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Catherine Lacey reads from her latest novel, Biography of X (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), and Miriam Toews reads from her latest novel, Fight Night (Bloomsbury, 2021), in this Christopher Lightfoot Walker Reading Series event at the 92nd Street Y in New York.
“All the books I’ve written in the past were books that I decided to write suddenly while I was writing something else.” In this London Review Bookshop conversation, French writer Édouard Louis speaks about his writing process and discovering the parts of his mother’s life he did not know for his new memoir, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), with translator and novelist Tash Aw.
“I don’t really think you can teach people to write, you can just teach them to read. Read everything you can about your setting or your characters or whatever it is you don’t know.” In this Granta video, Sarah Moss, author of the novels Ghost Wall (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) and Summerwater (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), offers advice on first drafts, research, and the importance of reading to a writer.
In this 92nd Street Y event, Ama Codjoe reads from her debut collection, Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), with an introduction by poet Nkosi Nkululeko, followed by Carl Phillips reading from his latest collection, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), with an introduction by poet Shane McCrae. Phillips won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his collection.
“It came to me one night as I was falling asleep / that I had finished with those amorous adventures / to which I had long been a slave.” In this video from the 2014 National Book Award finalists reading, Louise Glück reads her poem “An Adventure,” which appears in her National Book Award–winning collection Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
“Staggering out of a black-red peony, / where you have been hiding all morning / from the frigid air, you regard me smearing / jam on dark toast.” Henri Cole reads his poem “Face of the Bee” and other selections from his latest poetry collection, Blizzard (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), in this recent reading at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
“What I like about teaching is that it is always an experiment in unfolding a new language of value that isn’t a dominant value of the day, that needs to be developed to stay human,” says Ben Lerner, author of The Hatred of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), about some of his approaches to mentoring and teaching poets in this interview with his Danish translator Tonny Vorm at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
“You can slash a book. There are different ways to measure depth, but not many readers measure a book’s depth with a knife, making a cut from the first page all the way down to the last.” Yiyun Li reads from her novel The Book of Goose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) in this Politics and Prose event with Maud Casey in Washington, D.C.
In this Strand virtual event, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux president Jonathan Galassi and editor-at-large for poetry Robyn Creswell speak about editing The FSG Poetry Anthology, which celebrates the publisher’s seventy-fifth anniversary, and introduce poets Maureen N. McLane, Ishion Hutchinson, and Carl Phillips who read their poems.
“To feel signs depends on how & why / the singer’s song puckers the mouth.” Yusef Komunyakaa reads his poem “A World of Daughters,” which appears in his collection Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), among other selections in this 2020 virtual reading for UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series.
