"Though I might have no talent I and I might have made a terrible mistake by starting the novel, at least I was showing up every single day to make the book work." See the watch and the other objects that kept the We Second That authors writing their celebrated second novels. 

The Pulitzer Prize winning poet lists Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine & Rome by Dorothea Lasky for the honest visions of the U.S. they offer.

Kinder Than Solitude (Random House), Family Life (W.W. Norton), Euphoria (Grove Atlantic), and Can't and Won't (FSG) make the list of excellent fiction considered for the 2014 prize.

Colson Whitehead writes that the novel "contains a deep, nourishing reservoir of grim humor." Read his review at Slate, and see all five superb second novels announced earlier this week. 

Works by other Whiting Awards winners Katha Pollitt, Lydia Davis, Jeffery Renard Allen, Sarah Ruhl, and Denis Johnson make the Notable list!

Read Sarah McNally's review of this "brutal and beautiful second novel" set on a Jamaican plantation in 1801. Look out for the announcement of the final We Second That pick tomorrow on Slate.

Read Yiyun Li's review of the "poignant, fascinating" story of a theater troupe traveling in South America on Slate. Two more titles to be announced tomorrow and Friday!

New Yorker online Literary Editor Sasha Weiss writes that Inferno "feels like it was put down in gusts of inspiration, between drinking and sex and poetry readings...the streets are its true territory; its weather is the storm of language." Read her review at Slate! 

Read Dan Kois's review of the first We Second That selection, Helen Dewitt's "demented sex comedy" Lightning Rods.

Lauren Cerand poses ten questions to poet Don Mee Choi on her writing and literary influences.