Archive for February, 2011

Geoff Dyer is the author of But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Paris Trance, and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He lives in England.

The following essay is excerpted from Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, coming from Graywolf Press in March 2011.

Don’t read much now.
Philip Larkin, “A Study of Reading Habits”

Could I have become a symptom, or is this an entirely personal indisposition?

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Mark your calendars: Nerd Jeopardy is back for round two. If you’ve ever sought public validation for your deep knowledge of obscure literature*, your time has come.

Since we had an overflow crowd at Lolita Bar, this time we’re taking over the great Housing Works Bookstore in Soho. We’ll provide wine and beer until it runs out, then it’s a cash bar. A cash bar that will make you feel good about yourself: all proceeds fight AIDS and homelessness.

There are two ways to participate. You can form a three-person team and compete for respect (and prizes of serious cash value) against two other teams. You can also play as an audience member during the speed quiz at intermission. Either way there should be plenty of glory and humiliation. In addition to said glory, winners will receive prizes from Housing Works and BOMB Magazine. And there just may be a surprise FSG author or two in the Video Daily Doubles.
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As a special offer to Work in Progress subscribers, our friends at BOMB Magazine are offering their complete online interview with controversial French writer Tristan Garcia. This will be available only for a short time.

If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do so here; you’ll receive a link to the interview in your inbox shortly thereafter.

Garcia’s novel, Hate: A Romance, won the prestigious Prix de Flore. He has previously written a book of philosophy.

-Ryan Chapman

“To me, a novel is specifically defined as an experience—concerning morality and knowledge—that takes the shape of a story. Like any experience, it runs the risk of having imperfect results, but it must always allow us to know a little more than what we already knew, than what we have personally experimented with in our own life. It is truly a moral adventure. The experience must particularly—and this is the specific power of the novel—give us the means to escape the limits of our morality (individual, familial, national, of class, or species) to adopt that of an Other (the character) who can truly begin to exist there where our own actions end.”

-Tristan Garcia

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Last week brought the good news that Eliza Griswold’s The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam has been named a finalist in the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award For Excellence In Journalism. The winner will be announced June 7th. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this previously unseen recording of Eliza at the Russian Samovar for our FSG Reading Series.

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On February 8th, over a thousand people turned out to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the poet Elizabeth Bishop at the Cooper Union in New York. Paul Muldoon and Alice Quinn read selections from the New Yorker correspondence, and twenty poets shared their favorite Bishop poems.
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