The need to tell stories, to create narratives, grows from the weird essence of the human condition: we are conscious, and inextricable from consciousness is the awareness that we are going to die. This knowledge makes simply living kind of a crazy act. Plus, life is chaotic, and most of what happens during our short time alive just happens to us. Most of what happens occurs by chance or through the will of some outside entity; occasionally we are able to exert power, but usually with compromise and adjustment. So we narrate our lives as we live them, making sense of the chaos by organizing our experiences. Forming our lives into plot, we can pick out certain patterns and see some cause and effect. We learn to navigate the chaos, sometimes, little by little. We believe we are moving forward. There are seven billion of us walking around with our stories unfolding inside our heads. We have an unspoken -- generally unconscious -- understanding of this fact. We tend to cluster within cultures where our narratives take similar forms. There is, though, still the problem of language. Much of the frustration of being human arises from the different experiences we have of words and their meanings, even when we speak the same tongue.

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.

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?

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 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?

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.

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 Ben Schrank Writing a novel should be fun. At the beginning, meander. Don’t be afraid to play around. Get lost. Fall down. Get dirty. The stakes aren’t high because whatever is written will be tossed, ideally without fret or regret. When I began to write Love Is a Canoe I thought I wanted to write about a girl who gets advice from her grandfather while paddling around in a canoe. I meandered for over a year before that girl turned into a boy. I wrote additional narratives that wandered far afield of the novel I would eventually complete, built complex lives at a country inn and indulged in pages of imagery and then, when I found characters I believed in (a senior publishing executive who had disappeared into her persona, an unhappy young married couple, a writer who wrote a popular book of advice on marriage) I wound their stories together. But on the way there, Peter Herman, the character who wrote the book within my book, Marriage is a Canoe, officiated at marriages and then got horribly drunk at them. He was attacked in his house by an unhappy married couple. He started work on a novel. I had a wild time at that wedding, was shocked at the violence an unhappy couple can inflict, and I plotted and wrote a lot of Peter Herman’s dirty, indulgent novel. Then I tossed it all. Most, if not all, writers work through several drafts. The concept of the writer writing and then throwing material away is not new. But they never say they liked doing it. Julian Barnes says of first drafts in an interview with the Paris Review: “The pleasure of the first draft lies in deceiving yourself that it is quite close to the real thing. The pleasure of the subsequent drafts lies partly in realizing that you haven’t been gulled by the first draft.”
 Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan tells us, in an interview with CNN, that when she writes a novel, it may go through 50 or 60 drafts. Egan says: "The key is struggling a lot.”

(Steps In Reverse Order) by Matthew Quick Step 5 - You are going to need a lot of people to purchase your novel—and I do mean a lot! Like, more than you can even imagine. Yes, your father will buy copies for all of his business associates; your mother will tell (in great detail) every single person who comes within a twenty-foot radius all there is to know about you and your work; you will even be contacted by the caretakers of your late grandfather, and they will say he proudly pitched your novel to every doctor and nurse he saw until his last dying breath; your siblings and friends will do everything they can to support you, making signed copies of your movie tie-in edition the standard go-to birthday and holiday gift; but all of this will never be enough—even if your family is enormous and you have impossibly generous friends. You will need complete strangers to buy your work, to fall in love with your words and encourage others to do the same. Sometimes these strangers will write beautiful e-mails that make you ache and believe that maybe you really are on your way, but mostly these strangers will never ever contact you, as you pretend you’re not obsessively checking Amazon numbers and Goodreads reviews. You will have woefully minimal control over the millions of potential book-buyers in the world, even if you tour around; give many TV, radio, and print interviews; speak often; and maintain a healthy web presence. (Even if you miss spending your birthday with your wife for the first time since 1993 so that you can promote the film and MTI.) It’s like trying to control the weather with your hopes and dreams.

by Iza Wojciechowska and Rosalind Harvey “Some people say I’m precocious,” begins Juan Pablo Villalobos’ super-slim, super-fast first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole. What follows is a beautiful, heart-breaking story told from the perspective of Tochtli, a precocious kid whose dad is a major Mexican drug lord. Tochtli has seen people murdered and has found his father’s gun room, but those things aren’t as important to him as collecting hats and acquiring a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. Slowly, though, he begins to reconcile the world he understands with the world as it really is. Written in Spanish and translated by Rosalind Harvey, the book is an incredible debut—and a wonderful work of translation. This is Rosalind’s first solo translation, having previously worked with Anne McLean to co-translate Oblivion by Hector Abad (FSG, 2012) and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas (New Directions, 2012). I talked with Rosalind about Tochtli’s advanced vocabulary, her advice for young translators, and about the potential for more mainstream Estonian chick lit, Indonesian thrillers, and Bolivian erotica. Down the Rabbit Hole is the first book you have translated solo. How was it different than working with a co-translator? Do you have a preference for translating alone or with a partner? The main difference is the sense of responsibility—working with another translator, especially one of Anne [McLean]’s stature, you always feel a little more relaxed as you know someone else’s eyes will be checking over your work (as well as the editor’s, of course). And the books I did with Anne were by authors who had either specifically requested her or that she had ‘discovered,’ so while I loved working on them I knew I never fully owned them, so to speak. So the fact that I read Juan Pablo’s book shortly after it came out in Spanish, then took it to And Other Stories to persuade them of its worth, then translated it all working quite closely with Juan Pablo, meant I felt a huge responsibility to get it right and to do his work justice in English. Which is scary, but the flipside of that is that you get to enjoy the end result even more than with a co-translation! I enjoy both ways of working though, and am currently doing another co-translation with Frank Wynne, and further down the line I would love to give a leg up to a less experienced translator by co-translating with them, as that’s what helped to get me where I am today.

Earlier this month, FSG published two books on twentieth-century American political figures: William H. Chafe’s Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal and Joseph Crespino’s Strom Thurmond’s America. Neither one is a straightforward biography. Bill and Hillary, which tracks the Clintons’ lives but is focused on the dynamic of their relationship, almost resists classification. Meanwhile, Strom Thurmond’s America is a political biography that out of necessity highlights its subject’s greatest personal failure. We asked the authors to read each other’s book and then discuss, over email, the art of biography. Joe Crespino: One of the things that struck me in reading your book, Bill, was the challenge of writing about people who are so articulate and skilled about shaping their own personal and political narratives. And it’s not only that the Clintons are articulate; they are baby boomers who came of age in a culture of self-exploration and therapeutic analysis. Bill Clinton’s explanations of his own actions and motivations are often self-serving and full of rationalizations, but they are never uninteresting, and in many cases, hold genuine insights. Bill Chafe: Both Bill and Hillary were very self-conscious. They thought a lot about their choices in life. And, of course, both wrote memoirs. Bill, in particular, devotes the first sixty pages or so of his book My Life to his insight into his “parallel lives,” the “secrets” that underlay so much of his troubled journey. He goes to great lengths to get us to accept his rationalizations. But that generates suspicion. What has he not told us? And how does someone writing a biography get at the other side? Both Bill and Hillary—Bill especially—rarely shared the most personal and important sides of their lives. Hillary spoke of growing up in a household that was like “Life with Father,” even though her father, in reality, was a very difficult figure. And through all the years of trauma Bill experienced with a stepfather who was both alcoholic and abusive, he never told his closest friends anything about what he was going through. At Georgetown, he went steady for three years with a woman named Denise Hyland, and in his memoir talks constantly about how they sat on the steps of the Capitol talking all night long about their past and what they planned to do in the future. He even brought her home to meet his folks. But at no point did he ever mention to her the most central reality of his childhood, or how he had to physically intervene to stop his father from beating his mother.

This week, Hill and Wang, an imprint of FSG specializing in books on American history, published Brown historian Robert O. Self’s All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s. Self sees the civil rights, gay rights, feminist, and antiwar movements, as well as evangelical Christianity and neoliberal economics, as threads in a single grand narrative. Rethinking the past fifty years of American political life, he is the first to argue that competing ideas of the family fractured liberalism and paved the way for the rise of the conservative right. All in the Family has been seven years in the making. We asked Self to write about the process, from the first spark of inspiration to the submission of the final draft. What follows is a year by year account of how a historian conceptualizes, researches, and writes a book. Year 1 Los Angeles. I want to write a book about this amazing city, where I find myself in 2005 with a fellowship at the Huntington Library, near Pasadena. My first book was about race in postwar Oakland, and my new idea seems simple enough: what would the urban crisis of the 1960s look like in one city—a city that famously exploded in the 1965 Watts riot—if I paid as much attention to gender as to race?

by Iza Wojciechowska Whether or not you’ve known it, or whether or not you’ve wanted to, you’ve heard the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. You’ve certainly heard him on the radio or on CD if you listen to even a bit of classical music; but if you steer clear, you’ve still heard him. You’ve seen a commercial for American Express or iTunes, or you’ve heard old Nokia ringtones, or you’ve simply been around music during Christmas. Bach, arguably more than any other composer, is ubiquitous, even now, more than 250 years after his compositions were written. But how did he get that way? One answer is: technology. Paul Elie, a former editor at FSG and a creative writing professor (mine, in fact), has written an astounding book that traces the evolution of Bach’s music through the evolution of technology. From the creation of wax cylinder recordings, through LPs, CDs and MP3s, each stage in technology’s progress coincided with a major breakthrough for Bach’s music. In Reinventing Bach, Elie presents this history, interweaving the story of Bach with those of the musicians who played his music, as well as with his own.

Lisa Zeidner, the author of Love Bomb, directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Camden, where Jay McKeen is a student. Jay retired as Police Chief of Hamilton Township, NJ, after service as a detective and Detective Bureau Commander, Operations Commander, and member of Tactical Containment and Underwater Search and Rescue Teams. He provided technical advice to the author. McKeen: First, thanks for putting up with a cop in your classes over the years. Zeidner: No, thank you. No student I've ever taught has seen more dead bodies. Plus it was useful to have you show up armed to workshops when things got testy. McKeen: I'm looking forward to giving you the third degree for a change. You comfortable? Some water? Loosen the handcuffs? Here's a softball, so you don't invoke the 5th. The initial picture of the domestic terrorist in wedding gown, painted boots, clown socks and gas mask startles and sticks—was that image the genesis of Love Bomb?

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, whose debut book of poetry, The Ground, published this week, recently sat down with fellow FSG poet Lawrence Joseph. We're happy to share with you their remarkable discussion on the craft, translation, mythmaking, and--of course--Phillips' stunning new work. Lawrence Joseph: First of all, I want to say how much I like this book. In fact, I think it’s a masterpiece. Why the title The Ground?