There were many amazing moments on my recent five-week Borne book tour—yet the opportunity to visit independent bookstores remains foregrounded in my mind. The experience was sublime on multiple levels. Each adventure begins with that marvelous instant of arrival, when you step inside the...

Isadora is a shocking and visceral portrait of a woman and artist drawn to the brink of destruction by the cruelty of life. In Amelia Gray's breakout novel, described by the Los Angeles Times as “a heavenly celebration of women in charge...

May is Short Story Month, and we at FSG are damn proud of the short stories we publish—so there’s no way we’d miss out on the fun. Our short story collections run the gamut. We’ve got classics like Bernard Malamud’s The Magic Barrel...

A few months ago I traveled to India for work. I went north and south, seeing auto rickshaws and UNESCO architecture. One of the best things I saw was a logo. The logo stands for the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Gujarat....

Who’s a good dog? We humans seem to think highly of dogs who understand and care about what we want from them, says author Kirsten Bakis—but why don’t we measure ourselves by how well we can understand what they want from us? The mysterious...

The Mighty Franks is the story of one family—brilliant, close, complicated—and of one woman and the power she exerted within it. Michael Frank’s Aunt Hankie was a legendary screenwriter, and a magnetic, enthralling personality, who separated Michael from his parents and siblings and...

The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience,...

Durga Chew Bose's essay collection Too Much and Not the Mood "bristles with slow and tender inquisitiveness, carefully wrought anecdotes and character studies, devotion to detail, and nuanced structure in which form engages with content" (Los Angeles Review of Books). Durga recently...

Elif Batuman's new novel The Idiot, published by Penguin Press, has been lauded as "a hefty, gorgeous, digressive slab of a book." It tells the story of Selin, the introverted, tall daughter of Turkish immigrants in her first year at Harvard. The...

Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of the Southern Reach Trilogy, explores northern Florida to discuss the encroaching threats to local wildlife, writing about the environment as a political act, and the inspiration for his latest novel, Borne.

My first experience with Robert Lowell’s poetry was a failure in reading comprehension. Breezing through a stack of poems I’d been assigned for a college class, I came to his “Man and Wife” and gave it my cursory attention. Its setup is not hard...

Though it charts historical and intellectual trends that have taken place over centuries, Pankaj Mishra's Age of Anger could hardly be more timely. Earlier this spring, Mishra and the author and artist Molly Crabapple corresponded over e-mail about the book and considered...

We are, famously, a nation of escaped convicts, younger sons, persecuted minorities, and opportunists. This fame is local and racial: white America’s myth of itself. It does not, obviously, describe Native Americans and African Americans: though they are theoretically free to participate in mythic...

I have to begin by saying that as far as I know, and even listening to all the people talking earlier, I have to say that war is man-made. It’s made by men. It’s their thing, it’s their world, and they’re terribly injured in...

Of the many resources I’ve mined in researching James Wright: A Life in Poetry, the most vivid have been recordings of Wright’s readings over the course of two decades, when he was a vital public figure in the world of American poetry. A...

So Where Are We? So where were we? The fiery avalanche headed right at us—falling, flailing bodies in midair— the neighborhood under thick gray powder— on every screen. I don’t know where you are, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I heard a man say; the man who had spoken...

I’ve often asked myself: Why write a book? In part, it’s to tell my story, and it’s also to understand it. In many ways, my childhood is a mystery, even to me. I’m always being asked the same questions: How did I get here? How...

ENGLISH 206 Why would anyone even want to do it anymore? Fifty-two years ago I didn’t know what it was, And yet I knew I wanted to do it too, like the idea of a mind The self aspires to, the self a mind endeavors to become. I...

Rather than reflect on his poems or essays, which are still here for anyone to read or reread, I want to say a few words about our friendship, one whose nature, though central, is hard to capture, apparently uneventful as it was. Everything that...

Peter Cole and Christian Wiman, two longtime friends, recently exchanged e-mails about the process of selecting their own work for their latest collections. Wiman’s book of selected poems, Hammer Is the Prayer, published by FSG in 2016, was “a stunning reminder of how...