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…
Each of these books explore what it feels like to not fit in- either by being so blatantly different that you can never go unnoticed, or by having to conceal who you really to the point that your very identity dissolves. Although gay marriage is now legalised across all American states and high profile celebrity transgender people such as Caitlin Jenner and Laverne Cox have grabbed the media attention, these four short books remind us that the struggle for equality for people of all genders and sexualities isn’t over.
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…
