A Limited-Edition Chapbook for Subscribers

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We created Work in Progress to highlight, among other things, the debut fiction we’re excited about at the FSG offices. It doesn’t matter if you’ve read fiction for five or fifty years, there’s nothing quite like the thrill of discovering a new voice.

This August we’re publishing one such novel, Amy Waldman’s The Submission. It has already garnered a suite of starred pre-publication reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist. Richard Price (Lush Life, “The Wire”) writes, “Amy Waldman’s The Submission is a wrenching panoramic novel about the politics of grief in the wake of 9/11. From the aeries of municipal government and social power, to the wolf-pack cynicism of the press, to the everyday lives of the most invisible of illegal immigrants and all the families that were left behind, Waldman captures a wildly diverse city wrestling with itself in the face of a shared trauma like no other in its history.”

We’ve produced a handsome chapbook with an early look at the novel. The print run is limited to 700 and only available to Work in Progress subscribers. (What’s that? You aren’t a subscriber yet? Let’s remedy that.) Subscribers should check their inbox for more information.

Courtney Hodell, The Submission‘s editor, writes:

“Sometimes fiction takes us out of our world. Sometimes fiction restores us to it.

“Ten years after 9/11, the debut novelist Amy Waldman, a former New York Times reporter and bureau chief, has dared to imagine a competition for a memorial commemorating a devastating terrorist attack. Their fraught deliberation complete, the jurors open the envelope containing the anonymous winner’s name—and discover he is an American Muslim. Instantly they are cast into a roiling debate about the claims of grief, the ambiguities of art, and the meaning of Islam. Their agonized response is only a preamble to the country’s.

The Submission is a kaleidoscope of conflicting points of view, all passionately held. The widow, the reporter, the politician, the architect: each wants to be the one to answer the urgent question of how to remember, and understand, a national tragedy.”

See Also:

Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review

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