Lawrence Joseph’s A Certain Clarity brings together poems selected from throughout his career, spanning his first book—1983’s Shouting at No One—to his most recent, So Where Are We? (2017). Joseph’s poetry has always grappled with the defining moments of our age, from riots and...
A story collection takes shape over years, usually (or at least in my case, and that of most other writers I’ve known) without an overarching plan in place. The stories accumulate, creating patterns and echoes, until there is a group that one hopes will...
In January, thousands of customers flocked to a department store in Tianjin, China, stocking up on clothes and gifts for Chinese New Year. But as the month wore on, the store’s employees began to fall ill; over the course of just a few days,...
For this installment of “Developing Stories,” a series from Work in Progress, author Carlos Fonseca presents a series of visual pieces that guided him while writing his novel, Natural History. "Every novel is an archive or at least refers back to one. Storytelling has...
The only work James Harvey completed in the last year of his life (he died, this past May, at the age of 90) was a six page introduction to his late friend Gilberto Perez’ book The Eloquent Screen. And the writing of that short...
dayliGht is a dazzling collection of poems from a necessary new voice, at once a clarion call for stories of Black women and a rebuke of broken notions of sexuality and race. In her stunning debut, written in protest to an absence of representation,...
Laura van den Berg is known as “a prose master” (Entertainment Weekly) and Sigrid Nunez has referred to her as “one of our most imaginative storytellers." In this "Story Behind the Story", she brings us behind the scenes in writing "Hill of Hell,"...
In 1957, Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the U.S. Defense Department in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny, like countless...
Over the next few months, we’ll be putting put on a spotlight on each of our editors and three things that they’ve been enjoying right now: whether that be a beloved piece of music, a tried-and-true recipe, an all-consuming movie or show, and of...
Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled...
Sharks in the Time of Saviors is a groundbreaking debut novel that folds the legends of Hawaiian gods into an engrossing family saga; a story of exile and the pursuit of salvation from debut author Kawai Strong Washburn. In this interview, transcribed from a...
Bound galleys of Dalia Sofer’s Man of My Time happened to go out just as political tensions started to escalate between the US and Iran over the killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani. Some weeks later, as we publish this novel, the entire...
The coincidence of Coronavirus and National Poetry Month is perhaps fitting: for poetry as a form feels oddly suited to the demands of the moment. We speak of things going viral; a small poem is meme-sized, and stanzas may as well have been designed...
Some places draw language to the surface. The surroundings (that lovely word) provoke a response, sometimes through the sheer subtlety of the landscape’s character. As I wrote ten years ago in “The Rough Bounds,” “I like the sort of track that passes / out...
The Whiteness of Bones is about more than coming of age and exquisite physical description. Susanna Moore writes frankly about servants and striving and inequality with a deceptively light touch. While beauty is a prominent theme of the novel, it’s often not all that...
Phyllis Grant’s Everything Is Under Control is a memoir about appetite as it comes, goes, and refocuses its object of desire. Grant’s story follows the sometimes smooth, sometimes jagged, always revealing contours of her life: from her days as a dancer struggling to find her...
We are excited to reveal the cover for Marilynne Robinson's upcoming novel, Jack, publishing on September 29, 2020. Robinson returns to the world of Gilead for the latest novel in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction. Jack tells the story of John...
If Men, Then, Eliza Griswold’s second poetry collection, charts a radical spiritual journey through catastrophe. Alternately searing and hopeful, funny and fraught, the poems explore the world’s fracturing through the collapse of the ego, embodied in a character named “I”—a soul attempting to...
“Poetry is not the record of an event—it is an event.” —Robert Lowell Even in times of stillness and physical distance, reading a great poem has the ability to move us, transport us—in other words, poetry will always retain its power to feel, as Lowell...
Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and...