Archive for the ‘In Conversation’ Category

Authors and Editors in Conversation

Sean McDonald: How surreal has it been to watch your debut novel, Hemlock Grove, become a TV series? How closely does it track what you imagined when you were writing?

Brian McGreevy: There has been no shortage of interesting or disconcerting moments; for instance, standing in a physical location that had previously existed exclusively in your head is a bit of a reality collapse. It is also inevitable that the actor you cast for a part will have certain insights that you can’t—even if it’s a character you’ve been thinking about for five years—because this is an intelligent, sensitive person whose sole job is to think about it, and also because someone who is a closer approximation to the character’s age, sex, and physicality by nature will have a perspective that the author can’t. (more…)

Authors and Editors in Conversation

Alex Star: You’ve titled your book The Unwinding. What do you mean by that?

George Packer: It’s a word that a character in the book, Dean Price, once used. He was talking about the way that the economy in his part of the country — rural North Carolina, where tobacco and textiles used to be king — might revert to pre-industrial characteristics, with lots of small, local producers of food and energy taking the place of Bojangles’ restaurants and long-haul trucking. (more…)

Authors and Editors in Conversation

Mitzi Angel: I particularly enjoyed your portrait of Dublin in This Is the Way. It’s an inside-out portrait of a city, seen through the eyes of someone who does not feel at home there. How have your own experiences of that city influenced Anthony’s Dublin?

Gavin Corbett: Funnily enough, only last Thursday afternoon I had an experience that strongly reminded me of the sense of Dublin I used to have growing up. It was one of those typically Dublin days, weather-wise – drizzly, misty, the light diffuse. I went down this canyon-like street I’d never been on before, this street with seemingly nothing in it, just high brick walls on either side. And I found myself behind a notorious former Magdalene laundry. Have you heard about these Magdalene laundries? They’ve been in the news recently.

Mitzi Angel: Yes, those Church-run laundries the Irish prime minister apologised about? (more…)

Authors and Editors in Conversation

Jonathan Galassi: Rebecca, lots of people are going to be asking, Where did this all come from? I mean: a fly. I mean: a Jew in 18th-century France becoming a fly here and now. We’re well beyond the bounds of realism here. Can you tell us what the first kernels of Jacob’s Folly were, and where you found them?

Rebecca Miller: The first thing I wrote was in the spring of 2008. It was the moment where “reliable, true” Leslie Senzatimore, the volunteer fireman, is peeing on his front lawn as the moon sets. So all I had was this big, very good man peeing at dawn—and then I saw a creature above him, nestled in the sky—some kind of demon or sprite, a mischievous soul stuck as if between two harp strings in some sort of transmigration accident, laughing down at him. So I started with a human and a low-order divinity. This spirit/human dichotomy had been fascinating to me since I was a small child and used to stare and stare at my mother’s tiny Mexican earthenware chapel that contained a few people praying, a priest blessing them, and the devil laughing down at them all from the roof. For some reason this little object fascinated me and I would spend hours staring at the praying people, and then up at the laughing devil. The irony of the situation, the fact that the people had no idea the devil was there, and the mirth of the devil, was fascinating and a little terrifying to me, maybe because it implied that nothing was as it seemed. That little object opened me up to the void, the mystery behind the material world. (more…)

Authors and Editors in Conversation

Eric Chinski: In The Fun Parts you’re returning to short stories after publishing a novel, The Ask. Do you approach writing stories and novels differently?

Sam Lipsyte: Once I know what I’m writing I start to approach them differently, but in the beginning I’m just trying to get something down on the page. As I go I can start to sense whether it’s opening up and might be something longer or if a closing is already in view. Sometimes I know it’s a short story from the start but often it takes a little while. Nathanael West, who wrote rather short novels, said, “You only have time to explode.” I think of that when I write the short pieces. You are creating a new world and new language to navigate it and there will be some nice effects along the way, but you are usually after a single moment for the piece to turn on. You are putting something – characters in the case of some stories, the very mode of utterance in others – under increasing pressure. It’s the same with the novel, in some sense, but you vary the pressure, digress in a controlled way, gather in more stories to feed into a larger narrative.

Eric Chinski: I don’t think it quite hit me until I heard you read from The Ask a few years ago, but there’s clearly a Sam Lipsyte sentence. I heard music at that reading. Your sentences are as much about rhythm and sound as character and plot. How do you think about the sentence in the broader context of a story?

Sam Lipsyte: I’m after music and meaning at the same time. I want poetry and life, or as much as prose can deliver those things. I prefer it when sentences are doing a few jobs at once, like male and female models strutting down the runway, looking great in their wild, impossible outfits, and at the last possible moment leaning forward to deliver some important plot or character information, before returning to the wings. And I’m backstage, screaming at the other sentences to get ready.

Eric Chinski: Some of the stories in The Fun Parts have been marinating for many years. Do you spend a lot of time on revisions? How do you know when a story is done?

Sam Lipsyte: Most of the stories are new, but some took me a while. I wrote a version of “The Dungeon Master” twenty years ago. The old version has no resemblance to the one in the collection, except the title. I wasn’t ready to write it then. I threw it out and forgot about it. Then one day I started thinking about it. The old story was lost but I remembered an element or two and thought maybe I was ready to write the story now. But that’s very rare for me. I usually write a draft of a story, get excited, decide that it sucks, put it away, take it out in a few weeks or more, get excited, decide that it sucks, etc. I go through this cycle for a while. But in the excited stage I can really see what the story could be, I’m doing a lot of revision. I don’t know when you’re ever done. You just have to stop. All you are doing is moving commas around. You don’t want to let it go because you are worried nothing else will come to you. That’s when you have to walk away.

Eric Chinski: No one gets the male mind in all its gory details as well as you do. In The Fun Parts, though, you take the reader inside the heads of several female characters who are wrestling with some pretty dark thoughts. Did this shift present any particular challenges for you?

Sam Lipsyte: I’ve lived long enough to know so many different kinds of women and men, and I just trusted I could handle these close third perspectives. They aren’t based on some preconceived notion of “what a woman thinks.” That would be generic nonsense. They felt very close to me, closer than many of my male characters. I’ve shared my life and thoughts with a woman for a long time. And she’s shared her life and thoughts with me. And I thought a lot about some of the things that might be hindering these characters, provoking them, and so forth. I was interested in the mix of pressures, cultural, biological, but just as important, the ones unique to them, based on their idiosyncrasies, which are clearly also connected to some of mine.

Eric Chinski: Some critics insist on calling you a comic novelist. Do you think there’s an inherent tension between a comic and literary sensibility? How do you think of the potential for comedy in fiction writing — and does it come with certain constraints?

Sam Lipsyte: I don’t see the comic and the literary as distinct categories. I think you have literature, and most of the good stuff is often very funny. Comedy and tragedy work best in tandem. Put them together and you have literature. I think maybe I make certain assumptions about my readers, that they understand that I’m not just going for laughs, that there are other currents running through my work, and I think my assumption is correct based on the response I get. But I’m also flagging in my struggle not to be pigeonholed by critics. As I’ve said before, I guess if you’re a pigeon it’s better to have a hole than not.

Eric Chinski: Many readers have hailed you as a writer who has captured a generation’s angst and lost illusions. Some fiction writers deliberately set out with the ambition to show us the way we live now. Would you put yourself in this camp? Can a short story take on our contemporary moment in the same way as a novel?

Sam Lipsyte: I don’t sit down and say, “Today I’m going to write something that shows us how we live now,” mostly because I would become paralyzed immediately. I’d ask myself too many anxious questions. I do, however, like to engage with the present, to use its textures, or else employ it as a jumping-off point. Some say write what you know. Some say write what you don’t know. The present, for me, is both, especially because of its speed. Roth was right about the futility of trying to keep up. You don’t have to keep up. You stand on the banks of the roaring river and look at who or what washes up. That’s what you make stories out of. All that heartbreak. I think you can do this in prose fiction no matter the length.

Sam Lipsyte is the author of Venus Drive, The Subject Steve, Home Land, and The Ask, the latter two of which were New York Times Notable Books. He won the first annual Believer Book Award and was a 2008 Guggenheim fellow. He teaches writing at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

Eric Chinski is Editor in Chief at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Authors and Editors in Conversation

Jonathan Galassi: Jamaica, this is your first novel in a decade. How has your writing changed in the intervening period and what have you been thinking about in terms of writing?

Jamaica Kincaid: “This is your first novel in a decade.” There are so many strange things in that brief statement. The word “decade” is one of them; the word “novel” is another. Do you know who I am, who I really am? Well, I don’t know that, either.

The first real novel I read was Jane Eyre. I was about ten years of age or so. Before that I read mostly poetry: Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and the Bible, King James version, and the Concise Oxford Dictionary; also Nancy Drew mysteries and everything written by Enid Blyton. Enid Blyton was the first person I pretended to be when I was a child. After that, I wanted to be Charlotte Brontë. It’s possible my writing has gone from Enid to Charlotte. I would be so pleased if someone would say that about it. As for thinking about my writing: I do wish I could go beyond 200 pages, I do wish I would write one of those books with so many pages that no one ever finishes the reading of them, but alas, I seem unable to do this. Of course, there are many reasons not to finish reading a book, apart from the length of it. (more…)

by Sarah Scire

Oliver Burkeman wants you to stop trying to be happy. In his wry, wide-ranging book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, Burkeman challenges the “cult of optimism” and writes that “it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative—insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness—that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.” To celebrate the book’s stateside publication, the award-winning journalist agreed to answer a few questions about his thought-provoking, often counterintuitive approach to achieving happiness. (more…)

by Iza Wojciechowska and Rosalind Harvey

“Some people say I’m precocious,” begins Juan Pablo Villalobos’ super-slim, super-fast first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole. What follows is a beautiful, heart-breaking story told from the perspective of Tochtli, a precocious kid whose dad is a major Mexican drug lord. Tochtli has seen people murdered and has found his father’s gun room, but those things aren’t as important to him as collecting hats and acquiring a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. Slowly, though, he begins to reconcile the world he understands with the world as it really is. Written in Spanish and translated by Rosalind Harvey, the book is an incredible debut—and a wonderful work of translation. This is Rosalind’s first solo translation, having previously worked with Anne McLean to co-translate Oblivion by Hector Abad (FSG, 2012) and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas (New Directions, 2012). I talked with Rosalind about Tochtli’s advanced vocabulary, her advice for young translators, and about the potential for more mainstream Estonian chick lit, Indonesian thrillers, and Bolivian erotica. (more…)

Earlier this month, FSG published two books on twentieth-century American political figures: William H. Chafe’s Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal and Joseph Crespino’s Strom Thurmond’s America. Neither one is a straightforward biography. Bill and Hillary, which tracks the Clintons’ lives but is focused on the dynamic of their relationship, almost resists classification. Meanwhile, Strom Thurmond’s America is a political biography that out of necessity highlights its subject’s greatest personal failure. We asked the authors to read each other’s book and then discuss, over email, the art of biography. (more…)

by Iza Wojciechowska

Whether or not you’ve known it, or whether or not you’ve wanted to, you’ve heard the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. You’ve certainly heard him on the radio or on CD if you listen to even a bit of classical music; but if you steer clear, you’ve still heard him. You’ve seen a commercial for American Express or iTunes, or you’ve heard old Nokia ringtones, or you’ve simply been around music during Christmas. Bach, arguably more than any other composer, is ubiquitous, even now, more than 250 years after his compositions were written. But how did he get that way?

One answer is: technology. Paul Elie, a former editor at FSG and a creative writing professor (mine, in fact), has written an astounding book that traces the evolution of Bach’s music through the evolution of technology. From the creation of wax cylinder recordings, through LPs, CDs and MP3s, each stage in technology’s progress coincided with a major breakthrough for Bach’s music. In Reinventing Bach, Elie presents this history, interweaving the story of Bach with those of the musicians who played his music, as well as with his own. (more…)

Lisa Zeidner, the author of Love Bomb, directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Camden, where Jay McKeen is a student. Jay retired as Police Chief of Hamilton Township, NJ, after service as a detective and Detective Bureau Commander, Operations Commander, and member of Tactical Containment and Underwater Search and Rescue Teams. He provided technical advice to the author.

McKeen: First, thanks for putting up with a cop in your classes over the years.

Zeidner: No, thank you. No student I’ve ever taught has seen more dead bodies. Plus it was useful to have you show up armed to workshops when things got testy.

McKeen: I’m looking forward to giving you the third degree for a change. You comfortable? Some water? Loosen the handcuffs? Here’s a softball, so you don’t invoke the 5th. The initial picture of the domestic terrorist in wedding gown, painted boots, clown socks and gas mask startles and sticks—was that image the genesis of Love Bomb? (more…)

Elissa Schappell, whose Blueprints for Building Better Girls is out in paperback this month, talks process, novels vs. stories, musical inspiration, etiquette, motherhood and more with Justin Taylor, author of The Gospel of Anarchy and Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever.

To begin at the beginning, or to try anyway, can you tell me a bit about the process of writing Blueprints for Building Better Girls? Were the stories written in the order in which they appear? Did you yourself employ a “blueprint” of some kind?

God no. I don’t care for outlines and blueprints. I don’t like to be told what to do, even if it’s me doing the telling. Which isn’t to say I didn’t have a direction in mind. I began with the idea of writing a series of “instructive” stories inspired by the rules governing proper female behavior in old etiquette and women’s self-help books from Emily Post to What to Expect… Not surprisingly, the stories felt over-determined and too clever by half. (See what I mean?) So I abandoned the idea. However, clearly my subconscious didn’t because that’s pretty much what I ended up doing.

The order the stories appear in is not the order in which they were written. Although I felt strongly about having the book begin as it does—with the story of Heather who has been labeled a slut and how that effects her sense of self and sexuality—and then ending with her as a mother having to come to terms with her past and her own mythology. I wanted you to see how growing up in this time, under these circumstances made her that woman. I also knew when I wrote the last line of that story that was the end of the book. I wanted the reader to acknowledge their complicity in the suppositions that have been made about these women. These women aren’t just what I’ve shown you, their lives are infinitely richer and more complicated.

Both your books are collections of linked stories, but Use Me is strict enough in its forward-moving chronology and in its limits on point of view that it can “pass” as a novel-in-stories, particularly in the latter sections where Evie’s narrative largely eclipses Mary Beth’s. Blueprints, its mosaic structure notwithstanding, has at least as strong a sense of thematic unity as Use Me–maybe a stronger one. Was it tempting to bring this book to market as a novel-in-stories or even, in a post-Goon Squad world, as simply a novel?
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Rowan Ricardo Phillips, whose debut book of poetry, The Ground, published this week, recently sat down with fellow FSG poet Lawrence Joseph. We’re happy to share with you their remarkable discussion on the craft, translation, mythmaking, and–of course–Phillips’ stunning new work.

Lawrence Joseph: First of all, I want to say how much I like this book. In fact, I think it’s a masterpiece. Why the title The Ground?

Rowan Ricardo Phillips: Good morning… and thank you! As opposed to “the land” or “the floor” or “where you are” or “the street”, there’s something feral, archaic, and really part from ourselves in “the ground”. It’s the word we often relate with the ceremonial end of our physical selves—we’re buried, we tend to say, in the ground—and yet it also inhabits, in our English language at least, a point of progression: we build on things, and on ourselves, from the ground up. If you replace “ground” with “earth” in those two phrases they become too self-conscious and overly willful. Similarly, “the land” is a word almost entirely self-conscious of ownership and power. For example, switch “land” with “ground” in Frost’s “The Gift Outright” and you have a different poet. I should point out that none of these aforementioned words were candidates for the title of the book. The Ground came to me instinctively as I was working on through the poems. It was as insistent, like a pulse, and I wanted to capture the feel of that in the entire book, the way the ground pulsed in my imagination as I wrote. As you read through the book I’m hoping you feel the pulse of the ground in it, both as concept and character. It’s incredibly important for a poet to recognize and come to terms with his or her temperament—I can’t stress that enough—and my temperament left me not wanting to have a titular poem in the book. That’s not me. A representative poem for the book—that wasn’t where The Ground was heading; I could feel that strongly even in its earliest moments and movements. (more…)

With his “charming, hilarious account of la vie Parisienne,” Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down, about to hit bookstores, Rosecrans Baldwin set off on a two-week tour of U.S. towns (and one Vegas casino) named Paris. His assignment was to find out what Americans really think of the French; his full write-up, “Our French Connection,” has just been published in the Morning News. But we were curious what this chronicler of “the real Paris” made of its American counterparts – if, perhaps, any of them had eclipsed the City of Light, and if it’s truly possible to get tired of Paris.

Road into Paris, Idaho

Paris, France has a reputation as one of the most beautiful cities in the world. How does Paris, USA measure up?

The Paris, USA that I saw was down-at-the-heels, struggling, beautiful in parts, isolated, and a little behind the times. The towns each had their own treasures. But I wouldn’t pick them out as vacation destinations. The people who would, of course, would be the French. The French I know love gritty America, Larry Clark, Tulsa’s drug addicts. In Paris, France, I had coworkers all the time asking me about the vacation pleasures of Detroit, of North Dakota, of urban Albuquerque. (more…)

The writers Bret Easton Ellis (author of several books, including Less Than Zero, American Psycho, and Imperial Bedrooms) and Laurent Binet (HHhH) met recently to talk about writing, adapting your work for film, and listening too much to your editors.

Laurent Binet: My first question is about something you said in Lunar Park. Actually, your character, Bret Easton Ellis, said that he is the greatest living American writer under forty. Would you have any comment about it, now, today? Or do you want to add something?

Bret Easton Ellis: Well, it’s a joke! I was making fun of myself. The Bret Easton Ellis character actually says that out loud. But no, I never thought I was one of the better American writers of my generation. I thought there were always better writers. And that’s why I’m always shocked—

Binet: Over forty!

Ellis: No, my age! Well, I wrote Lunar Park when I was under forty, so . . . No, I always though there were better writers than me. There were better writers than me when I was in college. We talked about this: my friend Eric, the famous Eric, who actually never got published. He was the best writer of us all. But he got derailed by drugs and things. He should have been the one who had the book published. And I’ve never rated myself against my contemporaries, I’ve never felt I’m part of a literary tradition or a literary scene, and I don’t really pay that much attention to the rankings of who is considered the best writer. But I do read a lot of writers, and I do kind of keep up with people my age. Though less so than I did when I was younger.

Binet: So which writer is impressing you the most today? (more…)

The writers John Jeremiah Sullivan (Pulphead) and Geoff Dyer (Zona) recently met up in New York to discuss writing, Raising Arizona, and self-indulgence. The following is an edited transcript of their talk at 192 Books.

John Jeremiah Sullivan: I’d like to begin by saying what an honor it is to talk with Geoff Dyer, a writer who has inspired me all my career. In fact there has been more than one occasion when an editor has expressed incomprehension at an idea I wanted to do, and I raised my fist and said, “It’s like you’ve never heard of Geoff Dyer!”

Geoff Dyer: Well, I mean obviously it’s just awful at these events—it’s just two people slapping each other on the back. In John’s book—it’s not been published in Britain yet—and when it came to the round-up of the books of the year, inevitably everyone chose Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens as their book of the year, but I was so ahead of the curve. I chose this book of essays by this American guy, sort of, seven-eight months before it was even published in England. There is a problem being ahead of the curve—it can seem like you’re ‘round the bend. There’s this huge wave of expectation, and when you come to England, you’ll discover that nothing that happens can quite live up to that sense of expectation in the land of disappointment. So enjoy it now!

Sullivan: Thank you for warning me. Well, I’d like to just talk a little bit about your new book, which I’ve been devouring in recent days. (more…)

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…)

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…)

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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