Archive for May, 2011

The last week of April means two things in New York: inclement weather and the wonderful PEN World Voices Festival. There’s an entire week of diverse programming with celebrated authors from all corners of the globe, but the audience favorite would have to be the Moth storytelling night.

This year Jonathan Franzen shared an autobiographical anecdote about the dangers of using your life in your writing: (more…)

This fall FSG will publish Parallel Stories by acclaimed Hungarian author Péter Nádas. Editor Elisabeth Sifton writes, “After his last novel, A Book of Memories, appeared in English in 1997, many critics and readers agreed with Susan Sontag’s assessment that it was the greatest novel written in postwar Europe. But Nádas was already moving past that signal achievement. And now we can see how Parallel Stories—which took eighteen years to write, Nádas has said, and appeared in Budapest in 2005—extends and deepens the scope of his fiction, both in historical terms and in the most intimate, hidden terms of body and soul. The multilevel narrative reaches back to the 1930s, thickens in the crisis seasons of 1944–45, 1956, and 1961, and thrusts forward to 1989; and at every point we experience the intense and daring ways that the men and women he so memorably creates live through or transcend, create or deny the brutalities of their strife-torn times. This is a great novel about the twentieth century and, with its dazzling formal innovations and daring candor, a postmodern novel for the twenty-first.” (more…)

The following short story is excerpted from Daniel Orozco’s debut collection Orientation and Other Stories. You can also read this on Scribd or listen to a staged reading from “This American Life.”

Daniel Orozco’s stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, as well as in publications such as Harper’s Magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, Ecotone, and StoryQuarterly. He was awarded a 2006 NEA Fellowship in fiction, and was a finalist for a 2006 National Magazine Award in fiction. A former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, he teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho.

Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That’s my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle. This is your phone. Never answer your phone. Let the Voicemail System answer it. This is your Voicemail System Manual. There are no personal phone calls allowed. We do, however, allow for emergencies. If you must make an emergency phone call, ask your supervisor first. If you can’t find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers, who sits over there. He’ll check with Clarissa Nicks, who sits over there. If you make an emergency phone call without asking, you may be let go. (more…)

This newly translated piece by Jorge Luis Borges appears in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry. Ilan Stavans, the book’s editor and the translator of “Borges and I,” stopped by the FSG offices to record the piece in Spanish and English for us:

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The other one, Borges, is to whom things happen. I walk through Buenos Aires, stop, maybe a bit mechanically, to look at the arch of an entrance way and a grillwork door; I have news from Borges by mail or when I see his name in a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson’s prose; the other shares those preferences but with a vanity that turns them into an actor’s attributes. It would be an exaggeration to affirm that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can plot his literature and that literature justifies me. It doesn’t cost me anything to confess he has achieved a few valid pages, but those pages can’t save me, perhaps because what’s good no longer belongs to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and traditions. (more…)

There has been a lot of buzz about the rise in online “longform” reading, loosely defined as any article between 2,000 and 8,000 thousand words. Tablets like the iPad, services like Instapaper, and curators like Longreads have created a perfect storm of sorts: it’s now incredibly easy to find high-caliber stories for people who want something more substantive than a blog post.

As you’d expect, there are several great articles by FSG authors, and we’ve begun sharing them on our Longreads page. Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.

A few recent highlights: Michael Cunningham on translation, John Wray on Owen Pallett, and Judith Thurman on Amanda Beecroft.