Susan Mitchell selected a few designers from the past she considers iconic: Paul Rand, George Salter, and W.A. Dwiggins. Here's a quick look at their work:

I sat down with three designers over coffee and muffins to talk about how they came to their jobs, and where they think the industry is headed. Susan Mitchell is Senior Vice President and Art Director at FSG; Charlotte Strick is Art Director, also at FSG; and Henry Sene Yee is Creative Director at Picador. —Ryan Chapman, Online Marketing Manager "I’m not just here to create something beautiful. Sometimes I’m here to be a plumber."

Greg Lindsay is a journalist whose writing has appeared in publications like Time, Fast Company, and recently the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. His new book Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next (co-written with John D. Kasarda) is a fascinating look at the future of cities in an increasingly connected world. To mark its publication this month, Lindsay hopped on Skype with Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, to talk about Aerotropolis, global urbanism, the role of the architect, and the internet's place in architectural criticism today. Work in Progress is bringing you the second part of this conversation; you can head over to BLDGBLOG to read the first part. Geoff Manaugh is the founder and author of BLDGBLOG, one of the best architecture and design blogs out there today. He is a former senior editor of Dwell magazine, a contributing editor at Wired UK, and the author of The BLDGBLOG Book, one of Amazon's 100 Best of 2009.

“A man is sitting in a room, all by himself. He’s lonely. He’s a writer. He wants to write a story. It’s been a long time since he wrote his last story, and he misses it. He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right—something out something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But when it’s something out of something, that means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before.” —from “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door” by Etgar Keret Faber & Faber publisher and editor Mitzi Angel writes: “Etgar Keret’s short tales have always resisted classification. Are they fables? Are they forays into the Israeli unconscious? How can they be so funny and so devastatingly sad at the same time? Can you even call Suddenly, A Knock on the Door (Spring 2012) a ‘story collection’? We thought it would be fun to see what his vivid, shape-shifting narratives might inspire in other people, especially given that Etgar has always been interested in blurring the boundaries between different artistic media.”

T. M. Wolf is the author of Sound, which will be published by Faber & Faber in April. He is twenty-nine, grew up on the New Jersey Shore, and he has written for a variety of music publications, particularly on hip-hop. He recently graduated from Yale Law School. You can follow him on Twitter @tom_tm_wolf. You have a tremendous academic record and this is something of a departure from your studies. How and why did you come to write this novel? When I was in the early stages of writing Sound (2005 to 2008), I was bouncing around a lot, basically moving from one school and one academic program to the next. I was working very hard trying to “find” something (I’m still not quite sure what) and learning a lot, but I still felt like I was missing something (again, I’m not sure exactly what). At the time—and I still think this is true—fiction seemed like a more versatile, and maybe more productive, way to explore ideas that my academic work kept kicking up but that academic methods didn’t seem flexible enough to address. These were all questions of experience, I guess: what it feels like to be human, how our minds work, how we relate to other people, what it’s like to be answer-oriented in a world that’s chaotic and doesn’t yield answers all that readily.

Amelia Gray grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Her first collection of stories, AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection, Museum of the Weird, was awarded the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She lives in Los Angeles. THREATS is her first novel. You may have already seen Amelia Gray reciting book passages from the back of a moped, or declaiming threats to a boisterous audience in Washington, D.C. So with Gray's novel THREATS in mind, we built a site that addresses one question: Would you like to send vaguely menacing epistles to friends, loved ones, and enemies?

When I got off the ferry in the harbor of the Greek island of Sifnos in 1972, I was 21 years old and very serious about being a painter. I had had three successful shows and I had just been accepted to a three-year Master of Fine Arts program at the Royal College of Art in London. I was, I guess, a little full of myself, but very disciplined. Drawing and painting were all that mattered to me, and I had come to Sifnos looking for a quiet place in the sun to work in peace.

by Charlotte Strick Part of my job as Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Paperback Art Director is the repackaging of books from our illustrious backlist. Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond resulted in one of my favorite recent redesigns. To start, we typically mine our company’s massive library archive to see how the title was packaged over the decades. Sometimes there’s a hidden gem sitting on the shelves that’s been waiting to be rediscovered. In 1954, when our company was known as Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, the first edition hardcover of Macaulay’s novel boasted a jacket illustration and design by the venerable Milton Glaser, who is responsible for several of my favorite mid-century FSG jackets, but this one wasn’t as bold or as graphic as those others. The trusty internet turned up a more abstract solution by one of my design heroes, Alvin Lustig. Published in paperback by Meridian Fiction in 1960, it sold for a mere $1.35. Over the years, there had also been different photographic cover treatments by other publishing houses that took less artful approaches, trying perhaps to appeal to more contemporary audiences.

In April 2014, art director Charlotte Strick and typographer Jude Landry gave FSG’s Bernard Malamud library a sharp makeover on the occasion of Malamud’s centenary. Here we reveal the new, soon-to-be-classic covers for the first time, and Charlotte and Jude discuss the ins and outs of giving a new look to a true icon of twentieth-century American literature. Sean McDonald: What’s it like to be assigned a project like redesigning the entire oeuvre of a great American writer, one who’s having his 100th birthday this month, who’s going into the Library of America as we speak? What’s your first step?

One of the great pleasures of seeing The Southern Reach Trilogy in print has been the ingenuity and sophistication of the foreign language editions. Among the absolute best of the many versions are Destino’s covers for the Spanish editions. Destino commissioned artist and designer Pablo Delcán to create these covers, which capture the surreal vibe of the novels as well as the theme of transformation running through the narrative. I caught up with Delcán via email to ask him about how he created these striking images, and to share with readers some early versions. You can experience more of his amazing work at his website. Spanish readers can also check out the Destino Southern Reach webpage.

Last month the United States Postal Service issued a Flannery O’Connor stamp, complete with a glowing portrait and peacock feathers. Coincidentally, we also recently reissued all of O’Connor’s fiction with new covers painted by June Glasson and designed by Charlotte...

In 1995 Witold Rybczynski published his first article in The New Yorker. Afterwards Tina Brown, the magazine’s editor, invited him to join her for lunch at her famous table at the Royalton where she asked him what he would like to write about next....

The Tale of Shikanoko is a four-volume epic set in the mythic, medieval Japan of Lian Hearn’s imagination. The first volume, Emperor of the Eight Islands, comes out in the United States on April 26; the remaining volumes will all be published...

One of the first chairs you need, when furnishing a new home, is a dining chair. You can make do with cushions on the floor instead of an easy chair, as I did in my first apartment, and you can read a book or...

Two items from the poet John Ashbery’s private collections appear on the cover for The Songs We Know Best. One is a yellow card from the early 1940s that his father, Chester "Chet" Ashbery, designed to advertise goods sold by the Ashbery...

Now through July 30, 2017, MCDxFSG is holding a fan art contest to celebrate the release of Jeff VanderMeer's Borne. The contest is limited to two-dimensional interpretations of the shape-shifting, color-changing, mind-boggling biotech Borne. You might find the following passages from the early...

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,...

“The Topeka School is a novel of exhilarating intellectual inquiry, penetrating social insight, and deep psychological sensitivity . . . To the extent that we can speak of a future at present, I think the future of the novel is here.” —Sally Rooney, author...