March 2012
114 posts
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“Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.”
– Elizabeth Hardwick
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“I remember this old guy once telling me, “To thine own self be true.” And I was...”
– George Saunders gives advice.
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A Case Study of Literary Karma
Two years ago Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Yesterday, he celebrated his 76th birthday by donating 30,000 of his books to the library in Lima, his Peruvian hometown.
Instead of “man of letters,” can we start using the phrase “hero of letters?”
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Need 50 Short Story Recommendations? →
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An Excellent Random Discussion about Why We Love...
The Tournament of Books always features plenty of smart discussion about publishing, criticism and contemporary literature.
Exhibit A, from C. Max Magee:
It’s all about word of mouth for me. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of readers whose taste I trust and admire. I see what these people are talking up on Twitter and Facebook, and I also see the books that my writers are pitching me....
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“The bottom line is that the ACA approach is one where we redistribute towards...”
– Jonathan Gruber, author of Health Care Reform. Have a question about the Affordable Care Act or how health care reform affects you? Ask away.
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I hope you'll join me at The Daily Beast for a... →
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Ira Glass reads Etgar Keret’s short story...
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Laura Miller on the Global Blockbuster Known as...
The actress Kristen Bell (star of the cult-TV series “Veronica Mars”) recently told the Huffington Post that “The Hunger Games” is “all I think about.” Bell threw an elaborate Hunger Games-themed party for her 30th birthday: “All my friends dressed as the characters and I dressed as Katniss [Everdeen, the books’ heroine].”
As of this writing, the first book in the Hunger Games series has...
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Searching for the "Confederacy of Dunces"...
I had nearly given up on the question of the original manuscript until a year ago when I interviewed Lynda Martin, the sister of Toole’s best friend in high school. “The manuscript?” she said in a soft southern accent. “Yes, well I have it in my closet here at home.”
An excellent tale of literary sleuthing from Cory Maclauchlin in The Millions.
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“Both of these books take place in the recent past and glide along the exospheric...”
– Michelle Orange judges Helen DeWitt & Haruki Murakami in today’s Tournament of Books. (I am compelled to point out Orange’s This Is Running for Your Life will be pubilshed by us this fall.)
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“Airports are such interesting laboratories of human interactions—reunions and...”
– Mathilda Savitch author Victor Lodato, in an interview with The New Yorker about his recently published short story “P.E.”
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Robert Silvers Reminisces About the Early Days of...
You had full control.
Silvers: Full control. That was a very special thing in publishing, maybe historic, because most magazines are owned by somebody, a publisher, who ultimately has say—it’s his view of the world that can’t be contradicted too much. He might, for example, think, I’m a patriot, and I don’t want to challenge the American Vietnam War. And therefore the paper would support the...
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“He was a one-book man. Some men have only one book in them; others, a library.”
– Sydney Smith
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Brian McGreevy's novel "Hemlock Grove" is coming...
GQ interviewed McGreevy on what it’s like to adapt his monsters-in-Pennsylvania story for a 13-episode series on Netflix:
GQ: What inspired you to sit down and write this book?
McGreevy: A deeply, deeply abnormal brain. I reached a point in my relationship with my own work—I was in graduate school for an M.F.A. at the time—when I realized I wasn’t very good at realism. And so I...
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“I view genre as a range of colours a writer has in his/her paintbox, rather than...”
– David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, in an interview with the Galway Advertiser
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Virgin Launches "Travelreads" Channel on Longreads
Taking a trip? Even just vicariously through literature? Virgin Airlines has curated a selection of travel writing on the popular Longreads site just for the occasion. (You’ve seen our Longrads page, right? …Right?)
A few of their picks:
“City of Dreams,” by Evan Osnos, Conde Nast Traveler
“The Place to Disappear,” by Susan Orlean, susanorlean.com
...
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“Schoenberg said it’s still possible to write music in C major, and that’s coming...”
– Jeffrey Eugenides
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Geoff Dyer Explains Why He Hates the Coen Brothers
John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead, and Geoff Dyer, author of Zona, recently met for a discussion at 192 Books in New York City. Among the topics covered: Burning Man, Axl Rose, writerly influence, and why Geoff Dyer hates the Coen brothers.
Sullivan: Can I ask you about a remark you made in the book about the Coen brothers? Which did not seem flip—you accuse yourself of being flip with...
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“When I was a child I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred...”
– Marilynne Robinson, from her title essay in When I Was a Child I Read Books
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The Most Popular FSG Stories of the Past Four...
We post hundreds of links on @fsg_books each month. Here’s a look at which ones received the most recent attention.
Toni Morrison Cancels Her Memoir, Cleveland Plain-Dealer
“How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Academic Paper?,” The Atlantic
“Recovering Lolita,” Imprint
“Let’s Welcome Alex Star to FSG,” The FSG Tumblr
“Martin Amis, Salman...
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Our Latest Quiz: Swedes & Literature (Stieg... →
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PULPHEAD NOTES: John Jeremiah Sullivan and Geoff... →
From our latest issue of Work in Progress:
johnjeremiahsullivan:
(A little bit of the two writers’ exchange at 192 Books in New York a couple weeks ago. Read the rest here.)
Dyer: I was talking to someone last night, and I said about these essays of yours that there’s no telling what you’re going to say next. And that carries at the level of the paragraph—you’ve got no idea of what’s going to...
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How to Drink Like a Kingsley Amis Character →
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“When you have been lucky in your life you find that just about the time the best...”
– Ernest Hemingway
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“My publisher asked me to [write a memoir], but there’s a point at which...”
– Toni Morrison cancels her memoir.
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Sarah Manguso, author of The Guardians: An Elegy,...