[caption id="attachment_605" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="© Cormac Scully"][/caption] Paul Murray is the author of the novels Skippy Dies (shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Award) and An Evening of Long Goodbyes. Simultaneously the best and the worst gift I ever received was a Batman kite my father bought me when I was seven. We had gone to the local newsagent to buy the paper; I found the kite among the shelves of low-grade newsagent-type toys—bubble mix, plastic dinosaurs, translucent guns that sparked inside when you pulled the trigger. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen: Batman in his opaque, implacable DC Comics incarnation (this was still a few years before the first Tim Burton movie) on an appropriately bat-shaped canvas.

Two of our writers contacted us about creating a video for the "It Gets Better" national campaign to educate and help struggling LGBT teenagers. Here, Justin Spring and Wendy Moffat talk about the trials Sam Steward and E. M. Forster faced in their lives, and how they rose above them.

To coincide with David Levithan's The Lover's Dictionary, he's asking readers to create their own entries in the style of the book. Here's a preview of what we mean:

Heavenly Questions, Gjertrud Schnackenberg's recently published sixth book of poems, is a remarkably moving and, perhaps surprisingly, exhilarating work, given that it is an elegy for the poet's late husband, the philosopher Robert Nozick, who died in 2002. In the exchange that follows, I ask Trude to talk about some of the sources and inspirations that inform this complex and deeply beautiful book. -Jonathan Galassi, President and Publisher of FSG

Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.” Peru's foremost writer, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, The Bad Girl, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War of the End of the World, and The Storyteller. He lives in London. This essay, making its U.S. debut, is excerpted from Touchstones: Essays on Literature, Art and Politics. There are certain naïve people who believe that a fear of flying is, or can be explained by, a fear of death. They are wrong: fear of flying is fear of flying, not of death, a fear as particular and specific as a fear of spiders, or of the void, or of cats, three common examples among the thousands that make up the panoply of human fears. Fear of flying wells up suddenly, when people not lacking in imagination and sensitivity realise that they are thirty thousand feet in the air, travelling through clouds at eight hundred miles an hour, and ask, 'What the hell am I doing here?' And begin to tremble.

On February 8th, over a thousand people turned out to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the poet Elizabeth Bishop at the Cooper Union in New York. Paul Muldoon and Alice Quinn read selections from the New Yorker correspondence, and twenty poets shared their favorite Bishop poems.

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

Geoff Dyer is the author of But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Paris Trance, and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He lives in England. The following essay is excerpted from Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, coming from Graywolf Press in March 2011. Don't read much now. Philip Larkin, "A Study of Reading Habits” Could I have become a symptom, or is this an entirely personal indisposition?

In 1949 Theodor Adorno famously said that “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” How, Adorno seemed to be asking, could existing forms of artistic representation be expected to convey something so aberrant, so distant from normal human behavior? Adorno’s comment thus represents a challenge to artists who seek to present the horror of the Holocaust in general and of Auschwitz in particular: to do so, they must move beyond traditional modes of representation and create new structures and forms.

Rahul Bhattacharya, who lives in New Delhi, is the author of Pundits from Pakistan, a book of reportage, and The Sly Company of People Who Care, a first novel to be published by FSG in May. He answers some questions about the desire to escape home, the visceral energy of Creole, and V.S Naipaul. -Eric Chinski, Editor in Chief Chinski: Your first book was a work of reportage on the India-Pakistan cricket rivalry. Why did you decide to turn next to writing your first novel? Rahul Bhattacharya: I didn’t, actually. The form came afterward, at the moment of writing. What I was responding to was the impulse to get away. It’s a terribly seductive impulse: What are the consequences? In part I was getting away from writing about cricket as well. But I’m grateful to cricket-writing, without which I may not ever have had a chance to visit the Caribbean.

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.

Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux published in March, takes place in 2028, but it’s deeply indebted to—indeed, deeply enmeshed in—the past. Sorokin, whose knowledge of Russian literature and history is encyclopedic (without any of the stuffiness that such a word might suggest), has written a book haunted by the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Yet Oprichnik (a term for Ivan the Terrible’s most feared courtiers) also suggests that the violence, cruelty, and human degradation that characterized that regime have recurred throughout the country’s dark history. And very little has changed. In a glowing review of the book in The New York Times Book Review, Stephen Kotkin wrote: So it is in Putin’s Russia, where a gang of police officials, the siloviki, lord over not just the richest private citizens but also other parts of the state. Sorokin’s imaginative diagnosis of Putinism further grasps that the officials’ looting is driven not by profiteering alone, but by their conviction that they are defending Russian interests. Everything Sorokin’s oprichniks do is a transaction, but their love of country runs deep. They may give in to temptation and tune in to foreign radio (“enemy voices”), but these moments of weakness vitiate neither their pride in their work nor their code of honor. They have ideals. Day of the Oprichnik is a satire and a polemic and a picaresque and a tragedy, but it’s also, as Kotkin notes, a brilliant analysis of a society in crisis—perhaps perpetually in crisis. Below, in an exclusive essay, Sorokin explores the roots of his remarkable diagnosis. -Mark Krotov, Assistant Editor Ideally, prose isn’t written—it simply happens. Luckily, that’s exactly what occurred in the case of Day of the Oprichnik. The desire to find the literary equivalent of a chemical formula—one that would explain the servants of Russia’s authoritative absolutism—had been brewing for a long time, but any subject is connected, somehow or other, with style and with tone, which plays an important part in this formula. Write Lolita in the language of Goncharov or Faulkner, and it’ll be a rather predictable book. Each regime has its own style. Each hangman has his own unique humor, with which he justifies his actions and cheers himself up. It’s well-known that Ivan the Terrible often laughed hysterically as he gazed upon the suffering of the boyars he was torturing. It’s not hard to guess that out of respect for the tsar, the entourage present at the executions also roared with laughter. And so the people gathered on the square laughed, too. In the history of our country, where the government’s violence against individuality has always carried an inevitable character, laughter has concealed and hidden much. But laughter has also saved many. I wanted to tell the story of a monstrous government’s servant in the language of the laughing marketplace.

This newly translated piece by Jorge Luis Borges appears in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry. Ilan Stavans, the book's editor and the translator of "Borges and I," stopped by the FSG offices to record the piece in Spanish and English for us: [audio:https://fsgworkinprog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/borges-y-yo.mp3] The other one, Borges, is to whom things happen. I walk through Buenos Aires, stop, maybe a bit mechanically, to look at the arch of an entrance way and a grillwork door; I have news from Borges by mail or when I see his name in a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson’s prose; the other shares those preferences but with a vanity that turns them into an actor’s attributes. It would be an exaggeration to affirm that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can plot his literature and that literature justifies me. It doesn’t cost me anything to confess he has achieved a few valid pages, but those pages can’t save me, perhaps because what’s good no longer belongs to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and traditions.

The following short story is excerpted from Daniel Orozco's debut collection Orientation and Other Stories. Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That's my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle. This is your phone. Never answer your phone. Let the Voicemail System answer it. This is your Voicemail System Manual. There are no personal phone calls allowed. We do, however, allow for emergencies. If you must make an emergency phone call, ask your supervisor first. If you can't find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers, who sits over there. He'll check with Clarissa Nicks, who sits over there. If you make an emergency phone call without asking, you may be let go.

This fall FSG will publish Parallel Stories by acclaimed Hungarian author Péter Nádas. Editor Elisabeth Sifton writes, "After his last novel, A Book of Memories, appeared in English in 1997, many critics and readers agreed with Susan Sontag's assessment that it was the greatest novel written in postwar Europe. But Nádas was already moving past that signal achievement. And now we can see how Parallel Stories—which took eighteen years to write, Nádas has said, and appeared in Budapest in 2005—extends and deepens the scope of his fiction, both in historical terms and in the most intimate, hidden terms of body and soul. The multilevel narrative reaches back to the 1930s, thickens in the crisis seasons of 1944–45, 1956, and 1961, and thrusts forward to 1989; and at every point we experience the intense and daring ways that the men and women he so memorably creates live through or transcend, create or deny the brutalities of their strife-torn times. This is a great novel about the twentieth century and, with its dazzling formal innovations and daring candor, a postmodern novel for the twenty-first."

Charles Drazin is a lecturer on cinema at Queen Mary, University of London. His previous books include The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s and In Search of The Third Man. This “canon” of French films is a list not of personal favorites (although some of them are) but of films that I think serve to illustrate some of the key themes of French Cinema. All of them, I hope, bring out the idea that the true importance of the French cinema is the degree to which it inspires and informs our own cinema—“our” meaning specifically the English-speaking cinema.

At BookExpo America, the annual conference for booksellers, librarians and publishers, novelist Jeffrey Eugenides previewed The Marriage Plot, his much anticipated follow-up to Middlesex. (Astute Work in Progress readers may remember his conversation with editor Jonathan Galassi from our debut issue.)The author shared the stage with Mindy Kaling, Diane Keaton, and Charlaine Harris.

[caption id="attachment_924" align="alignright" width="172" caption="© Greg Gorman"][/caption] To mark the paperback publication of Role Models, John Waters answered a few questions about taste, the art world, and death. The interview was conducted over the phone just before Waters's trips to the Walker Art Center in Minnesota and the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee. -Ryan Chapman Chapman: What is taste, and what do people mean when they say something is in bad taste? John Waters: Taste is style, and to know bad taste of course you have to have been taught the rules of the tyranny of good taste so you can yearn to break them. I thank my mother every day for teaching me proper table manners—which fork to use, all that stuff—even though it lead to a career that humiliated and embarrassed her. But she’s grown quite used to it and proud over the years. You have to have some taste. I think Diana Vreeland said bad taste is better than no taste. Taste is how you describe yourself. It’s how you present yourself to the world. It’s about humor . . . Everyone is a curator of their own life: what they have around them, what they read, what they watch. So everybody, no matter what—even the most deranged homeless person—has taste. They know which bottle they want to collect more, which shopping cart they want to fill. Everyone has taste and it’s how you define yourself against the world.

Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria. He arrived in America in 2001 and completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology and an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. He has won the Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction, and his story “Buying Lenin” was published in The Best American Short Stories 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is a fiction editor for the American Literary Review. When I was a child, I did not much like to read, because I was lazy and preferred to play soccer outside. I did not like to be read to either, because repetition bored me and because my parents were really good story tellers—for years my mother told me about the adventures of two little hippos (brother and sister) who we’d send around the world and get into all sorts of trouble, while my father told me stories about Bulgarian history: khans, tsars, rebels fighting the Turks.

Misha Glouberman is the co-author of The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City. He is a is a performer, facilitator, and artist who lives in Toronto. As told to Sheila Heti. I taught a class on happiness to my friends, and one thing that came up was that the topic was seen as sort of trivial. I found that really weird. It was seen as some sort of sickness of Western consumerist individualism. Happiness seems to me the most untrivial thing to talk about or think about. I think it’s really worthy of investigation. Pretty much everything that people do, in one way or another, is done in the interest of trying to be happy. So it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to spend a bit of one’s time thinking about it.