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 April 1988, Valerie Solanas—the writer, radical feminist, author of the SCUM Manifesto and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol—was discovered dead at fifty-two in her hotel room in San Francisco, alone, penniless, and surrounded by the pages of her last writings. In Valerie,...

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 of noon on June 30 of that year, a solar eclipse will cast all...

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 century. Drawing on his own childhood and adolescence, Martins uses the rhythms and slang...

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 rich, important debut,...

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.” Published A Piece of Good News by Katie...