In Ling Ma’s wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance, Candace Chen spends her days self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, devoted to routine. She goes to work, rides the subway, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend. So she barely notices when...

With her newest essay collection Look Alive Out There, Sloane Crosley brings us her trademark humor, wit, and charm. Yet there is also a new maturity to these essays: they are full of punch-packing observations and emotional insight, whether ruminating on fertility or...

At the opening of Laura van den Berg's The Third Hotel, we see Clare arrive in Havana, Cuba, to attend the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema. She was supposed to be there with her film scholar husband, Richard, but he was...

For my mother’s seventy-first birthday, I bought her a beautiful pair of forest-green gloves at Settimio Mieli in Rome. Nestled into a small street just steps away from the bustling Piazza San Silvestro, Settimio Mieli is a tiny oasis of luxury, with stacks of...

The first time I remember seeing termites I didn’t even know what they were. A cluster of bugs with long translucent wings appeared on the side of a friend’s Northern California garage while we were drinking cocktails on the deck. They seemed to spurt...

On Christmas Eve 2012, in Paris, the novelist Édouard Louis was raped and almost murdered by a man he had just met. This act of violence left Louis shattered; its aftermath made him a stranger to himself and sent him back to the village,...

Caryl Phillips’s A View of the Empire at Sunset is a biographical novel of the life of Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, which she wrote as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica...

Write about what captivates. This principle didn’t occur to me until Mysterium was finished, but now I believe in the words wholeheartedly. It was fascination and reverence for the mountains that bore the novel forward. You could say I was taken captive by...

In the years since his daughter Vanessa moved to America to become a professor of philosophy, Alan Querry has never been to visit. He has been too busy at home in northern England, holding together his business as a successful property developer. His younger...

The characters in my novel Early Work think they know everything. In fact, they only know a few things, and most of it is half-remembered (at best) from books or films or articles they’ve seen or read. One of the things they (and...

Thom Gunn has been described as “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Times Literary Supplement). Gunn was an Elizabethan poet in modern guise, though there’s nothing archaic or quaint about his poetry. His method was dispassionate...

My German Brother is a novel from renowned Brazilian musician and author Chico Buarque about a man’s lifelong search for his possibly imaginary half-brother. In 1960s São Paulo, teenage Ciccio finds a decades-old letter inside one of his father’s books, revealing an affair his...

The history of storytelling has always been one of shouting around a fire, and of the loudest voices retaining control of the larger narrative. This, of course, means certain things in patriarchal society. Stories about cis-gendered men and about whiteness and straightness as an...

Pablo Neruda wrote a total of 225 odes. The number stands as a pledge of alliance with a lyrical form he adored. He was also fond of other poetic forms (the sonnet, for instance), but as a practitioner of verso libre, unrhymed poetry, the...

“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 live a few days in the life of Akil...

In Champaign, Illinois, in the summer of 2011, in a closet in a bookstore consecrated to science fiction (the closet, that is, not the bookstore), I came upon a shelf of pocket paperbacks all attributed to one Barry N. Malzberg. I’m not sure what...

In Amity and Prosperity, prize-winning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold draws on seven years of reporting to tell the story of the energy industry’s impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia, and one woman’s transformation from a struggling single parent...

Ever since FSG Originals came out with the now-classic Southern Reach covers, there has been what seems like an ongoing competition to create amazing original art and design for other editions, from the somber grace of the original UK hardcovers to, well,...

In our current moment of political turmoil, words hold immense power. As we live through a time when words themselves are often being twisted and corrupted, we must look to voices that reclaim language as a tool of change. What follows is a reading...

As anyone who writes historical fiction knows, research becomes your partner. If you do too much, it becomes your master, weighing down the narrative; too little, the reader fails to be transported to the world of the book. The primary challenge I give myself...