Assigned to write a profile for The New York Times, Lawrence Weschler began spending time with celebrated neurologist and author Oliver Sacks in the 1980s. After meeting for dinner two or three nights per week for four years, the two developed a close friendship....
I speak and write four languages: Medumba, which is my mother tongue, English, German, and French. I was educated in French and German, and started teaching at a university in Germany, something for which I was prepared at the University in Yaoundé. My first...
When I first read Lian Hearn’s novel, Across the Nightingale Floor (2002), it was a snow day. I sat in my apartment with my feet against the radiator, my heart thudding—not so much over the story, though it was suspenseful, but over the...
Phyllis Grant’s Everything Is Under Control (out April 2020) is a memoir about appetite—how it comes, goes, and refocuses its object of desire. Grant's story spans her days as a dancer struggling to find her place at Juilliard, her time in and out...
"Developing Stories," a series from Work in Progress, invites authors to carry a disposable camera and document whatever compels them—a reading, a walk in the woods, a tour of the writer’s hometown. This week we journey to suburbia with Tupelo Hassman, author of
In Adam Ehrlich Sachs's The Organs of Sense, the year is 1666 and an astronomer makes a prediction shared by no one else in the world: at the stroke...
A cheery deathbed story by way of introduction. My dad said a couple of things to me in the hours before he passed. Three of these were direct orders, which is a total power move: Find a husband. Have a baby. And . ....
Fifteen years ago, Kathryn Scanlan found a stranger’s five-year diary at an estate auction in a small town in Illinois. The owner of the diary was eighty-six years old when she began recording the details of her life in the small book. The diary...
In The Sun on My Head, Geovani Martins recounts the experiences of boys growing up in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the early years of the twenty-first...
I loved Garth Greenwell’s debut, What Belongs to You. It tells the story of a romance between two men, an American teacher and a charismatic hustler he propositions in a public bathroom in Sofia. The New York Times said: “A...
FSG’s poetry list for 2019 celebrates voices old and new, from Seamus Heaney to Katie Peterson. These are poems that interrogate today’s politics and anger—that reinvigorate and offer clarity, singing “the music of what happens.”
Menopause hit Darcey Steinke hard. First came hot flashes. Then insomnia. Then depression. As she struggled to express what was happening to her, she came up against a culture of silence. Throughout history, the natural physical transition of menopause has been viewed as something...
Helen arrives in Appalachian Ohio full of love and her boyfriend’s ideas for living off the land. Too soon, with winter coming, he calls it quits. Helped by Rudy—her government-questioning, wisdom-spouting, seasonal-affective-disordered boss—and a neighbor couple, Helen makes it to spring. Those neighbors, Karen...
Adam Foulds presents readers with a stunning and terrifying vision of the damage done between a fan and a celebrity in his new novel, Dream Sequence. It follows Henry, who has become...
Since Destroy All Monsters was published last fall, readers have reached out with all sorts of questions. Some have wanted to know the best place to start this two-sided novel—Side A or Side B? Others have wondered about the book’s layers, references, and threaded...
A bestselling literary sensation in Brazil, The Sun on My Head is Geovani Martins's forceful debut story collection about favela life in Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on his own...
Enter below for a chance to win a galley! To cool-headed, fastidious Pricilla Messing, Italy will be an escape, a brief glimpse of freedom from a life that's starting to feel like one long decline. Rescued from the bedside of her difficult mother, forty-something Cilla finds...
This week’s edition of Work in Progress celebrates Pride Month. We asked ten of our authors to reflect on a foundational queer text in their life—works that influenced their writing, style, or path as an artist. In their responses we see a wide range...
Two decades after his death, my father still troubles me. He remains a mystery and a contradiction—the man my mother loved, who sat each night at the head of the table, silently carving the roast. The man my brothers and I barely knew. Dinners were...
