by Dennis Mahoney It’s 1990 and I’m a loser. Becoming a novelist hasn’t crossed my mind. I’m a high-school junior who’s shown some aptitude in art, and by aptitude I mean I’m better than classmates who don’t try at all. My art teacher is just happy I do the assignments instead of throwing Exact-o knives into the ceiling. I had a creative impulse throughout my early life, fueled by supportive parents, Legos, and the original Star Wars trilogy. Relatives raved about my drawings. I got a spaceship illustration printed in the local paper during grade school. And I didn’t really want to be Luke or Han. I wanted to be George Lucas and create something awesome. But I couldn’t be bothered to develop any skills. Mötley Crüe was big in my life, as were the Commodore 64 video games my friends and I swapped along our paper routes. I had bad hair, just shy of a bowl cut. Major cysts instead of zits. A soft, pale, jean-jacketed body. I’d never had a serious girlfriend because girls have standards, and because I kept thinking my luck might change, which is the best way to ensure it never, ever does.

by Rebecca Miller I started with one image: a fireman peeing on his front lawn, at the moment between night and dawn, just as the darkness began to drain from the sky. I knew his last name was Senzatimore. I had known a young man with that name—he was, in fact, the assistant editor on my last film—and the grandeur of the name bewitched me. Senzatimore means “without fear” in Italian. It has an aura of the Middle Ages, of our more primitive, real selves, when names could be wishes, or properties of being, and had not devolved to mere accidents of birth. I wanted my man to be a kind of Titan because then his fall—the fall my hunch told me was coming in the story—would be all the more meaningful. And another element came to me as I wrote Leslie Senzatimore peeing on his front lawn: a spirit creature, some mischievous, malevolent entity, which at the time I saw as a soul frozen between lives like a spat-out chunk of bread stuck between two harp strings. I saw him looking down on Leslie, and laughing.

Authors and Editors in Conversation Eric Chinski: In The Fun Parts you're returning to short stories after publishing a novel, The Ask. Do you approach writing stories and novels differently? Sam Lipsyte: Once I know what I’m writing I start to approach them differently, but in the beginning I’m just trying to get something down on the page. As I go I can start to sense whether it’s opening up and might be something longer or if a closing is already in view. Sometimes I know it’s a short story from the start but often it takes a little while. Nathanael West, who wrote rather short novels, said, “You only have time to explode.” I think of that when I write the short pieces. You are creating a new world and new language to navigate it and there will be some nice effects along the way, but you are usually after a single moment for the piece to turn on. You are putting something – characters in the case of some stories, the very mode of utterance in others – under increasing pressure. It’s the same with the novel, in some sense, but you vary the pressure, digress in a controlled way, gather in more stories to feed into a larger narrative. Eric Chinski: I don't think it quite hit me until I heard you read from The Ask a few years ago, but there's clearly a Sam Lipsyte sentence. I heard music at that reading. Your sentences are as much about rhythm and sound as character and plot. How do you think about the sentence in the broader context of a story?

Authors and Editors in Conversation Jonathan Galassi: Rebecca, lots of people are going to be asking, Where did this all come from? I mean: a fly. I mean: a Jew in 18th-century France becoming a fly here and now. We’re well beyond the bounds of realism here. Can you tell us what the first kernels of Jacob’s Folly were, and where you found them? Rebecca Miller: The first thing I wrote was in the spring of 2008. It was the moment where “reliable, true” Leslie Senzatimore, the volunteer fireman, is peeing on his front lawn as the moon sets. So all I had was this big, very good man peeing at dawn—and then I saw a creature above him, nestled in the sky—some kind of demon or sprite, a mischievous soul stuck as if between two harp strings in some sort of transmigration accident, laughing down at him. So I started with a human and a low-order divinity. This spirit/human dichotomy had been fascinating to me since I was a small child and used to stare and stare at my mother’s tiny Mexican earthenware chapel that contained a few people praying, a priest blessing them, and the devil laughing down at them all from the roof. For some reason this little object fascinated me and I would spend hours staring at the praying people, and then up at the laughing devil. The irony of the situation, the fact that the people had no idea the devil was there, and the mirth of the devil, was fascinating and a little terrifying to me, maybe because it implied that nothing was as it seemed. That little object opened me up to the void, the mystery behind the material world.

Authors and Editors in Conversation Mitzi Angel: I particularly enjoyed your portrait of Dublin in This Is the Way. It’s an inside-out portrait of a city, seen through the eyes of someone who does not feel at home there. How have your own experiences of that city influenced Anthony’s Dublin? Gavin Corbett: Funnily enough, only last Thursday afternoon I had an experience that strongly reminded me of the sense of Dublin I used to have growing up. It was one of those typically Dublin days, weather-wise – drizzly, misty, the light diffuse. I went down this canyon-like street I’d never been on before, this street with seemingly nothing in it, just high brick walls on either side. And I found myself behind a notorious former Magdalene laundry. Have you heard about these Magdalene laundries? They’ve been in the news recently. Mitzi Angel: Yes, those Church-run laundries the Irish prime minister apologised about?

by Mark S. Weiner On a winter afternoon in 2006, on my birthday, I gave away my library. The previous week, I owned so many books that I built teetering stacks of them on the floor of my study. I stored the overflow in my wife’s office, and on the shelves next to the treadmill, and downstairs, beside the television. I loved those books, each one, and I had spent countless hours in their company—some I had known for over twenty years. Just looking at them made me feel secure, as though all the supportive friends I had ever known were by my side, ready to offer me their wise advice and comfort. Then, after my wife and I crammed our ailing station wagon full of white shipping boxes, and drove to the local post office, and lifted each box to the chest-high counter, and watched an agent wheel them behind a wall, they were gone, on their way to a public library that had a use for them. Poof! The process was over surprisingly quickly.

Averill Curdy on What Brought Her to Poetry Wayward: difficult to control or predict; shortened from obsolete Middle English awayward, “turned away.”   I’ve kept a diary, more or less faithfully, for over 30 years. I’ve moved the expanding shelf of filled journals between various apartments in Seattle, and then to Texas, Missouri, Michigan, and finally to Chicago. I’ve copied favorite passages from my reading, noted the rare dream, and jotted down ideas, stray images, or lines for poems; I’ve paginated and indexed them. I mourned when my favorite notebook—an Exaclair sketchbook with 100 pages of 100-gram French paper that loved ink—was discontinued. Writing in one of these was happiness, small, but durable as the cup of coffee my husband makes for me each morning. But I never so much as glance at a single one of those diaries after writing the final words on its last page. The summer I turned 25 my mother was dying of breast cancer. Long after she died, I broke the middle joint of my thumb fielding an easy ground ball at second base during a softball game. The doctor bent my thumb backwards from the break, binding it into position so that the tendon and joint would knit themselves back together, then sent me home with some Tylenol. That night the pain reduced the little vanities and injuries, desire, and self-regard of my identity to kindling. The next day I was able to get a prescription for codeine and the cessation of that pain was an experience of delicious release from bondage. Afterwards, I was able to think of what my mother must have endured without complaint as the cancer colonized her bones and soft tissues.

by Maureen N. McLane What a strange, vital, careening book—what a book for now. Yet also, what a fascinating document of the early 20th century. A Poet in New York, “New York in a Poet,” as Lorca himself glossed it: this is clearly one of the great works of transnational modernism, a cracked Andalucían mirror held up to New York’s crazed, vibrant, and disgusting face. The best poetry is “news that stays news,” as Pound put it. This book seems to me news I can use—registering the skyscrapered canyons of the city, its savage underbelly everywhere humming with reptilian life (all those iguanas and crocodiles running around in the poems), the titanic fraudulence of Wall Street, the vomiting crowds of a Coney Island Sunday. Here’s a book that reminds us, as Sandy violently reminded us, that Manhattan is an island, that Brooklyn and Queens have extensive shorelines, that this is a fragile land engulfable by oceanic waters and estuarial overflow. This is a river- and shore-minded book. It looks for sailors; it loves the contingent arrival, the polyglot port, the lowlife bustle, the glance, the sneer. Like Whitman, Lorca is alert to the rhythms of waves and tides. In this as much as in its more obvious hailing of Whitman as camerado, Lorca is a true heir to the beautiful, at times ornery psalmodist of Mannahatta.

Authors and Editors in Conversation Alex Star: You've titled your book The Unwinding. What do you mean by that? George Packer: It's a word that a character in the book, Dean Price, once used. He was talking about the way that the economy in his part of the country — rural North Carolina, where tobacco and textiles used to be king — might revert to pre-industrial characteristics, with lots of small, local producers of food and energy taking the place of Bojangles' restaurants and long-haul trucking. As soon as he said it, the word resonated with me. But what I imagined wasn't Dean's future. I saw the present — a country where so many once-solid things were collapsing. Banks, governments, news organizations, small towns, main streets, shops, factories. You see it visibly all over the country, especially when you leave the prosperous coasts. And you find it across America in the unraveling of the fabric that connects people to one another. In short, "the unwinding" refers to the end of a deal Americans used to have with one another — a social contract.

Authors and Editors in Conversation Sean McDonald: How surreal has it been to watch your debut novel, Hemlock Grove, become a TV series? How closely does it track what you imagined when you were writing? Brian McGreevy: There has been no shortage of interesting or disconcerting moments; for instance, standing in a physical location that had previously existed exclusively in your head is a bit of a reality collapse. It is also inevitable that the actor you cast for a part will have certain insights that you can’t—even if it’s a character you’ve been thinking about for five years—because this is an intelligent, sensitive person whose sole job is to think about it, and also because someone who is a closer approximation to the character’s age, sex, and physicality by nature will have a perspective that the author can’t.

Authors and Editors in Conversation Ileene Smith: The title essay of your recently published volume—Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers—is an ingenious portrait of the artist David Salle that is taught in journalism schools. At what point did you decide to construct the piece as a series of “false starts”? Janet Malcolm: In most of what I write, it takes me a long time to find the opening that will propel the piece forward. False starts are openings that don’t go anywhere. While struggling to find the right start for my piece about David Salle, it occurred to me that the record of the struggle might form a kind of parallel to Salle’s paintings, which are a meld of images that don’t seem to go together but in some mysterious way do. So I began writing false false starts and added them to the rather large number of true ones I had already written.

Jeffrey Eugenides by John Freeman For the past fifteen years or so, whenever a novel has been published, John Freeman has been there to greet it. As a critic for over two hundred newspapers worldwide and onetime president of the NBCC, he's reviewed thousands of books and interviewed hundreds of authors. You might have thought his recent five-year stint as editor of Granta would have slowed him down some, but just weeks ago he was still finding time to sit down with the likes of Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, and Aleksandar Hemon as he rounded out the contents of How to Read a Novelist, his book of more than fifty author profiles coming from FSG Originals this October. Over the next two weeks, Work in Progress will publish an exclusive two-part preview of the book. Up first: Freeman’s conversation with FSG’s own Jeffrey Eugenides . . .

Authors and Editors in Conversation   Sean McDonald: So, 7th-century England! How did that happen? Your last novel was a distinctly 21st-century crime novel. How did you end up writing Hild? Nicola Griffith: In my early twenties I was living in Hull, a depressed (and depressing) industrialised city in East Yorkshire. For a break, for my sanity, I went north up the coast, to Whitby.

Jonathan Franzen by John Freeman Last week in Work in Progress we brought you John Freeman's conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides as the first of an exclusive two-part preview of Freeman's How to Read a Novelist, his book of more than fifty author profiles coming from FSG Originals this October. This week, we conclude that preview with Freeman's conversation with Jonathan Franzen.

or, How to Bait a Trap for Yourself by Eli Brown In Cinnamon and Gunpowder, the narrator, chef Owen Wedgwood, is kidnapped by a pirate and forced to cook for her on her ship. Despite the paucity of ingredients, his meals must delight her or she’ll kill him. Even in early drafts, I was tickled by this tension. Soon, though, I saw that in trying to hook the reader, I had set a trap for myself. What had been an interesting challenge for one of my characters had now become a daily challenge for me. How to make pie crust with half-melted lard? How to make bread without clean water or yeast? What could a dessert taste like when the only sweet handy is gritty honey? If I cheated and made the puzzle easy to solve, one of the chief dramatic pillars of the novel would crumble. I was in for a struggle.

I am often asked how I wrote Unmastered. Sometimes, I am asked how I went about getting it published. Mostly, I feel a bit stumped—almost embarrassed—by these questions, because in truth I don’t quite know how to answer them. But I like trying to answer them, because in my gropings and squintings back at the years that led up to its publication, I have started to understand a bit more about how I write.

Authors in Conversation Charles Yu: I’m re-reading Idiopathy and I’m dumbstruck by how good it is—sentence by sentence you illustrate these characters with prose that is economical and precise and delicate and acidic, and you have this impeccable sense of rhythm and pacing and sound. This is your first novel, and so my first question is this: I hate you. Okay that's not a question. How about: I hate you? Okay just kidding. How about instead of envy-hating you I give an example of why I loved this book so much. Relatively early on, Katherine and Nathan have an exchange which ends with the line: “We’re all miserable. Trick is to find a way of doing it without it being such a bloody cliché.”

The Nathaniel Rich and Robin Sloan Emails On May 7th, Robin Sloan and Nathaniel Rich sat down in front of an audience at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco to discuss the role of fiction in interpreting the future. After the event, the conversation continued online. Dear Robin, The future and the novel. Where to begin? I’m relieved at least that we’re not discussing the future of the novel—a truly tedious and overtalked subject. (My answer: the novel will be just fine, thank you very much.) Perhaps best to begin with a question, not answers. Is it, What can novelists tell us about the future? Or: Do novelists have an obligation to write about the future? Or: How can novels help us make sense of the future? We seem to be living in an era that is particularly obsessed by fantasies, and fears, about the future, but we tend to seek out scientists and technologists for our predictions, not novelists. You and I have both written fiction about the future. Are we in way over our heads? yrs, Nathaniel

by Alina Simone Dear Ms. Simone, I’m writing to you in regard to my husband Kenny who has gone through surgery. My husband is a very big fan of yours. I would like to ask if you could please send him an autographed photo. If you could I know he would be thrilled and I would be forever grateful to you. Thank You Very Much Sandy. This message, which I received about two years ago, was followed by an address in Buffalo. My husband happened to be sitting next to me when it landed in my inbox. Immediately, he pointed at my face and said, “See? All this time you’ve been whining away about how no one loves you and no one cares about your music, while secretly there are sad men in hospitals whose entire recovery hinges on just one kind word from you!” (Ok, I’m paraphrasing here.) “Um, wow,” I said, the warm glow of pride already stealing over me. “Well, it would be kind of mean-spirited of me to just send him a photo, right? I should at least send a copy of my record and maybe my new book, too.” “Totally,” Josh said. “Don’t be greedy.”

By Robert Anasi At the exact hour on February 12, 2012 that I was supposed to be ferrying the manuscript for The Last Bohemia to the FSG offices, I was puking into the toilet of my Greenpoint sublet. Dubious Chinese and sleep deprivation were to blame. After peeling my hands off the tile, I scrubbed my teeth, got dressed, and made my way to the subway. I felt like a human bruise. In March of 2011, the good news had come: FSG wanted me. I’d submitted the proposal in September and… waited. There was a catch though (isn’t there always?) – I had to deliver the manuscript in less than ten months. Ten months to write a book. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. As Kafka put it: "We are permitted to crack that whip, the will, over us with our own hand.” My whip hand had never been more ready. The contract came through in April and I started to write on a cross-country drive from SoCal to Brooklyn, typing on my laptop in the three hours a day my mother could handle the wheel (Neal and Jack we weren’t).