Tim Finch sat down recently with his editor, Ileene Smith, to discuss flammable prose, meta-fiction, and Orwellian influences. The House of Journalists will be published on September 3rd. Ileene Smith: The House of Journalists is my first debut novel at FSG, which is exciting, having come of age reading fiction published by this house. . . . I remember reading your manuscript as a new arrival on 18th Street, and being swept up into your imagined world of exiled writers re-making their lives in a London townhouse. . . . I was amused when Gary Shteyngart called your prose “flammable.” Were you? Tim Finch: I was going for a high-octane style. I wanted the prose to fizz and crackle. . . . He may also have been alluding to the unstable elements in the novel that make the reader uneasy. Ileene Smith: Like surveillance of the fellows of the House of Journalists?

Poet Ange Mlinko has been praised by The New Yorker for writing “intoxicating, cerebral poems [that] display a unique sense of humor and mystery.” She recently caught up with FSG’s Christopher Richards to discuss storytelling, advice for young poets, and just why aging for a poet is like tuberculosis for Keats. Her new collection, Marvelous Things Overheard, is now available.   Christopher Richards: Marvelous Things Overheard feels like a journey through worlds real and unreal. How do you think migration informed these poems? I'm thinking particularly of your background as the child of immigrant parents, and your time living abroad in places like Morocco and Beirut. Ange Mlinko: What I'm really after is—to borrow Guy Davenport's phrase—a geography of the imagination. It's almost a reaction against all this migration—I'm compelled to subsume my autobiography (my parents' immigration to Brazil, then the U.S., after WWII; my travels abroad) within structures. Baudelaire called the poets our lighthouses, mapping this geography for us. Now, I know many modern poets have an allergy to classical references. But these aren't merely references. They're knowledge. For one thing, they provide an account for our relationship with the elemental world. For another, they give depth and resonance to our conception of time. You can't read the works of the past—Keats, Shakespeare et al.—without this knowledge. And if you can't imagine the past, if you have no entree to it, your imagination withers. And your pride groweth.

Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know tells the story of a friendship—and the betrayal of that friendship—set against the backdrop of economic crisis and the war in Afghanistan. Editor Eric Chinski talked with Rahman recently about his debut novel, the power fiction has to explore human psychology, Rahman’s use of epigraphs, and the crucial role that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem plays in the narrative.

“Human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast, and are up against a force majeure. Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one mood, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting.” —Isak Dinesen, “The Monkey” Poet-priest Spencer Reece’s long-awaited second collection, The Road to Emmaus, fittingly opens with this epigraph from Isak Dinesen. Reece’s disarmingly straightforward, vulnerable narrative poems are haunted by loss and charged with the effort to preserve the ephemeral, the fleeting. But, still, he acknowledges, “The Gospel of John was right:/ the world holds so much life./ There are not enough books to record it all.”

In April 2014, art director Charlotte Strick and typographer Jude Landry gave FSG’s Bernard Malamud library a sharp makeover on the occasion of Malamud’s centenary. Here we reveal the new, soon-to-be-classic covers for the first time, and Charlotte and Jude discuss the ins and outs of giving a new look to a true icon of twentieth-century American literature. Sean McDonald: What’s it like to be assigned a project like redesigning the entire oeuvre of a great American writer, one who’s having his 100th birthday this month, who’s going into the Library of America as we speak? What’s your first step?

Bulletproof Vest, Maria Venegas' debut memoir, tells the haunting story of a daughter’s struggle to confront her father's turbulent—and often violent—legacy. Editor Eric Chinski recently spoke with Venegas about the difficulty of writing about her father, the fine line between fiction and nonfiction, and the influence that corridos—elegiac Mexican folk songs—have on her writing.

One of the great pleasures of seeing The Southern Reach Trilogy in print has been the ingenuity and sophistication of the foreign language editions. Among the absolute best of the many versions are Destino’s covers for the Spanish editions. Destino commissioned artist and designer Pablo Delcán to create these covers, which capture the surreal vibe of the novels as well as the theme of transformation running through the narrative. I caught up with Delcán via email to ask him about how he created these striking images, and to share with readers some early versions. You can experience more of his amazing work at his website. Spanish readers can also check out the Destino Southern Reach webpage.

Most of what we’ve heard about Werner Herzog is untrue. The sheer number of false rumors and downright lies disseminated about the man and his films is truly astonishing. Yet Herzog’s body of work is one of the most important in postwar European cinema. This conversation is excerpted from Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, Paul Cronin’s volume of dialogues that provides a forum for Herzog’s fascinating views on the things, ideas, and people that have preoccupied him for so many years. This revised edition of Herzog on Herzog features new interviews discussing Herzog’s films, as well as additional text from Herzog, his collaborator Herbert Golder, physicist Lawrence Krauss, and filmmaker Harmony Korine.

The thirty-three Chilean miners buried in the Copiapó mine disaster were rescued four years ago this month. When they were still underground, the miners agreed that should they survive, they would only tell their story together, once, to one person. Novelist and Pulitzer Prize–winning...

FSG Originals released all three volumes Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy in 2014—Annihilation in February, Authority in May, and Acceptance in September—in acclaimed paperback original editions. Now the imprint has unveiled plans for their first hardcover publication: a...

Nearly fifteen years after her debut essay collection, My Misspent Youth, unforgettably captured the anxieties, aspirations, and hypocrisies of a generation, Meghan Daum returns to the personal essay with a masterful collection of previously unpublished work, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. In these insightful and provocative new essays, Daum pushes back against false sentimentality and manufactured emotion in American life. Here, she talks about the new book, womanhood, and being mercilessly honest in her writing.

Evan Osnos has been reporting on China for the past five years for The New Yorker and last month, his book, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His...

On October 17, 2014, Marilynne Robinson and the staff of The Nation had a conversation about writing, Calvinism, and her work, including her new novel, Lila. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation that appeared in the January 26,...

On November 16th, 2014 the seminal performance artist Marina Abramović and Hans Ulrich Obrist, one of the world’s most influential critics and curators, sat down at McNally Jackson Books to celebrate the publication of Obrist’s book, Ways of Curating. They...

After two acclaimed story collections, Laura van den Berg brings us her debut novel, Find Me—an "unforgettable . . . unique . . . glorious" (TimeOut New York) tale of a young woman struggling to find her place in a world that...

In his latest book, Love and Lies, Clancy Martin argues that love requires deception and self-deception. He uses philosophy, literature, and his own life to argue the case. I am his wife, and I wanted to ask him the difficult, scary questions—like what...

Following the recent publication of The Sellout, which has been called “among the most important and difficult American novels written in the twenty-first century,” we asked Paul Beatty to sit down with his editor, Colin Dickerman, and discuss his explosive follow-up to

In The Road Home, Ethan Nichtern, a senior teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, investigates the journey each of us takes to find where we belong. He reveals how our individual quests for self-awareness ripple forward into relationships, communities, and society at large....

The poet Ali Ahmed Said, better known by his pen name, Adonis, was born in a mountain village of a few hundred people in Northwestern Syria in 1930. His father was a farmer, and his mother, who died in 2013 at the age of...

From the title alone, Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel, The Making of Zombie Wars, suggests that the author is up to something new and different. And while it’s not exactly what you’d call a traditional “zombie novel,” Hemon does admit that it could be...