Interview courtesy of our friends at FSG’s Work In Progress. For more information, interviews and extracts visit http://www.fsgworkinprogress.com/
This year’s Book Expo America launched with a marquee conversation between Jonathan Franzen and critic Laura Miller. The two sat down in front of a packed crowd to discuss the writing of Franzen’s latest novel, Purity (coming September 1st). Their conversation ranged from the story of the book’s name to its eponymous protagonist, and to the importance of climbing one’s own mountains as a writer. The following transcription of the conversation has been edited for length. Read more…
July sees the publication of Yiyun Li’s short story A Sheltered Woman, winner of the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2015. Auntie Mei is a live-in nanny for newborns and their mothers. She has worked for a hundred and twenty-six families and looked after a hundred and thirty-one babies, one set of clients easily replaced by the next. But the hundred and thirty-second baby and his mother Chanel prompts a crisis in Auntie Mei’s life – a tremor that threatens to destroy her resolute detachment. Read more…
For many of us (particularly if you were fortunate enough to be born in the 70s or 80s), America was introduced to us at a tender, impressionable age thanks to Hollywood’s far-reaching and never-ending power.
For Hadley Freeman, American movies of the 1980s taught her everything she needed to know: comedy in Three Men and a Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future and Trading Places; all a teenager needs to know – in Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Say Anything, The Breakfast Club and Mystic Pizza; the ultimate in action – Top Gun, Die Hard, Young Sherlock Holmes, Beverly Hills Cop and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; love and sex – in 9 ½ Weeks, Splash, About Last Night, The Big Chill, Bull Durham; and family fun – in The Little Mermaid, ET, Big, Parenthood and Lean On Me. Read more…
Peanut butter and marshmallows go so well together in these chewy cookies. Depending on your tastes, crunchy peanut butter can be used if you want added bite to your cookies. We’ve made these with white marshmallows, but you can also mix it up a little by adding some pink ones for extra colour.
This month’s blog theme is ‘America’ – an excuse for us to celebrate the dizzying array of US writers published by 4th Estate (Franzen, Didion, Chabon, Oates and Eugenides among them).
Josh Emmons’s cult novels The Loss of Leon Meed and Prescription for a Superior Existence are published for the first time in the UK today, so to kick off our theme he’s written an introduction to the books, explaining how although they may seem quintessentially Californian, they wouldn’t exist without his Anglophile streak…
‘I was born in the US but, weirdly, I’ve hardly seen anything of the US. At the risk of stating the teeth-bleeding obvious, America is a big country so you can’t just jump in your car and check out California, especially if you live in New York. Instead, my childhood holidays were spent visiting the same places over and over again as we rode the merry-go-round of visits to relatives: one grandmother and grandfather in Miami, another grandmother in Ohio, cousins in Washington DC and Seattle. Read more…
In this podcast, we were more than lucky enough to speak to T. Geronimo Johnson about his novel ‘Welcome to Braggsville’, his writing processes, his persona; soundtrack, the challenges that he faces as a writer, and how egotistical penning a novel really is. We touched upon character development, the subversion of stereotypes, and why making his main character, who he’d always envisaged as Black,White.
We spoke about the superficial progression of race in the U.S., and we asked if the inauguration of President Obama has done anything for Black culture. One thing we dreaded asking, but did anyway, was how the Ferguson movement and the ‘I Can’t Breathe’ campaign dedicated to the memory of Eric Garner impacts how he feels as a Black male in America. Read more…
