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 video.
See Also:
“Great American Novelist,” TIME cover story by Lev Grossman
“Good Neighbors” and “Agreeable” in The New Yorker
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.
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 fairly common practice, the book’s reception was anything but: after enormous critical success it would go on to win the 1998 National Book Award.
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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.
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.
