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 . . .

Jeffrey Eugenides stopped by the FSG offices a couple weeks ago, in advance of his book tour for The Marriage Plot. We used the opportunity to let his Facebook fans ask a few questions, some of which are featured in the video below. Q. In the introduction for My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead you speak of the concept of a “love story” and provide a selection of short stories in that vein. Which novels do you believe also fit the mold of a “love story,” and did they influence your writing of The Marriage Plot?

At BookExpo America, the annual conference for booksellers, librarians and publishers, novelist Jeffrey Eugenides previewed The Marriage Plot, his much anticipated follow-up to Middlesex. (Astute Work in Progress readers may remember his conversation with editor Jonathan Galassi from our debut issue.)The author shared the stage with Mindy Kaling, Diane Keaton, and Charlaine Harris.

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.