Tupelo Hassman graduated from Columbia's MFA program. Her writing has been published in Paper Street Press, The Portland Review Literary Journal, Tantalum, We Still Like, ZYZZYVA, and by 100WordStory.org, FiveChapters.com, and Invisible City Audio Tours. Tupelo will be filming Girlchild's book tour for a short documentary, "Hardbound: A Novel's Life on the Road." Her website is www.tupelohassman.com. Girl Scouts are inexhaustible creatures, and so it shouldn't have surprised me to find precisely the advice I needed today in my friend Rory Dawn's tired old copy of the Girl Scout Handbook. An entire section detailing "How to Introduce Your Friends" waved at me from the Handbook's index, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Friend, I'd like you to meet someone. "That's very forward," you might think, "we've only just met. I don't even know how to pronounce your name!" And to yourself, because you are invariably polite, "What is a Tupelo?" But we are now acquainted, via our mutual friends and hosts, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. You've caught me wondering where I'm meant to deposit the sword-handled toothpicks at the hors d'oeuvres table at this monthly cocktail party that is the Work in Progress. I've admired your wrinkle-free ease in conversation and put down my growing collection of petite plastic swords to shake your hand. We've shared the awkward "let's be alone at the party together" moment that has birthed many a friendship, and in that spirit, I'd like to introduce you to Rory Dawn.

There's something about Etgar Keret's short stories that works especially well online. Perhaps it's their terseness, their easy vernacular, or their wry approach to the fundamental oddness of modern life. Also, magic goldfish. Gary Shteyngart—novelist, Twitterer, and illiteracy advocate—reads "What, of This Goldfish,...

Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was the author of Going Places, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, and The Men’s Club, among other books. FSG recently published his Collected Stories and The Essays of Leonard Michaels, and reissued his novel Sylvia. David Bezmozgis on Michaels and "Writing About Myself." Nothing should be easier than talking about ways in which I write about myself, but I find it isn't at all easy. Indeed, in writing about myself I encounter a problem that engages me even as I write this sentence.

Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is the author of Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of Depression and Grace, and five books on the relationship between literature and psychology. The following piece is adapted from Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away. February is one of my favorite months of the year, a time to appreciate romance with all manner of crimson-colored trappings—hearts and roses, of course, but also, for those most drunk on love, blood.  What’s a Valentine’s Day, after all, without an affectionate recollection of one of the greatest cult horror films of all time, My Bloody Valentine?  Show your sweetheart your true devotion by screening this 1981 slasher—Quentin Tarantino’s favorite in the genre, by the way.  Nothing says “I love you” like a man dressed as a miner sending people to hell with a pick-axe.

David Bezmozgis was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973. His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, won a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was a 2004 New York Times Notable Book. His second book,The Free World, was published by FSG in March 2011. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. In 2010, he was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” You can follow him on Twitter @dbezmozgis. What happens when the writer you admire most becomes your friend? In an essay he published in The New York Times in 1981, the writer Leonard Michaels cited the works of three writers who influenced him—Saul Bellow, Wallace Stevens, and Chekhov. He then wrote: “Finally, the writer who influences me more than any other: Isaac Babel. I never talk about his work.” Implicit was the idea that, if you were a writer, you were a fool or a heretic to say anything about your deepest and most fundamental influence.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novels Housekeeping (FSG, 1981), Gilead (FSG, 2004), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Home (FSG, 2008), and three books of nonfiction, Mother Country (FSG, 1989), The Death of Adam (1998) and Absence of Mind (2010). She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. When I was a child I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists. Surprising as it may seem, I had friends, some of whom read more than I did. I knew a good deal about Constantinople and the Cromwell revolution and chivalry. There was little here that was relevant to my experience, but the shelves of northern Idaho groaned with just the sort of old dull books I craved, so I cannot have been alone in these enthusiasms. Relevance was precisely not an issue for me. I looked to Galilee for meaning and to Spokane for orthodonture, and beyond that the world where I was I found entirely sufficient.

There's something about Etgar Keret's short stories that sound great when read aloud. Fortunately for us, a few of his notable friends have volunteered to read pieces from his latest collection, Suddenly, A Knock on the Door. You can also read Keret's story "Mystique" along with Willem Dafoe, should you so choose. "What Animal Are You?" Read by Jonathan Safran Foer "Mourner's Meal" Read by Shalom Auslander "Mystique" Read by Willem Dafoe

Jonathan Franzen is the author of four novels (Freedom, The Corrections, Strong Motion, and The Twenty-Seventh City), a collection of essays (How to Be Alone), a personal history (The Discomfort Zone), and a translation of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening, all published by FSG. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California. The following piece is excerpted from his new book Farther Away: Essays. There’s so much to read and so little time. I’m always looking for a reason to put a book down and not pick it up again, and one of the best reasons a writer can give me is to use the word then as a conjunction without a subject following it. She lit a Camel Light, then dragged deeply. He dims the lamp and opens the window, then pulls the body inside. I walked to the door and opened it, then turned back to her. If you use comma-then like this frequently in the early pages of your book, I won’t read any farther unless I’m forced to, because you’ve already told me several important things about yourself as a writer, none of them good.

By Andrés Neuman Translated from the Spanish by Richard Gwyn This story first appeared in The Coffin Factory, issue 3 I entered the hospital dying of hatred and wanting to give thanks. How fragile is rage. We might shout, hit, spit at a stranger. The same person to whom – depending on their verdict, depending on whether they tell us what we are anxious to hear – we might suddenly express our admiration, or hug, or swear an oath of loyalty. And it would be genuine, that love. I entered without thinking anything, thinking about not thinking. I knew that my mother’s present, my future, depended on the toss of a coin. And that that coin was not in my hands and maybe not in the hands of anyone else either, not even those of the doctor. I have always thought that the absence of god liberated us from an unbearable weight. But more than once, I have missed the idea of divine mercy when entering or leaving a hospital. Filled with seats, corridors, hierarchies and ceremonies of hope, silent on their upper floors, hospitals are the closest thing to a cathedral in which we unbelievers may tread. I entered trying to avoid this kind of reasoning, because I was afraid that I would end up praying like a cynic. I lent an arm to my mother, who so many times had given me hers when the world was enormous and my legs very short. Is it possible to shrink overnight? Can someone’s body turn into a sponge that has soaked up so many fears that it gains in density, while losing volume? My mother seemed shorter, thinner, but nevertheless more laden down than before, as if earthbound. Her porous hand closed over mine. I imagined a child in a bathtub, naked, expectant, squeezing a sponge. And I wanted to say something to my mother, and I didn’t know how to speak.

Prologue to Woes of the True Policeman by Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas Translated by Natasha Wimmer Woes of the True Policeman is a project that was begun at the end of the 1980s and continued until the writer’s death. What the reader has in his hands is the faithful and definitive version, collated from typescripts and computer documents, and bearing evidence of Roberto Bolaño’s clear intention to include the novel in a body of work in a perpetual state of gestation. There are also a number of epistolary references to the project. In a 1995 letter, Bolaño writes: “Novel: for years I’ve been working on one that’s titled Woes of the True Policeman and which is MY NOVEL. The protagonist is a widower, 50, a university professor, 17-year-old daughter, who goes to live in Santa Teresa, a city near the U.S. border. Eight hundred thousand pages, a crazy tangle beyond anyone’s comprehension.” The unusual thing about this novel, written over the course of fifteen years, is that it incorporates material from other works by the author, from Llamadas telefónicas (Phone Calls) to The Savage Detectives and 2666, with the peculiarity that even though we meet some familiar characters—particularly Amalfitano, Amalfitano’s daughter, Rosa, and Arcimboldi—the differences are notable. These characters belong to Bolaño’s larger fictional world, and at the same time they are the exclusive property of this novel.

Jonathan Franzen by John Freeman Last week in Work in Progress we brought you John Freeman's conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides as the first of an exclusive two-part preview of Freeman's How to Read a Novelist, his book of more than fifty author profiles coming from FSG Originals this October. This week, we conclude that preview with Freeman's conversation with Jonathan Franzen.

Ruth woke at four in the morning and her blurry brain said “Tiger.” That was natural; she was dreaming. But there were noises in the house, and as she woke she heard them. They came across the hallway from the lounge room. Something large was rubbing against Ruth’s couch and television and, she suspected, the wheat-coloured recliner disguised as a wingback chair. Other sounds followed: the panting and breathing of a large animal; a vibrancy of breath that suggested enormity and intent; definite mammalian noises, definitely feline, as if her cats had grown in size and were sniffing for food with enormous noses. But the sleeping cats were weighing down the sheets at the end of Ruth’s bed, and this was something else.

Siri Hustvedt & Paul Auster   Previously, Work in Progress brought you John Freeman’s conversations with Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Franzen as exclusive previews of How to Read a Novelist, Freeman’s book of more than fifty author profiles. This week, to mark the publication of How to Read a Novelist (it's on-sale now!) and in anticipation of the November release of Paul Auster's Report from the Interior, we bring you a special bonus conversation that's not included in How to Read a Novelist: Freeman talking with Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster in 2008, on the eve of the publications of Hustvedt's novel The Sorrows of an American and Auster's Man in the Dark.

My name is Nicholas Patrick Slopen. I was born in Singapore City on April 10, 1970. I died on September 28, 2009, crushed in the wheel arch of a lorry outside Oval tube station. This document is my testimony. As will shortly become clear, I have an unknown but definitely brief period of time to explain the events leading up to my death and to establish the continuity of my identity after it. In view of the constraints upon me, I hope the reader will forgive my forgoing the usual niceties of autobiography. At the same time, I will have to commit myself to some details with a certain, and perhaps wearisome, degree of exactitude in order to provide evidence to support the contention contained in the first paragraph of this testimony: that I am Nicholas Slopen, and that my consciousness has survived my bodily death.

One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power. In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope--from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton--and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. 

Annihilation is the first volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, which is publishing throughout 2014: volume two (Authority) in May, and volume three (Acceptance) in September. Here, courtesy of Rap Genius, is the first chapter of Annihilation with annotations by the author.

Authority is the second volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, which is publishing throughout 2014: volume one (Annihilation) last February, and volume three (Acceptance) in September. Here, courtesy of Rap Genius, is the first chapter of Authority with annotations by the author. Previously: Annihilation, Annotated

This piece is excerpted from Aleksandar Hemon’s The Matters of Life, Death, and More: Writing on Soccer, now available from FSG Originals. Throughout the 1982 World Cup in Spain, I was in love, which is to say that I suffered through a painful conflict of most intense interests. I was a Sarajevo high school senior and an unwilling virgin. My girlfriend—let her be known as Renata—had just graduated and was studying for a med school entrance exam. Under the pretense of helping her prepare for it, I spent a lot of time at her home, which she shared with her father and schizophrenic brother. In her room, I read mock test questions to her, mainly biology-related, until, slowly, hotly, we moved from the theory of adolescent biology to its practical questions: Where does the heat in our heads come from? What should we do with these hormone-driven, tinder-box bodies? The biology textbook tossed aside we practically dared her father or brother to barge in and catch us locked in a feral clench, conducting biological research by petting each other very, very heavily. Sometimes the room was so infested with arousal that we had to open the windows and let it out to affect the innocent birds and bees of Sarajevo.

Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder. Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church—the only available shelter from the rain—and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security. Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves.

Isolated by a disfiguring injury since the age of seventeen, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between the real and the imagined. As the creator of Trace Italian—a text-based, role-playing game played through the mail—Sean guides players from around the world through his intricately imagined terrain, which they navigate and explore, turn by turn, seeking sanctuary in a ravaged, savage future America. Nominated for a National Book Award, John Darnielle's Wolf in White Van unfolds in reverse until we arrive at both the beginning and the climax: the event that has shaped so much of Sean’s life. My father used to carry me down the hall to my room after I came home from the hospital. By then I could walk if I had to, but the risk of falling was too great, so he carried me like a child. It’s a cluster memory now: it consists of every time it happened and is recalled in a continuous loop. He did it every day, for a long time, from my first day back until what seemed like a hundred years later, and after a while, the scene blurred into innumerable interchangeable identical scenes layered one on top of the other like transparencies. On the wall to the right, as you head toward my room, there’s a small bookcase with a painting above it, a western scene: hills and trees, a lake. A blue and green vista near sundown, a silent place. But if you look harder, or happen to turn your head at the right moment as you pass, you see figures, human figures, on what you might otherwise take for an empty ridge. It’s like an optical illusion, this hunting party on the near hill, their curving hats dark in the orange dusk: they come out of hiding if you look at the empty scenery long enough. They were always there in my journey, popping up in the same place each time I’d drift by in my half-sleep. They never lost their power to surprise just by being there, a little smoke rising from somewhere within their three-strong party, their brushstroke rifles resting lightly on their shoulders.