On a visit home last year, on a late-night walk, my mother and I were talking books. We were still getting used to the idea that I would be publishing one myself, and something about the combination of this news and a mother’s impulse...
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The Pea-Pickers is a classic Australian novel, in the sense that it remains in print seventy years after its release, but also in the sense that it is fascinating and timeless. It was written by Eve Langley in the late 1930s, but it is...
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Editor and publisher Robert Giroux worked with some of the most esteemed writers of his day, including Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, and many other giants of twentieth-century literature. In 1964, the company’s name was changed to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He was...
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I’m a little in love with the idea that a poem is an occasion for two people to share a trouble, whatever the outcome of that trouble might be. So, I would say that the listener I would want is a person with whom...
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This week’s edition of Work in Progress celebrates Women’s History Month. We asked nineteen of our authors to write about the women who influenced their writing, style, or path as an artist, and their varied responses speak to the way a person or work...
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“The Catholic School is one of the foundational works of the literature of the twenty-first century. It is a great book by a great writer. It is also a major sociological and theological meditation, which raises questions that we hope won’t be forgotten.” —Natale...
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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...
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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...
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Hideo Yokohama’s masterpiece Seventeen is set in a fictional newspaper company covering the real-life 1985 crash of a Japan Airlines jumbo jet in a mountainous region of Japan. The accident happened before I moved to Japan, but it is a major (well, infamous)...
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In the fall of 2013 I received a submission from one of the smartest, loveliest agents I know, Katherine Fausset at Curtis Brown. At first glance it seemed unlikely—a posthumous story collection from a little known writer. But then I saw her name: Lucia...
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“I’ve lived so many places it’s ridiculous . . . and because I moved so much, place is very, very important to me. I’m always looking . . . looking for home.” —Lucia Berlin, interview (2003) The first writer I ever watched at work was my...
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Just weeks before his death in late 2016, Leonard Cohen said he was ready for the end to come—he just needed a bit more time to put his last book in order. The Flame is this final work from the revered poet and...
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Philip Roth, one of the most renowned writers of our time, passed away last week at the age of 85 in Manhattan. We are extremely honored to have published some of his work. The following is an excerpt from Roth Unbound, Claudia Roth...
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Of the many resources I’ve mined in researching James Wright: A Life in Poetry, the most vivid have been recordings of Wright’s readings over the course of two decades, when he was a vital public figure in the world of American poetry. A...
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In trying to sum up the experience of having spent the last ten years editing the poetry of Marianne Moore, most recently in the New Collected Poems, I think of a recent classroom interaction I had. Toward the end of a course on...
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Two items from the poet John Ashbery’s private collections appear on the cover for The Songs We Know Best. One is a yellow card from the early 1940s that his father, Chester "Chet" Ashbery, designed to advertise goods sold by the Ashbery...
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It’s Emmanuel Carrère who stopped me from writing this article. Right at the moment when I’d planned to knuckle down and sort through the disparate ideas that had occurred to me during the four years I’d spent translating his works, Farrar, Straus and Giroux—which...
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I met Bill Knott in late 1968, or in early 1969, at William Corbett’s house, a gathering place for poets in Boston’s South End. I’d read Knott’s highly acclaimed first book, The Naomi Poems, from Big Table, in the spring of 1968. It was...
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Shirley Hazzard, who died on December 12 at the age of 85, wrote two collections of short stories, four novels, and three works of nonfiction. FSG published her last two works: in 2000, a memoir about Graham Greene, Greene on Capri, and, in...
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Though I was always a bookish child, two things happened shortly after my sixteenth birthday which fixed my course toward words and writing. The first of these was discovering that the British Poet Laureate was paid in wine. That I immediately decided this was...