Circuit, award-winning poet and Paris Review sports columnist Rowan Ricardo Phillips chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season. The annual tennis schedule is a rarity in professional sports in that it encapsulates...

Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Teju Cole In Conversation

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10.26.18

Living in the Time of Being

In Conversation

Living in the Time of Being

Spanning eras, continents, and genres, CoDex 1962—twenty years in the making—is Icelandic author Sjón's epic three-part masterpiece. Josef Löwe, the narrator, was born in 1962—the same year, the same moment, even, as Sjón. Josef’s story, however, stretches back decades in the form of...

Sjón and Laurie Anderson In Conversation

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10.19.18

Finding the Novel

In Conversation

Finding the Novel

Aden Grace Sawyer, the heroine—somehow, the word “protagonist” doesn’t do her justice—of John Wray’s fifth novel, Godsend, has a great deal in common with John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” who was, for a time, the most reviled American traitor since Lee Harvey...

John Wray and Akhil Sharma In Conversation

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10.11.18

The Ethical Challenge of Writing Violence

In Conversation

The Ethical Challenge of Writing Violence

I first came to know Jeff Jackson’s work when I encountered his powerfully original and moving debut novel, Mira Corpora, which Two Dollar Radio published in 2013. You have never read anything like this before, I would tell friends as I pressed the...

Jeff Jackson and Laura van den Berg In Conversation

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09.27.18

The Fictions We Maintain

In Conversation

The Fictions We Maintain

Certain American States is a collection of stories about ordinary people seeking—and failing to find—the extraordinary in their lives. The characters are continually coming to terms with their place in the world, and how to adapt to that place. A woman leaves her...

Catherine Lacey and Alexander Chee In Conversation

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09.20.18

A Dislocation of Reality

In Conversation

A Dislocation of Reality

Laura van den Berg’s beautiful and haunting The Third Hotel brings us to Havana, Cuba, where recent widow Clare has arrived for the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema. She was supposed to be there with her film scholar husband, Richard, but...

Laura van den Berg and Julie Buntin In Conversation

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09.07.18

Violating the Form

In Conversation

Violating the Form

In Kudos, a woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface. Rachel Cusk's unique approach to storytelling builds action through vivid, precise encounters and monologues that explore the nature of family and...

Rachel Cusk and Alexandra Schwartz In Conversation

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08.24.18

Opening Up a Life

In Conversation

Opening Up a Life

Named an NPR Best Book of the Year, Anne Fadiman’s poignant memoir The Wine Lover's Daughter examines her relationship with her father, Clifton Fadiman. Though he was a renowned literary critic, editor, and radio host, his greatest love was wine. The book explores...

Anne Fadiman and Jenny Allen In Conversation

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08.10.18

Putting the Medicine in the Applesauce

In Conversation

Putting the Medicine in the Applesauce

With her newest essay collection Look Alive Out There, Sloane Crosley brings us her trademark humor, wit, and charm. Yet there is also a new maturity to these essays: they are full of punch-packing observations and emotional insight, whether ruminating on fertility or...

Sloane Crosley and Zadie Smith In Conversation

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07.27.18

The Lingering Colonial Presence

In Conversation

The Lingering Colonial Presence

Caryl Phillips’s A View of the Empire at Sunset is a biographical novel of the life of Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, which she wrote as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica...

Caryl Phillips and Hilton Als In Conversation

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07.20.18

A Life in Letters

In Conversation

A Life in Letters

Thom Gunn has been described as “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Times Literary Supplement). Gunn was an Elizabethan poet in modern guise, though there’s nothing archaic or quaint about his poetry. His method was dispassionate...

August Kleinzahler and Clive Wilmer On Thom Gunn's Legacy

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07.13.18

Malzberg Reading Daniels Reading Malzberg

In Conversation

Malzberg Reading Daniels Reading Malzberg

In Champaign, Illinois, in the summer of 2011, in a closet in a bookstore consecrated to science fiction (the closet, that is, not the bookstore), I came upon a shelf of pocket paperbacks all attributed to one Barry N. Malzberg. I’m not sure what...

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06.29.18

Amity and Prosperity

In Conversation

Amity and Prosperity

In Amity and Prosperity, prize-winning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold draws on seven years of reporting to tell the story of the energy industry’s impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia, and one woman’s transformation from a struggling single parent...

Eliza Griswold and Alex Kotlowitz In Conversation

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Writing to a Single Listener

Saving Yourself from Time

Borderlands

The Erosion of Culture

In Place of Alternate Realities

The Love of Fate

Structural Options

A Tennis Odyssey

Living in the Time of Being

Finding the Novel

The Ethical Challenge of Writing Violence

The Fictions We Maintain

A Dislocation of Reality

Violating the Form

Opening Up a Life

Putting the Medicine in the Applesauce

The Lingering Colonial Presence

A Life in Letters

Malzberg Reading Daniels Reading Malzberg

Amity and Prosperity