Archive for the ‘Editor and Author’ Category

Paul Murray is the author, most recently, of Skippy Dies, due in paperback later this month. He spoke by telephone with his editor, Faber and Faber publisher Mitzi Angel, about his next novel, reading Proust, and what stops boys from putting dental floss up their noses.

Mitzi Angel: So I heard the big news about David Cameron’s holiday reading.

Paul Murray: Yes, my agent texted me at seven in the morning last week to say she’d heard David Cameron had brought Skippy Dies on holiday. The Daily Mail had the headline CAMERON BRINGS DARK TALE OF DRUGS AND PORN ON HOLIDAY, which was cool.

Angel: A Dark Tale of Drugs and Porn! Maybe that’s how we should have described the book in our catalog! Was Skippy the only book he took on holiday with him?

Murray: He took Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore, which sounded to me like your classic aspirational holiday read that never makes it out of the suitcase. But I don’t know how much of Skippy he read, either, because a day or two later the protests and looting broke out and he had to cut short his holiday. Though I liked to imagine him sneakily reading it under the table at COBRA meetings.

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Rahul Bhattacharya, who lives in New Delhi, is the author of Pundits from Pakistan, a book of reportage, and The Sly Company of People Who Care, a first novel to be published by FSG in May. He answers some questions about the desire to escape home, the visceral energy of Creole, and V.S Naipaul.

-Eric Chinski, Editor in Chief

Chinski: Your first book was a work of reportage on the India-Pakistan cricket rivalry. Why did you decide to turn next to writing your first novel?

Rahul Bhattacharya: I didn’t, actually. The form came afterward, at the moment of writing. What I was responding to was the impulse to get away. It’s a terribly seductive impulse: What are the consequences? In part I was getting away from writing about cricket as well. But I’m grateful to cricket-writing, without which I may not ever have had a chance to visit the Caribbean.

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In 1949 Theodor Adorno famously said that “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” How, Adorno seemed to be asking, could existing forms of artistic representation be expected to convey something so aberrant, so distant from normal human behavior? Adorno’s comment thus represents a challenge to artists who seek to present the horror of the Holocaust in general and of Auschwitz in particular: to do so, they must move beyond traditional modes of representation and create new structures and forms. (more…)

Heavenly Questions, Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s recently published sixth book of poems, is a remarkably moving and, perhaps surprisingly, exhilarating work, given that it is an elegy for the poet’s late husband, the philosopher Robert Nozick, who died in 2002. In the exchange that follows, I ask Trude to talk about some of the sources and inspirations that inform this complex and deeply beautiful book.

-Jonathan Galassi, President and Publisher of FSG
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I met with Richard Howard on a bright October morning in his apartment near Washington Square Park. He welcomed me as he always does, standing on the threshold, one foot in, one foot out, watching me walk down the corridor with a smile on his face. We kissed hello à la française. On that Saturday morning, he wore a striped shirt of subtle shades of blue and elegant black trousers. His round glasses, of which he owns an astonishing collection (same model, in a Pantone-like array of colors) were deep blue, matching the darkest of his shirt’s stripes. His socks, light blue, matched the other shade. The walls in Richard Howard’s home are lined with books, from floor to ceiling, dimming the place with an opaque silence. Behind me, as I sat on the sofa, battered editions of Cioran, Gide, Baudelaire in the original—authors whose works Richard Howard translated or taught. Roland Barthes was one of them, as well as a longtime friend.

-Marion Duvert, Editor and Associate Director of Foreign Rights

Duvert: Samuel Beckett once wrote that there was no need of a story. Roland Barthes would have probably agreed with that, and yet I think I would like to hear it—the story of you and Barthes. How did you come to meet him? Did you meet the man first, and then the work? Or the work first, and then the man? (more…)

I published Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier in 2007. Ishmael was born in Sierra Leone, and A Long Way Gone tells the story of how he was swept up in a civil war when he was only twelve years old. Editing and publishing Ishmael has been one of the joys of my time at FSG, and his book remains a perennial favorite here and on the bestseller lists. A few weeks ago, Ishmael and I sat down to brunch near his home in Brooklyn, where he’s working on a new novel.

-Sarah Crichton, Publisher of Sarah Crichton Books

Crichton: So, Ishmael, it’s been a very hectic time for you since A Long Way Gone was published three years ago, but I gather you’re finally back writing again.

Ishmael Beah: Yes, for the first two years after the book came out, it was constant movement. I spent almost no time at all in New York. I was wondering why I had an apartment because I only came to it for one or two days, and then I was gone. I was talking to students at universities around the United States, traveling and speaking as a UNICEF ambassador and as an advocate for children affected by war and for the Network of Young People Affected by War, of which I am a founding member. I have also spoken on behalf of the Human Rights Watch children’s rights advisory committee, the UN office for Children and Armed Conflict . . . all with the aim of creating the political will needed to strengthen mechanisms and support to end the use of children in war and provide assistance to those children and youth affected by war.

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One of the most anticipated new books around the FSG offices (and out in the real world, I daresay) is Jeffrey Eugenides’ follow-up to Middlesex. That 2003 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was later selected for Oprah’s Book Club, has sold more than 2 million copies and is on many readers’ lists of their favorite contemporary novels. We caught up (virtually) with Jeff in his studio in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is rounding the turn on his new novel.

—Jonathan Galassi, President and Publisher of FSG

Galassi: Please tell us everything you can about your new book, starting with the title.

Jeffrey Eugenides: I hate to begin by withholding information, but I’d rather not divulge the title of the new book at the moment. I remember when my wife was pregnant and we were trying out different names for the baby. Anytime we told someone a prospective name, they would find something wrong with it. It rhymed with something not-nice. It was just begging to be deformed into a schoolyard epithet. The result was that we never named our child and refer to her now only by her SS#. So I’m not going to make that mistake again and tell you the title of my book.

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