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. We are all haunted by certain writers whom we have never read. “I should read that author,” we think guiltily to ourselves in libraries, at bookstores, during dinner-party conversations. “One of these days,” we assure ourselves, “I’ll pick that up.” Perhaps the author has been recommended to us, by a friend, a teacher, a glowing review. Or perhaps we are simply aware that the author is one of the greats, a celebrated master of his craft, a creative genius we would be sorry to miss.

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. With The Tenants (1971), his sixth novel, Bernard Malamud took a risk and wrote a book about two writers stuck in a nearly condemned building, in the urban wasteland of an America riddled with conflict. His need to dramatize in fiction a clash between race and individual will, between determination and creation, was clearly made urgent by the events and political transformation of the late sixties. The urgency is evident both in his reducing the politically vast conflict to bare essentials (two writers—an African-American and a Jew—one woman, one empty building, one destroyed manuscript), as well as in his consequent refusal, perhaps even inability, to provide any resolution to the tensions of the book. The Tenants is rife with discord and confusion and unanswerable questions, all leading to an eventual narrative disintegration that closely corresponds to the breakdown of order and civility the book depicts. Absent is soothing narrative harmony; absent is the recollection in tranquility; but present is the painful immediacy of a world in which writers cannot produce. A library of books exists about the inability to write, but The Tenants is a different beast. It’s a book about the impossibility of writing in a world which is about to be condemned. At the same time, it reaffirms the need for literature as a mode of human engagement with the world, insufferable though the world may be.

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. Bernard Malamud was thirty-eight years old when he published The Natural (1952), his antiheroic tale about a baseball player whose ambitions and desires are constantly thwarted, and one can’t help wonder how much of the story reflects the author’s own frustrations. It was his first novel, and while thirty-eight is still young for a writer, if not for a ballplayer, Malamud’s career had already been deferred for years by his need to scrape out a living during the Great Depression, and then by the Second World War.

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?

This October marks John Berryman’s centenary, and to honor the hundredth anniversary of this inventive, transformative poet’s birth, we’re republishing a number of his works. In addition to The Heart is Strange, a new volume of selected poems edited by Daniel Swift, we’re also reissuing Berryman's Sonnets, 77 Dream Songs, and the complete Dream Songs. Here, John Darnielle—Mountain Goats frontman, avowed Berryman fanatic, and author of the novel Wolf in White Van, also coming from FSG this fall—takes us beyond the Dream Songs and into the pleasures of "Tampa Stomp" (which is included in The Heart is Strange). - Editors

It started with a quotation. “In those days,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, in a letter intended to publicize the 1939 premiere of his play The Fifth Column, “Herbert Matthews of The New York Times, Henry T. Gorrell of United Press, Sefton Delmer of the Daily Express, Martha Gellhorn of Colliers, Virginia Cowles, then for Hearst, now of the London Times, Joris Ivens, who made the ‘Spanish Earth,’ Johnny Ferno, who photographed it, Josephine Herbst for various American weeklies and for humanity in general, Sidney Franklin working for me, all International Brigade men on leave, and the greatest and most varied collection of ladies of the evening I have ever seen all lived at the Hotel Florida. . . . [Y]ou could learn as much at the Hotel Florida in those years as you could learn anywhere in the world.”

In Andrei Bitov’s new novel, The Symmetry Teacher, the infamous and inscrutable writer Urbino Vanoski declares that “Everyone thinks that choosing what to write about is the hardest thing. No, the hardest thing is to think up the one who’s writing. All the writers we read and revere were able to summon up within themselves someone who writes for them. And who are they, then, besides the ones who write?” Before publication, we ask for biographical notes from each of our authors. From Bitov, we received the ANTI-CV. It’s fitting, as a list of publications and accolades for this uncanny stylist simply falls short describing the one who writes. “You’d like to know how it really was?” Vanoski asks. “It’s hard for me to remember what I have written and what I have lived. I think it all really happened, because this time I recounted everything from memory. I didn't invent anything. Perhaps you’re right, I’m—a writer.” For Bitov fans and neophytes alike, the ANTI-CV is a humorous yet defiant proclamation that reaches beyond the biographical and into the immutable psyche of the Artist.

In 1967, the poet John Berryman—already a Pulitzer Prize winner for his 77 Dream Songs—was interviewed by the English critic A. Alvarez. The interview, which ran over the course of three days, was filmed for the BBC at a pub, Ryan’s Beggars Bush, in Ballsbridge, Dublin, and it is from this footage that the clips of Berryman reading his Dream Songs—#14 and #29—which now circulate on YouTube are drawn.

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work. “A dream recounted is a reader...

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work. I often think of my favorite...

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work. “Berryman,” by W.S. Merwin, is originally...

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work. The incandescent temperament of Berryman's poetry...

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work.

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work.

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work. This is an unpublished letter, dated...

In celebration of the centenary of James Laughlin’s birth (October 30, 1914), Jonathan Galassi recalls his time at Meadow House in Norfolk, CT with the publisher and founder of New Directions. This essay originally appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 23, No. 1/2. Next month, FSG will publish “Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions, by Ian S. MacNiven. My picture of J. Laughlin is indivisible from the place where he lived, a small town in northwestern Connecticut where even today nature remains dominant. Waves of hills cut by headlong brooks, second-growth forest of tall white pine, birch and hardwood cut by old logging roads, glacial boulders in the fields—and strong weather, especially long, cold, snowy winters: reputedly the highest point in the state, Norfolk is known as the Ice Box of Connecticut.

“I’m a failed poet,” William Faulkner confessed to Jean Stein in 1956, during a conversation subsequently published in the Paris Review. “Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after...

This piece is excerpted from Ted and I, Gerald Hughes’s poignant memoir about his childhood with his younger brother Ted. The two remained close throughout Ted’s career as a poet, and here Gerald reflects on his brother’s marriage to Sylvia...

No modern American writer has had so lively a posthumous life as Flannery O’Connor. When she she died, of lupus, in August 1964, age thirty-nine, she was the author of two novels—Wise Blood (1952) and

Paul Elie

The air was hot and sodden with humidity, and although it was October, a summer thunderstorm felt imminent. We caught a bus crammed with commuters and careened downhill to Trastevere through the evening rush hour—one of the four traffic jams that Roman drivers endure...