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Welcome to Work in Progress, our monthly missive
from the front lines of literature. Before Joyce finished Finnegans
Wake, he called it Work in Progress,
and we take our cue from his formlessness. Think of this as a shifting
space-an exhibition, a meet-and-greet, a freak show-curated by our editors and
writers, delivered to your inbox with a promissory thud.
This month, Jeffrey
Eugenides ponders his next novel, a trip to India, and Middlesex's long-lost sexologist subplot; three book designers discuss
their craft, then and now; and we blow the dust off some fifty years of
archived Susan Sontag jackets. There's also a video featuring David Means, who
reads from his collection The Spot. And for subscribers, we feature monthly
giveaways of the best in contemporary and classic literature.
But first, we begin
with a champagne bottle-smash across the bow: a (very) short story by the
award-winning Lydia Davis.
Best, Ryan Chapman
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Getting to Know Your Body by Lydia Davis
If your eyeballs move, this means you're thinking, or about to start thinking.
If you don't want to be thinking at this particular moment, try to keep your eyeballs still.
Excerpted from THE COLLECTED STORIES OF LYDIA DAVIS, by Lydia Davis, published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC in September 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Lydia Davis. All rights reserved.
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Jonathan Galassi and Jeffrey Eugenides
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One of the most anticipated new books around the FSG offices (and out in the Real World, I daresay) is Jeffrey Eugenides' follow-up to Middlesex
. That 2003 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was later selected for Oprah's Book Club, has sold over 2,000,000 copies and is on many readers' lists of their favorite contemporary novels. We caught up (virtually) with Jeff in his studio in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is rounding the turn on his new novel.
-Jonathan Galassi, President and Publisher of FSG
Galassi: Please tell us everything you can about your new book, starting with the title.
Eugenides: I hate to begin by withholding information, but I'd rather not divulge the title of the new book at the moment. I remember when my wife was pregnant and we were trying out different names for the baby. Anytime we told someone a prospective name, they would find something wrong with it. It rhymed with something not-nice. It was just begging to be deformed into a schoolyard epithet. The result was that we never named our child and refer to her now only by her SS#. So I'm not going to make that mistake again and tell you the title of my book.
"I don't quite know how to describe it. A college love story? Maybe."
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The State of Book Design: Susan Mitchell, Charlotte Strick, and Henry Yee
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 the Senior Vice President and Art Director at FSG; Charlotte Strick is the Art Director, also at FSG; and Henry Sene Yee is the Creative Director at Picador.
-Ryan Chapman, Online Marketing Manager
Origin Stories Henry Sene Yee: Most
of my friends drew comic books-that's how I got into [book design]. For some
reason, I liked logos. I used to get into the McDonald's logo. I found this
used bookstore, Ruby, in Tribeca-before it was called Tribeca-and I found this
commercial art book. It had great diagrams. I thought, maybe I can just read
this for fun: the mechanicals, the rules, the triangles and T-squares just sort
of fascinated me. And my brother started doing architectural renderings, these
beautiful rollout building plans. I wanted to look at them, but they would hide
[the plans] from me because I was too messy. I would rip them up. So it became
something so valuable that I couldn't see . . . I decided, I'm going to make my
own drawings. "I'm not just here to create
something beautiful. Sometimes I'm here to be a plumber. I love that aspect."
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FSG hosts a reading series at the Russian Samovar in New York, most recently with Lydia Davis and David Means. Produced by two of our assistant editors, Chantal Clarke and Mark Krotov, the readings occur at irregular intervals throughout the year. Homemade vodka is often consumed.
Here, David Means reads "The Blade," a story from his recent collection, The Spot. |
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 August: Jonathan Franzen, on video, talking about the strange idea of novelists talking about novels on video.
Illustrations by Paul Hoppe
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