I was planning a novel that involved a breakout from a Chinese labor camp and had just reread The Count of Monte Cristo, looking for ideas. At Hong Kong’s Central Library, I typed the word laogai, “labor reform,” into the computer catalog. Among the...

Win copies of some of FSG's most anticipated titles of 2017! These books have been mentioned in Nylon, New York Observer, Bustle, The Huffington Post, and many more. Sign up for the FSG newsletter and enter for a chance to...

A locked-room mystery taking place at a rest home for burned-out futurists, Warren Ellis's Normal explores what happens when you spend all your time staring at the end of the world. A darkly funny book, Normal was initially published during the lead-up to...

Two Meetings and a Departure On a spring morning in 2009, Matthew Lawrence dropped the anchor of his small boat at a random spot in the middle of a blue ocean bay on the east coast of Australia, and jumped over the side. He swam...

LETTER FROM CAMBRIDGE A couple of years ago I joined one of those clubs where they teach you how to knock the shit out of other people. The first lesson is how to get the shit knocked out of yourself. The first lesson is all...

Glemmingebro, 6 July Dear Fredrik, Today it is sunny and warm, and there is no football on TV, so we plan to go to the beach, for the first time this summer. The problem is that the children don’t want to go. Once they are there,...

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...

Powerfully alive, honest, and at times deliciously satirical, The Moravian Night explores the mind and memory of an aging writer, tracking the anxieties, angers, fears, and pleasures of a life inseparable from the recent history of Central Europe. In crystalline prose, Peter Handke...

We asked the staff of Farrar, Straus and Giroux to name the best book published in 2016, pick their favorite titles—old, new, or forthcoming—that they read or reread this year, and to share which FSG books they’ll be gifting during the holidays. Readers from every...

Shortly before midnight on February 27, 2015, as Boris Nemtsov and his girlfriend were crossing the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin, a man stepped out of the darkness and shot the prominent opposition politician four times, killing him instantly. Nemtsov...

Today marks the 100th anniversary of Shirley Jackson's birth. Jackson was a writer known for the creeping menace in her stories, the way that evil slips in among ordinary people—her most famous story, "The Lottery," being an excellent illustration. To mark her centenary this...

On an unseasonably warm Saturday morning in early October, Jonathan Safran Foer sat down with New Yorker editor David Remnick for a conversation and reading from Here I Am as part of the 2016 New Yorker Festival. Despite taking place...

There is much excitement for John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester, his follow-up to the New York Times bestseller and National Book Award nominee Wolf in White Van. And that excitement has spilled over to early review copies of the book and its presentation...

Like most books, my history of tap dancing does not include any video. But YouTube abounds in tap footage, easily accessible though impermanent, coming and going as copyright restrictions are irregularly enforced. By directing attention to it, I may cause it to disappear. Nevertheless,...

In the preface to his graphic adaptation of The Lottery, Miles Hyman talks about growing up with the legacy of his famous grandmother, and the process of adapting her most famous work. Visits with my father often include a ceremony, a unique sort...

In the wake of the election, we found ourselves turning to the shelves that line our halls and looking for books that might help us understand what happened, navigate the world ahead, and perhaps find comfort. We’ve rounded up some of our picks here.

The library was pitch-dark when we arrived. We turned on the lights just long enough to arrange our things and hit the sack—separate sacks. The following morning marked the first of many spent exploring West Wind together. The boxes in dry storage represented but...

Kelly Luce and Karan Mahajan spent three years studying together at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, where they both earned MFAs. FSG recently published Luce’s debut novel, Pull Me Under, which tells the story of a Japanese-American woman who cannot...

In 2001 I was living in Charlottesville, reading poetry at the University of Virginia, a young Canadian who had never been in the southern states before. In my second week I bought a beautiful used set of Shelby Foote’s Civil War volumes. Six weeks...

Sjón—Iceland’s prolific poet, novelist, and frequent Björk collaborator—met with fellow writer Laura van den Berg in the Harvard Bookstore to discuss his miniature historical epic, Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was. The book follows queer teenager and cinephile Máni Steinn as he travels...