Welcome to Work in Progress, a compendium of original works, exclusive excerpts, and interviews with authors from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. These are the stories behind the books which FSG started publishing in 1992 as a printed newsletter. Now we send an email every...

We're rewarding subscribers with an advance edition of Richard Lloyd Parry's People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the Streets of Tokyo—And The Evil That Swallowed Her Up. If you haven't yet joined, there may still be time to sign up and receive your own copy ahead of its June publication. But note that when they're gone, they're gone. (Also note this offer is only available in the United States.) -Ryan Chapman Sean McDonald, the book's editor, is the executive editor and director of paperback publishing at FSG. Two of my favorite books are In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song. My favorite city on the planet—after New York, I suppose—is Tokyo. So, for me, the set-up of People Who Eat Darkness is as alluring as they get: A young woman named Lucie Blackman moves to Tokyo, where she stands out like, well, like a tall, blonde, 21-year-old in Japan. And then she disappears. Her friend receives a mysterious message saying Lucie has joined a religious cult, but no one believes that. The Japanese police seem helpless and hopeless. Lucie's family comes to Japan, hires a series of investigators, digs into leads on their own that take them into the craziest, darkest corners of Tokyo's subcultures. And this is only the beginning of the story.

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 partnered with the good folks at BOMB Magazine to offer our subscribers an exclusive...

As a special offer to Work in Progress subscribers, our friends at BOMB Magazine are offering their complete online interview with controversial French writer Tristan Garcia. This will be available only for a short time. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do so here; you'll receive a link to the interview in your inbox shortly thereafter. Garcia's novel, Hate: A Romance, won the prestigious Prix de Flore. He has previously written a book of philosophy. -Ryan Chapman "To me, a novel is specifically defined as an experience—concerning morality and knowledge—that takes the shape of a story. Like any experience, it runs the risk of having imperfect results, but it must always allow us to know a little more than what we already knew, than what we have personally experimented with in our own life. It is truly a moral adventure. The experience must particularly—and this is the specific power of the novel—give us the means to escape the limits of our morality (individual, familial, national, of class, or species) to adopt that of an Other (the character) who can truly begin to exist there where our own actions end." -Tristan Garcia

It's a privilege to help usher in Nelson Mandela's Conversations with Myself, an international publishing event. We've selected President Barack Obama's foreword to the book as our monthly exclusive for Work in Progress readers. A preview is excerpted below. -Ryan Chapman "Like many people around the world, I came to know of Nelson Mandela from a distance, when he was imprisoned on Robben Island. To so many of us, he was more than just a man – he was a symbol of the struggle for justice, equality, and dignity in South Africa and around the globe. His sacrifice was so great that it called upon people everywhere to do what they could on behalf of human progress.

Would you sacrifice one life to save five? Is it okay to steal a drug your child needs to survive? These are the questions Professor Michael J. Sandel poses in his legendary course and New York Times-bestseller Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? Sandel's class on moral philosophy is consistently the most popular at Harvard, with over 1,000 students at a time. On November 7th, we're taking his accessible approach directly to readers with a national, live, interactive format called teleforum. It's a new form of the traditional author reading, one where readers can join in from anywhere in the country. All you need to participate is a telephone. Broadnet's teleforum enables readers to interact with an author directly, answering his questions and responding with your own. Simply sign up in advance and we call you as the event begins. It's completely free. Sandel debating "The Moral Side of Murder":