Americans love musicals. Americans invented musicals. Americans perfected musicals. But what, exactly, is a musical? In The Secret Life of the American Musical, which MORE Magazine has praised as an "engaging, insightful anatomy of a singularly American art form," Jack Viertel takes them...

Lian Hearn and Kelly Luce are perhaps not the two most obvious writers to have in conversation with one another. Lian Hearn is the pseudonym of a writer who lives in remote Australia and writes epic stories of a medieval, mythical Japan. Kelly...

Laura van den Berg, whose debut novel Find Me is now available in paperback, and Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, corresponded from across the world to talk about open space, the aftermath of catastrophe, and the end of the...

Garth Greenwell (What Belongs to You) and Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life) have both seen their novels championed (sometimes by one another) as works signalling an exciting new wave of gay literature. But they had never met in person before appearing...

Every fake should tell a story. Maybe it’s the blue chalk marks on the back of the frame, partially removed by hand, that suggest previous auction sales. Or maybe it’s the insect frass on the picture itself, evoking decades of neglect in an attic,...

The village of Saltleigh, the setting of my new novel The Crooked House, is a place that has inhabited the shadows of my imagination for a very long time—in much the same way as it has haunted the dreams of my protagonist, Esme...

It’s hard for us humans to accept truth when it’s unexpected—this is the cause of all conspiracy theories, I suspect. Look at 9/11. We have video evidence, jets flying into towers. But the truth is so audacious, so unexpected, even today some people refuse...

No matter which hat each FSGer wears in the office—art, contracts, design, editorial, foreign rights, marketing, permissions, production, publicity, sales, or otherwise—they’re often first and foremost a reader. With that in mind, we asked the staff of Farrar, Straus and Giroux to pick the best...

Karen Olsson on where fiction touches the real, where our empathy most easily attaches, and how the true-life scandal of the Iran-Contra affair revealed itself to be the perfect backdrop for her sophomore novel, All the Houses, which NPR has called "funny,...

In The Art of the Publisher, the illustrious Roberto Calasso reflects on more than half a century of distinguished literary publishing at Adelphi Edizioni in Milan. With his signature erudition and grasp of literary history, he recalls the beginnings of the house in...

Ceridwen Dovey's most recent collection of stories, Only the Animals, was published this September. Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Megan Mayhew Bergman said the collection "unflinchingly illuminates human nature, and makes clear that the rest of the natural world...

When a writer goes from writing nonfiction to writing fiction, it’s called a leap. When she goes from writing fiction to writing nonfiction, it’s not called anything. A diversion, perhaps, or an excursion, maybe an extra paycheck....

I begin with a character. As you know, there are many kinds of characters—Henry James’s peripheral but all the same essential character who observes the narrative with the same mystification and curiosity as does the reader; Joan Didion’s ironical and vaguely menacing character, sometimes...

In author Q&As, someone in the audience invariably asks, “What is your writing routine?” or “What is your process?” I find this question alarming. But even more alarming than the question are all the answers: I wake up at...

From '70s pop-soaked afternoons to naked flights on the trapeze, Stephen Jarvis shares the singularly unusual genesis of his vast, richly imagined, Dickensian debut, Death and Mr. Pickwick. Enter here for your chance to win a copy!

In Valley Fever, Katherine Taylor examines high-class small-town life among the grapes—on the vine or soaked in vodka. It's a blisteringly funny, ferociously intelligent, and deeply moving novel of self-discovery. Here she talks to us about California's Central Valley, the deadly Valley...

This year’s Book Expo America launched with a marquee conversation between Jonathan Franzen and critic Laura Miller. The two sat down in front of a packed crowd to discuss the writing of Franzen’s latest novel, Purity (coming September 1st). Their conversation ranged from the...

“A novel?” a friend emailed after reading an early review of what I’d thought was my collection of linked stories. A week later, a second review also called the book a novel. I wondered, Is my book a novel?

Living inside a book for many years it is perhaps inevitable that one loses sight of what the book is actually about. That is, if one ever really knew in the first place. Writers move stealthily, and almost always by instinct. However on completing...

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...