On Thursday, Nov. 29, which would have been Madeleine L’Engle’s 94th birthday, the Diocesan House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on New York City’s Upper West Side was dedicated as a Literary Landmark in honor of the nearly four decades that she wrote and worked in its library. L’Engle is the author of A Wrinkle in Time, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, among numerous other titles. Leonard S. Marcus, author of the oral biography Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L’Engle in Many Voices, made these remarks: In 1966—three years after winning the Newbery Medal for A Wrinkle in Time—Madeleine L’Engle volunteered to serve as Cathedral librarian here at St. John the Divine. The job she took on was an ill-defined, more or less full-time position that had nothing much to do with the Dewey Decimal System. For the next thirty-plus years—for as long as she had a steady connection to New York City—L’Engle, when she was not out of town, would arrive at the Cathedral each weekday morning by 10, greet school groups or other visitors, respond to her sack-loads of fan mail, pause for lunch, and then, if no one else happened by to talk with her, would write all afternoon. “People who needed to use the library would wander in,” her editor Sandra Jordan recalled, “as would people for whom Madeleine served as a spiritual adviser. She had a great many of those relationships, including with a number of people whose lives had been hard or complicated or who had suffered great losses. She felt a responsibility to people in need,” Jordan said, “as well as a responsibility to people who responded to her writings from some deep place in their lives.”

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.

by Dennis Mahoney It’s 1990 and I’m a loser. Becoming a novelist hasn’t crossed my mind. I’m a high-school junior who’s shown some aptitude in art, and by aptitude I mean I’m better than classmates who don’t try at all. My art teacher is just happy I do the assignments instead of throwing Exact-o knives into the ceiling. I had a creative impulse throughout my early life, fueled by supportive parents, Legos, and the original Star Wars trilogy. Relatives raved about my drawings. I got a spaceship illustration printed in the local paper during grade school. And I didn’t really want to be Luke or Han. I wanted to be George Lucas and create something awesome. But I couldn’t be bothered to develop any skills. Mötley Crüe was big in my life, as were the Commodore 64 video games my friends and I swapped along our paper routes. I had bad hair, just shy of a bowl cut. Major cysts instead of zits. A soft, pale, jean-jacketed body. I’d never had a serious girlfriend because girls have standards, and because I kept thinking my luck might change, which is the best way to ensure it never, ever does.

On Willa Cather, Alfred A. Knopf, and a case of Rothschild by Jeff Seroy Twenty-seven years ago, when I was working on the publication of Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice at Oxford University Press, I started to wonder how I had overlooked a writer whose work, in Sharon O’Brien’s groundbreaking study, sounded so interesting and so different from what I had assumed it to be. I began at the beginning—Cather’s stories in The Troll Garden; her first, stiff attempt at extended fiction, Alexander’s Bridge; her two early and perennially popular novels, My Antonia and O Pioneers!—and I read on. There’s a lot of Cather, so if you love her work, you’re in luck, for there’s a lot to love. And it turns out there’s an extensive underground of discerning Cather lovers: her appeal isn’t limited, as the paperback covers of her books often suggest, to girls in grade school. Just now there is cause for Cather lovers to rejoice: her current executors have authorized a marvelous volume containing 556 pieces from her correspondence, which has spent decades off limits to all but a select cut of scholars. As a publisher, I was immediately drawn to Cather’s voluble interactions with her two houses, Houghton Mifflin Company and Alfred A. Knopf, at both of which I’ve worked. The distinctive DNAs of these institutions were instantly recognizable in her letters, despite the fact that half a century had elapsed between my employment and the day Cather wrote to Houghton’s Ferris Greenslet that “unless you see it otherwise, I shall refuse to say that I have ‘left’ you . . . but that it is true that Knopf is going to publish this next book.” I had always understood that Cather left Houghton for Knopf because she wanted her books more beautifully designed, more handsomely produced—something Knopf has been notable for since its founding in 1915. (They’ve published this newest volume, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, and it’s exemplary of their expertise. It would have delighted Cather in that regard, though assuredly not in the more central fact of its existence—it was her express wish that her letters be kept from the public eye.) Yes, she grouses about Houghton’s ugly mustard-colored cases, and scrutinizes headbands more than would most writers, but Cather’s letters reveal that she left Houghton for a more serious reason: she felt undervalued and misunderstood by their publicity department. She was frustrated by Houghton’s tradition-bound, buttoned-up, high-minded Bostonianism—she nailed it—and she worried that Houghton didn’t perceive her growth as a writer and therefore acknowledge her potential to reach a broader readership.

Averill Curdy on What Brought Her to Poetry Wayward: difficult to control or predict; shortened from obsolete Middle English awayward, “turned away.”   I’ve kept a diary, more or less faithfully, for over 30 years. I’ve moved the expanding shelf of filled journals between various apartments in Seattle, and then to Texas, Missouri, Michigan, and finally to Chicago. I’ve copied favorite passages from my reading, noted the rare dream, and jotted down ideas, stray images, or lines for poems; I’ve paginated and indexed them. I mourned when my favorite notebook—an Exaclair sketchbook with 100 pages of 100-gram French paper that loved ink—was discontinued. Writing in one of these was happiness, small, but durable as the cup of coffee my husband makes for me each morning. But I never so much as glance at a single one of those diaries after writing the final words on its last page. The summer I turned 25 my mother was dying of breast cancer. Long after she died, I broke the middle joint of my thumb fielding an easy ground ball at second base during a softball game. The doctor bent my thumb backwards from the break, binding it into position so that the tendon and joint would knit themselves back together, then sent me home with some Tylenol. That night the pain reduced the little vanities and injuries, desire, and self-regard of my identity to kindling. The next day I was able to get a prescription for codeine and the cessation of that pain was an experience of delicious release from bondage. Afterwards, I was able to think of what my mother must have endured without complaint as the cancer colonized her bones and soft tissues.

by Maureen N. McLane What a strange, vital, careening book—what a book for now. Yet also, what a fascinating document of the early 20th century. A Poet in New York, “New York in a Poet,” as Lorca himself glossed it: this is clearly one of the great works of transnational modernism, a cracked Andalucían mirror held up to New York’s crazed, vibrant, and disgusting face. The best poetry is “news that stays news,” as Pound put it. This book seems to me news I can use—registering the skyscrapered canyons of the city, its savage underbelly everywhere humming with reptilian life (all those iguanas and crocodiles running around in the poems), the titanic fraudulence of Wall Street, the vomiting crowds of a Coney Island Sunday. Here’s a book that reminds us, as Sandy violently reminded us, that Manhattan is an island, that Brooklyn and Queens have extensive shorelines, that this is a fragile land engulfable by oceanic waters and estuarial overflow. This is a river- and shore-minded book. It looks for sailors; it loves the contingent arrival, the polyglot port, the lowlife bustle, the glance, the sneer. Like Whitman, Lorca is alert to the rhythms of waves and tides. In this as much as in its more obvious hailing of Whitman as camerado, Lorca is a true heir to the beautiful, at times ornery psalmodist of Mannahatta.

Jeffrey Eugenides by John Freeman For the past fifteen years or so, whenever a novel has been published, John Freeman has been there to greet it. As a critic for over two hundred newspapers worldwide and onetime president of the NBCC, he's reviewed thousands of books and interviewed hundreds of authors. You might have thought his recent five-year stint as editor of Granta would have slowed him down some, but just weeks ago he was still finding time to sit down with the likes of Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, and Aleksandar Hemon as he rounded out the contents of How to Read a Novelist, his book of more than fifty author profiles coming from FSG Originals this October. Over the next two weeks, Work in Progress will publish an exclusive two-part preview of the book. Up first: Freeman’s conversation with FSG’s own Jeffrey Eugenides . . .

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.

by Toby Barlow This is a ghost story, I think. So, one morning, I woke up hungover in my Brooklyn apartment. This was years ago now. It was late on a clear summer day, the windows were open and blowing in the sea air from the New York harbor. I was in no great hurry to move. For some reason, I found myself mulling over a recent Hunter S. Thompson quote I had read regarding the death of George Plimpton. “I think the friends of George Plimpton should and must create a permanent monument to him,” Dr. Thompson had said. I didn’t really think much of it when I read it, but as I lay there this idea began to gain some momentum inside my head. Eventually, I crawled out of bed over to the computer and began doing some research on Plimpton. Yes, he was a gentleman, an editor, a supporter of the arts, oh and a boxer and an acrobat and a birdwatcher and a Boston Bruins goalie and, and, and, well, as the list grew I felt a great energy begin to overtake me, an urgency really. “Why yes,” I thought to myself, “yes, we must! We absolutely must build this statue for George.”

by Harry Eyres While researching Horace and Me, my book on the Roman poet (and a few other things besides), I was astonished time and again by the uncanny prescience of this ancient and some might think antiquated poet; by how pertinent so many of his words remain, two thousand years after they were written. Perhaps it was something like the experience an archaeologist has, pushing a spade into long-dormant earth and coming up with a perfect glittering coin or piece of jewelry: how can this thing still be shining so bright after so long?

Authors on the Books that Helped Them Come Out Reading may be a solitary experience, but for some of us, it let us know that we were not alone. While everyone’s story is different, many of us are united by our love of books and our belief that they have the power to bring us together and to show us that when we’re different, as Nicola Griffith writes, “we can be glad to be so.” Growing up gay can feel like an excruciatingly isolating experience, particularly without the resources to understand what it is exactly that makes you so different. Books gave us not only a sense of who we were, but who we could be. So whether you hid a copy of A Boy’s Own Story under the bed or kept Fingersmith in your sock drawer, between the covers we were able to find a world for ourselves within the world.

On the Redoubtable Janet Ross by Ben Downing There it was: Poggio Gherardo! Or no, maybe not—it was hard to tell. I was in a tiny Fiat with my friend Grazia, buzzing around the narrow, winding roads of Settignano, a few miles from Florence. We were looking for a particular hilltop house, and for a tantalizing second we thought we’d caught a glimpse of it, before the road snaked again. Grazia is the kindest of friends but an alarmingly impulsive driver, so I didn’t encourage her to make what surely would have been a U-turn at full speed. Instead we kept going, and after a few wrong turns we fetched up at the gate of Poggio Gherardo.

Scandinavia House, The Nordic Center in America, 2013 Dear friends, I’d like to introduce a dear friend of mine, Sjón. I met him first when I was sixteen. With others he had started the first and only surrealist movement in Iceland, a group of six or so members called Medúsa. I was in a punk band at the time. Medúsa wrote poetry, did scandalous food performances around the city, ran a gallery (which was actually kind of a shed), had exhibitions of paintings, drawings, and sculpture, and played music. They were all around twenty years old, which, at that age, was a lot older than me. I guess I became sort of the only female unofficial member.

Seamus Heaney’s death last week left a rift in our lives, and in poetry, that won’t easily be mended. A Nobel Laureate, a devoted husband, a sharp translator, a beloved friend, and the big-hearted leader of the “Government of the Tongue,” Seamus was a poet of conscience; his close-friend and fellow poet Paul Muldoon said, “He was the only poet I can think of who was recognized worldwide as having moral as well as literary authority.” Poetry was a vocation that he dedicated his life to, something he believed had “the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they too are an earnest of our veritable human being.” Uncannily attuned to the voices of the world around him, his poems made both the personal and collective subconscious realms concrete in language.

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.

I picked up Marcel Theroux’s latest novel “Far North” because of a personal recommendation from his father, the well-known travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux. Marcel is the second of Paul’s three sons. The younger two sons were born to Paul and his English wife Anne Castle, and were brought up and educated in the UK following their parent’s divorce, while the eldest son was born to a different, American woman – but that’s a long story I won’t go into here. The youngest, Louis, is active as a TV journalist and writer, based mainly in the UK. He is in a way the British equivalent of Michael Moore, and has many fans. A Japanese translation of his non-fiction book “The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures” has been published by Chūōkōron-shinsha and received quite favourable reviews. It is a uniquely fascinating book covering America’s underside from the eyes of a Brit, and well worth reading if you get the chance.

Carl Van Vechten was a polymath unparalleled in the history of American arts. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1880, he was, at various times, the nation’s most incisive and far-seeing arts critic who promoted names as diverse as Gertrude Stein and Bessie Smith long before it was popular to do so; a notorious socialite who held legendary parties; a de facto publicist for great forgotten names including Herman Melville; a best-selling author of scandalous novels; and one of the most important champions of African-American literature, vital in advancing the careers of Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Chester Himes.

On Leave by Daniel Anselme was first published in Paris—as La Permission—in the spring of 1957. It had few readers and only a handful of reviews. It was never reprinted. In America, you can’t find it in the Library of Congress or any major university collection. Save for an Italian translation, On Leave almost disappeared. Yet it was an important book, and has become more precious with the passing of time. It tells in simple terms of the damage wrought by an unpopular and unwanted war on young men who are obliged to fight it. In 1957, as France’s engagement in Algeria became ever more bloody, On Leave told French readers things they did not want to hear: the silence surrounding its publication speaks loudly of its power to disturb. This short novel was all the more unsettling because it is neither a testimony nor a polemic. In fact, it hardly mentions military action at all.

For most of his contemporaries, France was the place to go for culture, food, and education; for John Ashbery, the place, but especially its language, provided—from his very first encounter with it—something even more personal. As a fourteen-year-old sophomore at the Sodus High School in rural upstate New York, the French language gave Ashbery the ability to explore private thoughts in a form that only he could read and understand. He had roiling ideas and feelings—irritations at school and home, crushes on both girls and boys, uncertainties about love and sex—and curious, anxious parents. To whom could he express himself? That year his mother bought him his first diary; he purchased the next three. These books contained his first raw translations.

In commemoration of the centenary of Bernard Malamud's birth (April 26, 1914), FSG's Work in Progress will be celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature throughout the week. What’s the difference between a good book and a great book? Good books can be engrossing, insightful, and new. Good books often receive critical praise, and some even stand the test of time. Good books are sometimes better—in the commonly used senses of readability and craftsmanship—than great books. (Just ask anyone who admires a great book without ever having finished it.) Great books are what our world needs, but good books are what our culture desires, so good books are what most authors, most of the time, aspire to write.