Archive for October, 2011

Jeffrey Eugenides stopped by the FSG offices a couple weeks ago, in advance of his book tour for The Marriage Plot. We used the opportunity to let his Facebook fans ask a few questions, some of which are featured in the video below.

Q. In the introduction for My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead you speak of the concept of a “love story” and provide a selection of short stories in that vein. Which novels do you believe also fit the mold of a “love story,” and did they influence your writing of The Marriage Plot? (more…)

Though Train Dreams has only recently been issued in hardcover, many readers first read it in the Summer 2002 issue of The Paris Review. And what an issue: Johnson’s novella shared space with new work by Aleksandar Hemon and Rick Moody.

To mark the occasion, The University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center has generously shared some of Johnson’s notes and drafts from his archive, which is currently being processed.

Many know the Ransom Center from their acquisition of David Foster Wallace’s papers. (Or rather, that’s how I first heard of it.) I visited  this past March while in town for SXSW, and only upon entering their gleaming new facility did I realize they’ve amassed a world-class collection of writers’ papers, including Don DeLillo, Bernard Malamud, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and, most recently, J.M. Coetzee. You can lose days in their collections.

Here you’ll find fragments of various Train Dreams drafts and notes, as well as revisions of Johnson’s essay “Why I Write.” (more…)

The following essay is excerpted from the epilogue of André Aciman’s new collection Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere.  He is the author of Eight White Nights, Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, and False Papers, and is the editor of The Proust Project (all published by FSG). He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife and family in Manhattan.

I was born in Alexandria, Egypt. But I am not Egyptian. I was born into a Turkish family but I am not Turkish. I was sent to British schools in Egypt but I am not British. My family became Italian citizens and I learned to speak Italian but my mother tongue is French. For years as a child I was under the misguided notion that I was a French boy who, like everyone else I knew in Egypt, would soon be moving back to France. “Back” to France was already a paradox, since virtually no one in my immediate family was French or had ever even set foot in France. But France—and Paris—was my soul home, my imaginary home, and will remain so all my life, even if, after three days in France, I cannot wait to get out. Not a single ounce of me is French.

(more…)

Paul La Farge is the author of two novels: The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999) and Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s Magazine, Fence, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. His nonfiction appears in The Believer, Bookforum, Playboy, and Cabinet. He lives in upstate New York.

I first had the idea to make an immersive text back in the twentieth century. (I thought of it as a hypertext then, but we’ve since decided to call it an immersive text, to distinguish it from 1990s hypertext, about which see below.) I was working as a Web designer in San Francisco, which in those days was a job you could just kind of fall into. The skills you needed to make Web pages were arcane enough that most people didn’t want to learn them, but not so arcane that they were actually difficult, so I and some friends from Stanford (literature people: I’d just dropped out of their PhD program in Comp Lit) taught ourselves HTML and went into business. We rented an office in South Park, which was the epicenter of the tech industry in San Francisco. Everyone had a business plan. You couldn’t eat lunch in the park without overhearing someone’s scheme to monetize something by putting it on the Web. Once I went out to dinner with a friend, and the head of a software company offered us jobs, just because we were eating dinner in South Park and we looked kind of gangly. (Later the same guy ran off with his company’s money, so it’s just as well we turned him down.) (more…)

Nerd Jeopardy returns to the McNally Jackson basement to test your bookish acumen and ability to phrase answers in the form of a question. Wine will be served. This may help or hinder your chances.

Q. What is Nerd Jeopardy?
A. Glad you asked. Much like a certain game show, there will be a series of clues which contestants must guess to accumulate points in the hopes of winning. Unlike regular “Jeopardy!”, all of our clues concern books and pop culture, contestants play in teams of three, and everyone is encouraged to drink wine throughout.

Q. I want to compete.
A. In the form of a question, please.

Q. How do I compete?
A. Grab two friends, create a team name, and drop your name in the hat. We’ll pick three teams around 7:15pm. The winning team gets prizes, respect, and short-lived glory. If your team isn’t chosen, don’t fret. There will be audience prizes as well.

Q. Will you have Video Daily Doubles?
A. Indeed we will. With surprise cameos by an author or two.

Thursday, November 10th at 7pm
McNally Jackson in Soho
52 Prince St., NYC

Map | Facebook Details