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Tag: FSG

Published November 12, 2014

Describing the Indescribable: Jeff VanderMeer and Peter Mendelsund in Conversation

Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer (US); design by Charlotte Strick; Illustration by Eric Nyquist (FSG / 2014)

If you only bookmark one long(ish) thing to read today, make sure it’s the slightly bonkers conversation between Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy, and book designer Peter Mendelsund at Boing Boing:

JV: I very much like how you draw out in ‘What We See When We Read’ this idea of creation of character by the constraints around them. Which helps to create an outline of the character. It’s more or less how I thought of Control in ‘Authority’. Taking this even farther, I think that writers like Karen Joy Fowler do something even weirder where sometimes the absence of text or the cutting of text creates a ghost or resonance that allows the reader to fill in the space. Is there an equivalent effect in art/design? Perhaps it’s something you’ve played around with in your own work. An absence that denotes presence.

PM: “An absence that denotes presence” could be the definition of a good book cover. Good book covers are hard to make, I think, specifically because a designer is asked to deploy the facts of a narrative without showing anything explicit about the setting or characters. It’s a tricky balancing act. Everything is done by implication, proxy, metaphor or analogy.

So what is left off of a jacket is crucial. (I’ve often said that most of my day in the office is spent either suggesting things or hiding things.) I’m not an anti-intentionalist or anything, but I do believe that the reader deserves, to some extent, the right to co-create a fictional world alongside the author. So when you make the author’s world explicit on a cover, you’ve taken something from the reader.

The Southern Reach Trilogy — Annihilation, Acceptance and Authority — have now been collected into a single volume called Area X. While the original (American) covers were designed by Charlotte Strick with illustrations by Eric Nyquist, the new cover is by Rodrigo Corral:

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VanderMeer also talks to his editor Sean MacDonald about the process of writing the books at the FSG Work in Progress blog. The post includes an amazing cover for the Polish edition of Acceptance. If anyone can tell me who the designer/illustrator is, I would be much obliged…

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Published March 6, 2014

Tove Jansson: The Hand That Made the Moomins

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At The New Yorker, James Guida reviews Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words: The Authorized Biography by Boel Westin, and Jansson’s memoir of childhood Sculptor’s Daughter (both published by Sort of Books):

Writing the Moomins afforded an escape at war’s end. After a quiet start, the series took off in the fifties, bringing welcome financial stability—but the success also represented a kind of detour. Jansson’s ambitions for painting never left her. Now free time was scarce, thanks to an unceasing flow of fan mail, the minutiae of merchandising, processions of visitors, and, until Lars, one of her brothers, took over, the arduous demands of the comic strip. For a while, there was no pleasure to be found in working. Thankfully, social media didn’t exist yet: “I could vomit over Moomintroll,” she wrote. “I shall never again be able to write about those happy idiots who forgive one another and never realize they’re being fooled.”

As with someone like Kafka, it is hard to know how literally to take Jansson’s obstacles. To some degree, her entrapment was avoidable: to be so involved in the products, to answer every letter, seem Moominish ideas—either that or, for a person who so prized being left free and alone, they’re plain masochistic. Were an analogous scenario to occur in the books, the hassles would be washed away by flood, to be followed by a celebratory picnic. As it was, Jansson believed that her nature didn’t give her a choice.

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On related note, Montreal’s Drawn Quarterly have just published two new paperback books in their lovely series of classic Moomin comic strips reworked in full colour, Moomin and the Golden Tail and Moomin’s Desert Island (pictured above).

(NB: the Moomin storybooks, published by FSG, and the Moomin comic books, published by D+Q, are distributed by my employer Raincoast Books. Sorry I seem to be doing this so much lately!)

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Published March 3, 2014

Writing and the Cost of Living

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I finally just got around to reading Emily Gould‘s spiralling essay on writing and debt ‘How much my novel cost me‘ over the weekend. It’s an excerpt from the new n+1 book MFA vs NYC edited by Chad Harbach (author of The Art of Fielding), which seems like it could be essential reading for idealistic folks wishing to pursue writing as a career:

IT’S HARD TO WRITE ABOUT BEING BROKE because brokeness is so relative; “broke” people run the gamut from the trust-funded jerk whose drinks you buy because she’s “so broke right now” to the people who sleep outside the bar where she’s whining. But by summer 2012 I was broke, and in debt, and it was no one’s fault but mine. Besides a couple of freelance writing assignments, my only source of income for more than a year had come from teaching yoga, for which I got paid $40 a class. In 2011 I made $7,000.

During that $7,000 year I also routinely read from my work in front of crowds of people, spoke on panels and at colleges, and got hit up for advice by young people who were interested in emulating my career path, whose coffee I usually ended up buying after they made a halfhearted feint toward their tote bag–purses. I felt some weird obligation to them and to anyone else who might be paying attention to pretend that I wasn’t poor. Keeping up appearances, of course, only made me poorer. I’m not sure what the point of admitting all this might be, because I know that anyone who experiences a career peak in his mid-twenties will likely make the same mistakes I did, and it’s not even clear to me that they were all mistakes, unless writing a book is always a mistake, which in some sense it must be.

Interestingly, Robert McCrum touches on the financial difficulties of older authors in an article for this weekend’s The Observer

To writers of my generation, who grew up in the age of Penguin books, vinyl records and the BBC, it’s as if a cultural ecology has been wiped out. For as long as most of us can remember, every would-be writer knew the landscape of the printed word. This Georgian square was home to publishing grandees (now retired). On that high street were the booksellers (now out of business). In those twisting back streets, you could expect to find literary agents working the margins with the injured innocence of pickpockets at a synod. It was a mutually dependent ecosystem.

Publishers were toffs, booksellers trade and printers the artisan champions of liberty. Like the class system, we thought, nothing would change. The most urgent deadline was lunch. How wrong we were. The years 2007-2010 are pivotal: first… came the credit crunch. And it occurred at the very moment that the IT revolution was wrecking the livelihoods of those creative classes – film-makers, musicians and writers of all sorts – who had previously lived on their copyrights.

Gould is self-recriminating. McCrum — a former editor-in-chief at Faber and Faber — is nostalgic for a time I don’t remember (things were always better in the ‘old days’ in publishing circles). For Gould the internet is a double-edged sword — a platform and a distraction — for McCrum it has brought nothing but woe. Both seem to agree, however, that nobody is making any money, “marketing types” are awful (aren’t they though?), and being a writer is not all it’s cracked up to be…

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Coincidently, Emily Gould’s new novel Friendship will be published in the US and Canada by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on July 1 (and a couple of days later in the UK by Virago). I’m not sure who designed the cover, but it is rather nice.

(NB: FSG, and n+1 / Faber & Faber are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books)

UPDATE: Leslie Jamison, author of the forthcoming essay collection The Empathy Exams (published by Graywolf Press, also distributed in Canada by Raincoast — sorry), reviews MFA vs NYC  for The New Republic:

Writers throughout these essays face the shame of privilege and the specter of poverty: They join magazine mastheads to keep from going broke, or they teach to keep from going broke, or else they actually do go broke—they’re broke in Brooklyn and broke in Los Angeles. Eli Evans evokes his years living in a “warehouse on Pico and Fourth” in one perfect image, one of the most remarkable moments in the entire collection: “I once found a baby rattlesnake strangled with electrical wire and tied to a signpost.” This baby rattlesnake, apparently, is what dreams become…

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Published July 30, 2013

Janet Malcolm: The Devil in the Detail


Gaby Wood interviews journalist Janet Malcolm for The Telegraph:

How Malcolm goes about her journalistic business is clear from her person. Her gaze is remarkably unflinching; unnervous, but not stern. She concentrates on looking at all times. She is difficult to interview, but for reasons much more prosaic than the dramatic ones I had conjured. She simply finds herself uninteresting, and so gives away little. You feel there is much more to know, and that the failure must lie in your ability to ask about it. Because when you listen back to the recording you find that she has not been especially evasive, merely – politely – private. ‘Have a macaroon,’ she says.

Malcolm’s most recent collection of essays, Forty-One False Starts, has just been published in the UK by Granta.  The US edition is available from FSG, (and is, for sake of disclosure etc., distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books).

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Published July 24, 2013

Semi-Outsiders

At Vulture, Jonathan Galassi, the current president of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, reflects on Boris Kachka’s new book Hothouse, a history of the New York publishing house:

FSG came into its own at a moment when postwar America was opening up and out—when “semi-outsiders,” in the words of critic Irving Howe, were “starting to break into the central spaces of American culture.” What made FSG significant, though, was its ability to catch a long series of literary waves. Straus and Giroux and a whole series of talented younger editors made stars out of Southerners (and Catholics) like Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy and Jews like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and the émigré Isaac Bashevis Singer. There were the poets of the ­Lowell-Bishop-Berryman generation; Susan Sontag, an entire typhoon on her own, who clued Straus in to great, obscure European writers; and the late-sixties Latin American “boom” (Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Neruda). There were the New Journalists (Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion) and New Yorker epigone John McPhee; the internationalist poets Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Joseph Brodsky; and great children’s writers like Maurice Sendak, Madeleine L’Engle, and Roald Dahl. All contributed to what Kachka calls “FSG culture,” which he ­describes as “high-minded and scrappy, aggressive and refined, quintessentially American but thoroughly international.”

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Published June 11, 2013

Janet Malcolm: The Messiness of Truth

Zoë Heller reviews Janet Malcolm’s new book, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, for the New York Review of Books:

Mess has always inspired fervent emotions in Janet Malcolm. It agitates her. It depresses her. She considers it her enemy. The job of a writer, she likes to remind us, is to vanquish mess—to wade onto the seething porch of actuality, pick out a few elements with which to make a story, and consign the rest to the garbage dump. Images of clutter and panic-inducing domestic chaos crop up frequently in her work, not just as metaphors for the failure or absence of art, but as advertisements for her own narrative discipline. This is what real life looks like, they tell us. This is the tedium and confusion that Malcolm’s elegant rendering of things has spared you. 

But if literal messes appall Malcolm, they also fascinate and attract her… Malcolm has a secret, writerly sympathy for the hoarder. She understands the mad desire to hold on to every piece of accumulated material, the fear of throwing out something precious. Art, she is fretfully aware, can be too ruthless in its cleaning operations… There is something awe-inspiring and at the same time a little barren about an environment from which all trace of “disorderly actuality” has been removed.

New York Review of Books

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Published March 16, 2011

Charlotte Strick | The Atlantic


Charlotte Strick, art director at Faber & Faber, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and The Paris Review, writes about the book design process for The Atlantic:

Even though I frequently have designs for titles from the previous season still on my plate, and just when I think I can’t possibly come up with another original idea for a cover, the creative sparks begin to fly. At the launch meetings, editors take turns presenting recent acquisitions… As the books are introduced, each of us begins to wonder: Will I solve the problem with illustration or photography? If the title is brilliant and descriptive, maybe an all-type treatment that’s bold and clever is the best solution. (These are always my favorites.) Is there even any budget for art after the copy-editing fees, production costs, and author’s advances have been tallied? No? Never mind! We’ll get out our paintbrushes and dust off our cameras and get to work.

She is also interviewed by The Atlantic’s Daniel Fromson:

Everyone has an opinion on whether or not the book publishing world as we know it is doomed. Just as the design of websites was becoming more interesting and thoughtful by the late ’90s, it’s clear that the look and feel of e-books will transform over the next decade. As a designer who makes her living creating covers for actual books, I hope to take part in this. I don’t want our work to be reproduced exclusively in black and white or viewed only at postage stamp size.

(Pictured above: sketches by Chris Silas Neal for the cover of Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, by Claire Dederer, published by FSG)

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Published January 8, 2010

More than…

In a recent op-ed for The NY Times, ‘There’s More to Publishing Than Meets the Screen’, Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, asked:

Are e-books a new frontier in publishing, a fresh version of the author’s work? Or are they simply the latest editions of the books produced by publishers like Random House?

This is essentially a more articulate framing of a question I asked here a couple of weeks ago. But unsurprisingly Galassi offers a far more compelling defence of Random House than I could manage:

[S]hould another company be able to issue e-book versions of Random House’s editions without its involvement? An e-book version of Mr. Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner” will contain more than the author’s original words. It will also comprise Mr. Loomis’s editing, as well as all the labor of copy editing, designing and producing, not to mention marketing and sales, that went into making it a desirable candidate for e-book distribution. Mr. Styron’s books took the form they have, are what they are today, not only because of his remarkable genius but also, as he himself acknowledged, because of the dedicated work of those at Random House.

I think the point here is that books are often a collaboration between author and publisher, and in this sense publishers add value — or, at least, they did in the past. Galassi’s example is Styron, but we now know that Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish was instrumental in defining the author’s trademark style. No doubt there are other high profile examples…

As Peter Ginna, director of Bloomsbury Press, points out in this post, and in a comment on my post here, there are definitely some issues around royalty payments that Random House need to address. But while e-books are little more than converting the file format of a work, I do have some sympathy for Random House’s argument about rights.

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