Archive for July, 2011

We created Work in Progress to highlight, among other things, the debut fiction we’re excited about at the FSG offices. It doesn’t matter if you’ve read fiction for five or fifty years, there’s nothing quite like the thrill of discovering a new voice.

This August we’re publishing one such novel, Amy Waldman’s The Submission. It has already garnered a suite of starred pre-publication reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist. Richard Price (Lush Life, “The Wire”) writes, “Amy Waldman’s The Submission is a wrenching panoramic novel about the politics of grief in the wake of 9/11. From the aeries of municipal government and social power, to the wolf-pack cynicism of the press, to the everyday lives of the most invisible of illegal immigrants and all the families that were left behind, Waldman captures a wildly diverse city wrestling with itself in the face of a shared trauma like no other in its history.” (more…)

Misha Glouberman is the co-author of The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City. He is a is a performer, facilitator, and artist who lives in Toronto.

As told to Sheila Heti.

I taught a class on happiness to my friends, and one thing that came up was that the topic was seen as sort of trivial. I found that really weird. It was seen as some sort of sickness of Western consumerist individualism. Happiness seems to me the most untrivial thing to talk about or think about. I think it’s really worthy of investigation. Pretty much everything that people do, in one way or another, is done in the interest of trying to be happy. So it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to spend a bit of one’s time thinking about it. (more…)

Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria. He arrived in America in 2001 and completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology and an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. He has won the Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction, and his story “Buying Lenin” was published in The Best American Short Stories 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is a fiction editor for the American Literary Review.

When I was a child, I did not much like to read, because I was lazy and preferred to play soccer outside. I did not like to be read to either, because repetition bored me and because my parents were really good story tellers—for years my mother told me about the adventures of two little hippos (brother and sister) who we’d send around the world and get into all sorts of trouble, while my father told me stories about Bulgarian history: khans, tsars, rebels fighting the Turks. (more…)

We’d like to invite our New York friends to the third round of our semi-frequent literary trivia night. If you’ve ever wanted to scrap the “Jeopardy!” game show’s categories and replace them with questions about Proust, the New Yorker, and Jennifer Egan, this is the event for you. (You can also expect some pop culture thrown in for good measure.) And, who knows, there may be surprise appearances by notable local writers.

You can compete in a three-person team against two other teams for a chance at glory and modest prizes, or as an audience member in assorted speed rounds. One such example: “Hemingway Quote or Axe Body Spray Advertisement?”

Another advantage over the real “Jeopardy!”: we will have Terrazas wine for everyone, courtesy of Moët Hennessy. Hope to see you there.

Thursday, July 21st at 7pm
McNally Jackson in Soho
52 Prince St., NYC

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Every month we’ll roundup highlights from our Longreads page, where we’ll be posting articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) From the past thirty days:

• “The Millions Interview: David Bezmozgis” The author of The Free World and Natasha chats with Paul Morton in an extended interview
• “Recalculating” a new short story by Deborah Eisenberg, in The New York Review of Books
• “Harvard and Class” by Misha Glouberman, co-author (with Sheila Heti) of the forthcoming book The Chairs Are Where the People Go, in the Paris Review Daily
• “The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934” a short story by David Means, in The New Yorker