Susan Mitchell selected a few designers from the past she considers iconic: Paul Rand, George Salter, and W.A. Dwiggins. Here's a quick look at their work:

I sat down with three designers over coffee and muffins to talk about how they came to their jobs, and where they think the industry is headed. Susan Mitchell is Senior Vice President and Art Director at FSG; Charlotte Strick is Art Director, also at FSG; and Henry Sene Yee is Creative Director at Picador. —Ryan Chapman, Online Marketing Manager "I’m not just here to create something beautiful. Sometimes I’m here to be a plumber."

"It is difficult, as you know, to create interest in new writers." -FSG letter introducing Susan Sontag's first book, 1963 FSG has published Susan Sontag since her debut novel The Benefactor. Here are a few selections from an archive of almost fifty years of material. Note the pitch-perfect location for the Volcano Lover publication party, and the lines from the teenage Sontag's diary on the back of At the Same Time. Audio: Sontag at the Prague Writer's Festival in 2000 with Robert Stone and William Styron [audio:http://media.us.macmillan.com/video/olmk/fsg/sontag_pwf.mp3] © Prague Writers' Festival, 2000

One of the most anticipated new books around the FSG offices (and out in the real world, I daresay) is Jeffrey Eugenides' follow-up to Middlesex. That 2003 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was later selected for Oprah's Book Club, has sold more than 2 million copies and is on many readers' lists of their favorite contemporary novels. We caught up (virtually) with Jeff in his studio in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is rounding the turn on his new novel. —Jonathan Galassi, President and Publisher of FSG Galassi: Please tell us everything you can about your new book, starting with the title. Jeffrey Eugenides: I hate to begin by withholding information, but I'd rather not divulge the title of the new book at the moment. I remember when my wife was pregnant and we were trying out different names for the baby. Anytime we told someone a prospective name, they would find something wrong with it. It rhymed with something not-nice. It was just begging to be deformed into a schoolyard epithet. The result was that we never named our child and refer to her now only by her SS#. So I'm not going to make that mistake again and tell you the title of my book.

You may know Eliza Griswold from her journalism at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or The New York Times Magazine. Perhaps you've heard the buzz around her first nonfiction work The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. Griswold is also a noted poet; FSG published her collection Wideawake Field in 2007. There is an unsurprising overlap between her journalism and her verse: both reflect her itinerant nature and an engagement with other cultures. The three poems presented here are all previously unpublished.

A few months before Charming Billy's publication in December 1997, Alice McDermott recorded a brief interview about the novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux then distributed the audio - on cassette - to sales representatives and interested booksellers as to drum up interest. While this is...

I published Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier in 2007. Ishmael was born in Sierra Leone, and A Long Way Gone tells the story of how he was swept up in a civil war when he was only twelve years old. Editing and publishing Ishmael has been one of the joys of my time at FSG, and his book remains a perennial favorite here and on the bestseller lists. A few weeks ago, Ishmael and I sat down to brunch near his home in Brooklyn, where he’s working on a new novel. -Sarah Crichton, Publisher of Sarah Crichton Books Crichton: So, Ishmael, it's been a very hectic time for you since A Long Way Gone was published three years ago, but I gather you're finally back writing again. Ishmael Beah: Yes, for the first two years after the book came out, it was constant movement. I spent almost no time at all in New York. I was wondering why I had an apartment because I only came to it for one or two days, and then I was gone. I was talking to students at universities around the United States, traveling and speaking as a UNICEF ambassador and as an advocate for children affected by war and for the Network of Young People Affected by War, of which I am a founding member. I have also spoken on behalf of the Human Rights Watch children's rights advisory committee, the UN office for Children and Armed Conflict . . . all with the aim of creating the political will needed to strengthen mechanisms and support to end the use of children in war and provide assistance to those children and youth affected by war.

We are very excited about Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, his first novel since The Corrections. He recently stopped by our office to discuss the ideas behind his book, why reading is the opposite of multitasking, and how very odd it can be for authors to appear...

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of The Magician of Lublin, Lorin Stein, the editor of the Paris Review, wrote a short introduction to the FSG reissue for reviewers and booksellers. We've reprinted it here with his permission. Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–91) occupies a unique place in American literature. Although he left Poland for the United States in 1935 and lived here until his death, he never wrote a single story in English. He was the only Yiddish writer ever inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the only Yiddish writer ever to receive a Nobel Prize, yet he wrote for the American mainstream. His novels were serialized in Yiddish by the Forward, but—starting with The Magician of Lublin, published fifty years ago—all his books first appeared as English translations. Singer supervised these translations closely, even jealously. (He fired one early translator, Saul Bellow, fearing that Bellow would get the credit for Singer’s own achievement.)

If we can pair wine with food, why not novels with albums? The subtextual kinship between certain titles lends itself to some investigation. Westin Glass, trained as an architect and currently playing drums in The Thermals, curates two such pairings. Let us know what you think in the comments, and feel free to suggest other pairings. I. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and Amnesiac by Radiohead Matching up Thomas Pynchon with Radiohead is a no-brainer. It’s no secret that the Oxford boys are fans of Pynchon’s paranoiac ziggurat-novels (their online merch store, W.A.S.T.E., is named after a worldwide underground postal service in his novel The Crying of Lot 49), and I like to imagine that the mythically reclusive author appreciates Radiohead’s alienated surveillance-camera view of the world. Amnesiac and Gravity’s Rainbow are among these artists most celebrated works—dense, complex masterpieces that greater minds than mine have examined at length. They pair beautifully.

Dan Bejar is something of a musical polymath. He releases albums as the front man for Destroyer while collaborating with the New Pornographers and playing as a member of indie supergroup Swan Lake. Bejar’s music contains myriad allusions to pop songs and contemporary literature, in addition to tongue-in-cheek wordplay (“She had the best legs in a business built for kicks”). He’s also the only musician I know of with a song about a certain publishing house. —Ryan Chapman Chapman: I have to get this out of the way: Is there a story behind naming the song “Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Sea of Tears)”? Dan Bejar: Ten years ago I was thinking of making an album whose song titles were all named after established American publishing houses. I don’t know why, it was maybe based on the idea of rejection, or social failure. Also, they all sounded so archaic to me, like books themselves, and therefore pretty mysterious. I was into enclosed sets of terms back then, though I was coming out of it, which is probably why I ditched the idea. The album ended up being called Streethawk: A Seduction, and the song titles were all over place, though FS&G stuck. I now just generally call it by its parenthetical title “(Sea of Tears).” I guess ten years later I like things in their simplest, saddest terms. Still think Farrar, Straus and Giroux rolls off the tongue real pretty, though. Audio: "Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Sea of Tears)" [audio:https://fsgworkinprog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/farrar_straus_giroux.mp3] (Courtesy of Merge Records) Chapman: There are a handful of musicians who strike fans as “literary,” whatever that word means in this context. You quote Ezra Pound, Albert Camus, and others in your songs, and the settings recall Graham Greene, Roberto Bolaño, even Borges. Are there certain literary antecedents you’d like to discuss? Put another way, do you have writers you read and reread?

Chris Adrian, the author of two novels and a short-story collection, is one of our most interesting young fiction writers—he is also a practicing pediatrician, a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology, and a student at divinity school. Rivka Galchen, a novelist who also has a background in medicine, talks with Chris about his forthcoming novel, The Great Night, a magical retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set in contemporary San Francisco. In the course of their conversation, they discuss talking bagels, the cult sci-fi movie "Soylent Green," and how to write convincingly about fairies. Rivka and Chris were both recently chosen for the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list. -Eric Chinski, Editor in Chief Galchen: Who and what lives and happens in The Great Night? Adrian: The Great Night is a retelling of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in Buena Vista Park in San Francisco in the summer of 2008. Three people—two men and a woman—get lost in the park on their way to a party and have a common adventure involving fairies, a monster, and the ghosts of their recently deceased romantic relationships. Around and in between the action of this main story, Titania struggles in the aftermath of the death of her adopted son and the subsequent breakdown of her thousand-year marriage to Oberon, and a group of homeless people stage a musical production of Soylent Green (called Soylent Green!) for the benefit of the evil mayor of San Francisco.

I met with Richard Howard on a bright October morning in his apartment near Washington Square Park. He welcomed me as he always does, standing on the threshold, one foot in, one foot out, watching me walk down the corridor with a smile on his face. We kissed hello à la française. On that Saturday morning, he wore a striped shirt of subtle shades of blue and elegant black trousers. His round glasses, of which he owns an astonishing collection (same model, in a Pantone-like array of colors) were deep blue, matching the darkest of his shirt's stripes. His socks, light blue, matched the other shade. The walls in Richard Howard's home are lined with books, from floor to ceiling, dimming the place with an opaque silence. Behind me, as I sat on the sofa, battered editions of Cioran, Gide, Baudelaire in the original—authors whose works Richard Howard translated or taught. Roland Barthes was one of them, as well as a longtime friend. -Marion Duvert, Editor and Associate Director of Foreign Rights Duvert: Samuel Beckett once wrote that there was no need of a story. Roland Barthes would have probably agreed with that, and yet I think I would like to hear it—the story of you and Barthes. How did you come to meet him? Did you meet the man first, and then the work? Or the work first, and then the man?

When the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature announcement went out last week, we were thrilled they named our author Mario Varga Llosa. I reached out to two of his translators for their thoughts. Edith Grossman is an award-winning translator of Gabriel García Márquez, Julián Rios, and Álvaro Mutis, among others. Her 2003 translation of Cervantes' Don Quixote is widely acclaimed as one of the best translations from the Spanish in recent years. Natasha Wimmer is best known for her translation of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and 2666. She has also translated Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's Dirty Havana Trilogy. +   +   + Chapman: How did you first discover Mario Vargas Llosa's work? Edith Grossman: I first discovered his work in graduate school, when I was reading works of the Latin American Boom—Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, García Márquez, Rulfo, Cortázar, and so forth. Chapman: How did you come to translate his books in the United States? Grossman: I was approached by FSG to translate Death in the Andes, the first book of his I worked on. I had met him a few times before that in New York, at talks and readings.

It's a privilege to help usher in Nelson Mandela's Conversations with Myself, an international publishing event. We've selected President Barack Obama's foreword to the book as our monthly exclusive for Work in Progress readers. A preview is excerpted below. -Ryan Chapman "Like many people around the world, I came to know of Nelson Mandela from a distance, when he was imprisoned on Robben Island. To so many of us, he was more than just a man – he was a symbol of the struggle for justice, equality, and dignity in South Africa and around the globe. His sacrifice was so great that it called upon people everywhere to do what they could on behalf of human progress.

As this glimpse at the proofs of my versions of Leopardi’s Canti suggests, a translation, like an original poem, is never finished, only abandoned. And that remains true even after the book is published—I’ve already started collected "improvements" for a future printing. There’s usually a way to say what needs to be said more concisely, more pithily, more beautifully. That’s why I’ve found translation over the years to have been an incredible education in writing.

Here are just a few of the images, objects, and papers that Sam Steward left behind when he died, and which I used in reconstructing his life in Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. The collection remains largely intact, and will hopefully go on display at the Museum of Sex in New York in February 2011, with a planned exhibition time of six months. Steward's executor has not yet determined where the collection will go, but we hope that it will enter a special collections archive within the next few years. It has been a great honor to work with these materials over the past decade, and a pleasure to share some of them now with FSG readers. --Justin Spring

Daniel Swift is the author of Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot's War. [caption id="attachment_494" align="alignright" width="120" caption="Photograph © by Deborah Copaken Kogan"][/caption] On October 30th, at a press conference in London, Julian Assange—the founder of Wikileaks—announced the leak of 391,832 secret military documents about the war in Iraq. This represents, he said, “the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.” Here are tortures, newly revealed; here are awful rates of civilian deaths (perhaps 66,000)—and all presented in clipped, oddly formal, occasionally redacted fragments (here, for example, is the record of a friendly-fire incident from January 2008: “CAV REPORTS THAT SMALL ARMS FIRE ENSUED BECAUSE OF A DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN CLC AND IA. NO ENEMY INVOLVEMENT”).

[caption id="attachment_621" align="alignright" width="120" caption="Joseph Brodsky © Nancy Crampton"][/caption] We've noticed a surge of interest in Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky centered around the recent New York Times article "Venice in Winter" and the use of poetry as travel guide. The following...

With the recent spate of articles debating MFA programs and the kind of writing they produce (including Elif Batuman's "Get a Real Degree" in the London Review of Books and Chad Harbach's "MFA vs. NYC" in Slate), we asked novelist Emily Barton to share her thoughts. The following originated as advice for her undergraduate students and has been reprinted with her permission. Emily Barton is the author of Brookland and The Testament of Yves Gundron. When Should I Apply to MFA Programs?