In The Circuit, award-winning poet and Paris Review sports columnist Rowan Ricardo Phillips chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season. The annual tennis schedule is a rarity in professional sports in that it encapsulates...
This summer ran long, and winter came early, but there were maybe a couple weeks in there when Chicago got a real fall. Around then I took these pictures, which span the course of a week or so. The week felt full, yet ordinary....
Enter for a chance to win a complete signed collection of Jonathan Franzen's books! The winner will receive signed copies of the following:
Hideo Yokohama’s masterpiece Seventeen is set in a fictional newspaper company covering the real-life 1985 crash of a Japan Airlines jumbo jet in a mountainous region of Japan. The accident happened before I moved to Japan, but it is a major...
"It has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars." —Marie Colvin Watch a video about the story behind In...
In the fall of 2013 I received a submission from one of the smartest, loveliest agents I know, Katherine Fausset at Curtis Brown. At first glance it seemed unlikely—a posthumous story collection from a little known writer. But then I saw her name: Lucia...
Lucia Berlin was a Western writer, by which I do not mean a genre writer of cowboy tales like Zane Grey or the younger Elmore Leonard, but that her stories, with only a few exceptions, are situated west of the Great Plains or in...
Evening in Paradise is a collection of previously uncompiled stories from the short-story master and literary sensation, Lucia Berlin. After reading them, Dwight Garner of The New York Times wrote, "Berlin probably deserved a Pulitzer Prize." The stories take us from Texas...
“I’ve lived so many places it’s ridiculous . . . and because I moved so much, place is very, very important to me. I’m always looking . . . looking for home.” —Lucia Berlin, interview (2003) The first writer I ever watched at work was my...
Enter the FSG Classics Sweepstakes for a chance to win a FSG tote bag, plus some of our favorite classics that remain relevant and important years after publication. The list of books includes: • The Complete Stories by Flannery...
In this special Halloween-themed edition of Work in Progress, we feature the voices of our growing list of female authors who explore the otherworldly and spooky side of literature in innovative and chilling ways. We asked them to write about the scariest story (book,...
Spanning eras, continents, and genres, CoDex 1962—twenty years in the making—is Icelandic author Sjón's epic three-part masterpiece. Josef Löwe, the narrator, was born in 1962—the same year, the same moment, even, as Sjón. Josef’s story, however, stretches back decades in the...
Gretchen and Steve have been married for a long time. Living in San Francisco, recently separated, with two children and demanding jobs, they’ve started going to a marriage counselor. Unfolding over the course of ten months and taking place entirely in the marriage counselor’s...
Enter a chance to win a hardcover copy of The Flame, Leonard Cohen's final collection of poems, lyrics, and drawings, and a beautiful letterpressed poster of one of his poems! {{FORM-OCTSWEEPS}}
Aden Grace Sawyer, the heroine—somehow, the word “protagonist” doesn’t do her justice—of John Wray’s fifth novel, Godsend, has a great deal in common with John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” who was, for a time, the most reviled American traitor since...
“I would like to make an assertion that I cannot prove but am certain is true. Within a fifty-kilometer radius of where I am writing this Prologue, someone somewhere is either playing or listening to Chopin’s music . . . Whatever the time zone,...
It is rare for a literary critic to remain alive for readers decades after his death—even rarer than for a novelist or a poet. Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) belonged to what Randall Jarrell called “the age of criticism,” a time when the analysis and judgment...
“There are very, very few people who occupy the ground that Leonard Cohen walks on.” —BONO The Flame is the final work from Leonard Cohen, the revered poet and musician whose fans span generations and whose work is celebrated throughout the world....
