Shirley Hazzard, who died on December 12 at the age of 85, wrote two collections of short stories, four novels, and three works of nonfiction. FSG published her last two works: in 2000, a memoir about Graham Greene, Greene on Capri, and, in...

Though I was always a bookish child, two things happened shortly after my sixteenth birthday which fixed my course toward words and writing. The first of these was discovering that the British Poet Laureate was paid in wine. That I immediately decided this was...

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at," wrote Oscar Wilde in 1891. Yet for nearly two thousand years after Plato's Republic, most Western thinkers did ignore Wilde's map. Christianity, as interpreted by the Apostle Paul,...

Marianne Moore’s masterpiece “The Fish” is that rare poem that enters the mind through the front door and the back door at the same time. There’s not another poem that has its cake and eats it too like “The Fish” does. It luxuriates in...

I first read Hamlet in Jamaica. The bleak daylight surrounding my high school Happy Grove was like the faded glow of an old photograph. Rain was expected; it never came. There might’ve been thunder, or that could just have been the pages turning in...

Who could resist this invitation to eavesdrop on the fabulous? The title for Ange Mlinko’s most recent book, Marvelous Things Overheard, is taken from a collection of anecdotes and wonders, falsely attributed to Aristotle, which explain, in tight descriptive units, marvels of the...

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” Rilke wrote in his response to a request for advice and feedback from the nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus. “I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps.” Rilke’s...

No matter which hat each FSGer wears in the office—art, contracts, design, editorial, foreign rights, marketing, permissions, production, publicity, sales, or otherwise—they’re often first and foremost a reader. With that in mind, we asked the staff of Farrar, Straus and Giroux to pick the best...

In 1947, concerned about supporting his family, Kurt Vonnegut took a job his brother recommended him for in the PR department at General Electric. The GE News Bureau was organized like a real newspaper—except that its purpose was to produce stories about all the...

A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday,...

Joan Didion is one of the most distinctive and celebrated critical voices of our time. FSG published three of her most acclaimed books: the novel Play It As It Lays, and the searing essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White...

In late April, Cynthia Haven posted a review of Ellendea Proffer Teasley’s new memoir Brodsky Among Us on her Stanford University Book Haven Blog. One person, however, took exception to her criticism of Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky’s translation of his own works...

Pablo Neruda found me in a strange way. I was still a teenager, obsessed with the Beats and pouring over Whitman in English class. I enjoyed writing poetry, but did not yet take it seriously. I was standing in the poetry section of the...

Even now, the voice that announces itself in the opening line of “Herbert White,” the first poem in Frank Bidart’s first collection, Golden State—“When I hit her on the head, it was good”—shocks and unnerves me, its force undulled by fifteen years of rereading....

When I read Derek Walcott it happens every third line or so. I wince with envy, pure and simple. Not the way Salieri was jealous of Mozart, more the way the bloke in the suit sits beside his date in the dark cinema, watching...

Charles Wright. The poet between now and not-now; between know and not-know; between the sun’s fire and a mountain’s snow; the poet between Dante and dude. He says he wished for anonymity—not for his poems but for Charles Wright: an anonymous author of astonishing poems—yet...

In commemoration of Flannery O'Connor's 90th birthday, we are honored to share the introduction to The Complete Stories written by her longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux. Flannery O’Connor’s first book has never, up to now, been...

Since 1922, almost all English-language readers have encountered Marcel Proust by way of the translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff, who wrestled with Proust's seven-volume masterpiece—published as Remembrance of Things Past—until his death in 1930. Yet little was known about him—publicly a debonair man...

The air was hot and sodden with humidity, and although it was October, a summer thunderstorm felt imminent. We caught a bus crammed with commuters and careened downhill to Trastevere through the evening rush hour—one of the four traffic jams that Roman drivers endure...

No modern American writer has had so lively a posthumous life as Flannery O’Connor. When she she died, of lupus, in August 1964, age thirty-nine, she was the author of two novels—Wise Blood (1952) and

Paul Elie