Archive for January, 2012

There’s something about Etgar Keret’s short stories that works especially well online. Perhaps it’s their terseness, their easy vernacular, or their wry approach to the fundamental oddness of modern life. Also, magic goldfish.

Gary Shteyngart—novelist, Twitterer, and illiteracy advocate—reads “What, of This Goldfish, Would You Wish?” from Keret’s collection Suddenly, A Knock on The Door. Should you find yourself inspired by Keret’s words (or, for that matter, Shteyngart’s voice), I recommend Something Out of Something, our design contest with BOMB Magazine.

See Also:

“Creative Writing,” The New Yorker, Jan. 2nd, 2012

Tupelo Hassman graduated from Columbia’s MFA program. Her writing has been published in Paper Street Press, The Portland Review Literary Journal, Tantalum, We Still Like, ZYZZYVA, and by 100WordStory.org, FiveChapters.com, and Invisible City Audio Tours. Tupelo will be filming Girlchild‘s book tour for a short documentary, “Hardbound: A Novel’s Life on the Road.” Her website is www.tupelohassman.com.

Girl Scouts are inexhaustible creatures, and so it shouldn’t have surprised me to find precisely the advice I needed today in my friend Rory Dawn’s tired old copy of the Girl Scout Handbook. An entire section detailing “How to Introduce Your Friends” waved at me from the Handbook’s index, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Friend, I’d like you to meet someone.

“That’s very forward,” you might think, “we’ve only just met. I don’t even know how to pronounce your name!” And to yourself, because you are invariably polite, “What is a Tupelo?”

But we are now acquainted, via our mutual friends and hosts, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. You’ve caught me wondering where I’m meant to deposit the sword-handled toothpicks at the hors d’oeuvres table at this monthly cocktail party that is the Work in Progress. I’ve admired your wrinkle-free ease in conversation and put down my growing collection of petite plastic swords to shake your hand. We’ve shared the awkward “let’s be alone at the party together” moment that has birthed many a friendship, and in that spirit, I’d like to introduce you to Rory Dawn. (more…)

T. M. Wolf is the author of Sound, which will be published by Faber & Faber in April. He is twenty-nine, grew up on the New Jersey Shore, and he has written for a variety of music publications, particularly on hip-hop. He recently graduated from Yale Law School. You can follow him on Twitter @tom_tm_wolf.

You have a tremendous academic record and this is something of a departure from your studies. How and why did you come to write this novel?

When I was in the early stages of writing Sound (2005 to 2008), I was bouncing around a lot, basically moving from one school and one academic program to the next. I was working very hard trying to “find” something (I’m still not quite sure what) and learning a lot, but I still felt like I was missing something (again, I’m not sure exactly what). At the time—and I still think this is true—fiction seemed like a more versatile, and maybe more productive, way to explore ideas that my academic work kept kicking up but that academic methods didn’t seem flexible enough to address. These were all questions of experience, I guess: what it feels like to be human, how our minds work, how we relate to other people, what it’s like to be answer-oriented in a world that’s chaotic and doesn’t yield answers all that readily. (more…)

Warm up with wine and the humiliation of your literary peers at the first “Nerd Jeopardy!” of 2012.

As always, three teams of three will compete for glory and prizes in a very familiar game show setting. Therein we’ll test everyone’s knowledge of literature and pop culture; even audience members will have the chance to win prizes.

If you’d like to compete, bring two friends, give your team a name, and drop it in the hat at the beginning of the night. We’ll select three teams at random. Everyone else can sit back, heckle, and enjoy the wine. Competing teams may also enjoy the wine.

Hosted by Ryan Chapman

FSG’s Work in Progress presents Nerd Jeopardy
McNally Jackson | 52 Prince St, NYC
Wednesday, Jan. 18th, 7pm

Facebook Event Details (including clues from the last Nerd Jeopardy)

We post hundreds of links on @fsg_books. Here’s a look at which ones received the most clicks in the past four weeks. (Discounting our own Favorite Reads from 2011 feature, which people really, really liked.)

• “King of the Hyperpolyglots,” The Morning News
• “Why Authors Tweet,” The New York Times Book Review
• “Why Does Art Have to Be Mainstream to Be Significant? An Interview with Jonathan Galassi,” The Economist‘s Prospero Blog
• “The Most Anticipated Books of 2012,” The Millions
• “Flavorpill’s Most Anticipated Books of 2012,” Flavorpill
  
• “Concept Art from the Film Adaptation of Cloud Atlas,” io9
• “The Channeling of the Novel,” The New York Times Book Review
  

Here are a few recent additions from our Longreads page, our repository for 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:

• “Late Bloomers” by Alina Simone, in BOMB
• “In Gold We Trust” by Wells Tower, in GQ
• “Creative Writing” by Etgar Keret, in The New Yorker