Archive for the ‘In the Archives’ Category

by Dan Piepenbring

Three years ago, I was browsing a used bookstore in West Saugerties, NY when I came across an anomaly from FSG’s past. It was published in 1974. It was titled, simply, The Best. And it comprised . . . a list of things that are the best.

You know, like the Best Electronic Pocket Calculator.

The Best Pepperidge Farm Cookie.

The Best Illustration of the “Convergence Theory” That Communist and Capitalist Societies Will Come Increasingly to Resemble One Another.

If you’re confused, so was I. Actually, perusing the pages of The Best never fails to leave me a little flummoxed. Compiled with affection and not inconsiderable wit by Mssrs. Peter Passell and Leonard Ross, The Best is a strange and wonderful slumgullion of the helpful, the frivolous, and the unabashedly topical. The Library of Congress files it under “Consumer education” and “Curiosities,” neither of which quite works. It’s a book that seems almost stridently out of place in 2012, and for this reason, among others, it has a cherished space on my shelf. (more…)

FSG has published Isaac Bashevis Singer’s works for over fifty years, including The Magician of Lublin, Gimpel the Fool, and his Collected Stories. As you can imagine, there’s a wealth of interesting material from his archives. Here’s just a brief selection.

You’ll notice our print advertising is nothing if not consistent: the notice for In My Father’s Court isn’t terribly different from its modern-day counterparts. (more…)

Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was the author of Going Places, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, and The Men’s Club, among other books. FSG recently published his Collected Stories and The Essays of Leonard Michaels, and reissued his novel Sylvia. David Bezmozgis on Michaels and “Writing About Myself.”

Nothing should be easier than talking about ways in which I write about myself, but I find it isn’t at all easy. Indeed, in writing about myself I encounter a problem that engages me even as I write this sentence. (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…)

It’s easy to be simultaneously envious of and seduced by Rosamond Bernier’s life. She’s struck friendships with seemingly every great artist of the 20th century, from Braque to Picasso, Bourgeois to Warhol. (This is addition to her journalism for fashion magazines like Vogue.)

As cofounder of the art magazine L’OEIL, Bernier amassed an impressive archive of photographs, some of which she’s shared with us. Highlights include a double portrait with her late husband John Russell (a wedding present from Richard Avedon), an oversized birthday card from David Hockney, and Pablo Picasso’s inscription in Bernier’s copy of El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz. (more…)

Joseph Brodsky © Nancy Crampton

We’ve noticed a surge of interest in Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky centered around the recent New York Times article “Venice in Winter” and the use of poetry as travel guide.

The following two poems were recorded at the Donnell Library Center on December 18, 1980. The poet Mark Strand reads in English, and Joseph Brodsky reads from the Russian.

“A Part of Speech (as for the stars they are always on)”

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“A Season”

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Courtesy of the Academy of American Poets (www.poets.org) and Mark Strand.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of The Magician of Lublin, Lorin Stein, the editor of the Paris Review, wrote a short introduction to the FSG reissue for reviewers and booksellers. We’ve reprinted it here with his permission.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–91) occupies a unique place in American literature. Although he left Poland for the United States in 1935 and lived here until his death, he never wrote a single story in English. He was the only Yiddish writer ever inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the only Yiddish writer ever to receive a Nobel Prize, yet he wrote for the American mainstream. His novels were serialized in Yiddish by the Forward, but—starting with The Magician of Lublin, published fifty years ago—all his books first appeared as English translations.

Singer supervised these translations closely, even jealously. (He fired one early translator, Saul Bellow, fearing that Bellow would get the credit for Singer’s own achievement.)

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A few months before Charming Billy‘s publication in December 1997, Alice McDermott recorded a brief interview about the novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux then distributed the audio – on cassette – to sales representatives and interested booksellers as to drum up interest.

While this is fairly common practice, the book’s reception was anything but: after enormous critical success it would go on to win the 1998 National Book Award.

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“It is difficult, as you know, to create interest in new writers.” -FSG letter introducing Susan Sontag’s first book, 1963

FSG has published Susan Sontag since her debut novel The Benefactor. Here are a few selections from an archive of almost fifty years of material. Note the pitch-perfect location for the Volcano Lover publication party, and the lines from the teenage Sontag’s diary on the back of At the Same Time.

Audio: Sontag at the Prague Writer’s Festival in 2000 with Robert Stone and William Styron

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© Prague Writers’ Festival, 2000

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