Archive for September, 2010

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. (more…)

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 clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(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?

(more…)

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.

(more…)

FSG hosts a reading series at the Russian Samovar in New York, most recently with Lydia Davis and David Means. Produced by two of our assistant editors, Chantal Clarke and Mark Krotov, the readings occur at irregular intervals throughout the year. Homemade vodka is often consumed.

Here, writer and translator Lydia Davis reads new work, including a short piece that, due to its own logic, can never be completed.

(more…)

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.)

(more…)