Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction

Work in Progress examines contemporary texts that demand reading practices which can feel old-fashioned and laborious in a world of instant responses. Examples studied include Chris Ware's graphic work Building Stories, Beck Hansen's album Song Reader, and Kentucky Route Zero, a computer game by Cardboard Computer.

These works stage their own fragmentary nature and apparent unfinishedness as central to how they narrate and how they exist as objects. They draw on and push against expectations of interactive art in the digital age, and their meaning shifts with each reader's path through them.

The book argues that these texts assume a reader who gives up spare time to work out what they mean, so that the reader becomes a curator of the options available. It is part of the Thinking Media series. Bloomsbury Academic USA published it in 2021. It runs to 216 pages. ISBN-13: 9781501375453.