“I want to find a job, that’s why I’m here! Please write that down: Cara Romero wants to work.”

So announces the 56-year-old protagonist of Angie Cruz’s How Not To Drown in a Glass of Water (Flatiron, Sept. 13) as she meets with a counselor from the senior workforce program. The year is 2009, and the Dominican American matron has spent two years living on unemployment benefits (“El Obama has been very generous”) after being laid off from the factory where she worked for decades; now she is determined to find employment.

Cruz’s new novel is cleverly framed as a series of sessions with that career counselor, at which Cara narrates her colorful life story. As our reviewer notes, “Cruz intersperses the 12 sessions with documents like rent notices from Cara’s building and job application materials she must complete…all of which work together to demonstrate both the power of bureaucracy to complicate a person’s life and the ability of paperwork to tell one version of a person’s story while often hiding what makes a life truly rich.”

How Not To Drown in a Glass of Water is also a potent reflection of what work means—and doesn’t mean—for those at the margins of society, not unlike another recent novel: Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta (Little, Brown, Aug. 31). In James Hannaham’s hilarious and moving story, a trans woman who has been incarcerated for two decades returns to Brooklyn, and priority No. 1, according to her parole officer, is finding a job. Carlotta knows that will be easier said than done. “Can’t nobody walk out the joint after twenty-two years an grab a job on no first day out. That would be stealing!”

In Kirkus’ first Work Issue, out Sept. 1, we explore the power and significance of work as reflected in a range of books—fiction and nonfiction, for both adults and young readers—published this year. We speak with Gabrielle Zevin, whose hot new novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Knopf, July 5), is about video game inventors—an unlikely subject that reveals the very special relationship that forms between creative collaborators. Elsewhere, W. David Marx, author of Status and Culture (Viking, Sept. 6), discusses the value society attaches to certain professions and how it shifts over time.

YA author Eric Gansworth tells us how he decided to make the protagonist of his upcoming novel, My Good Man (Levine Querido, Nov. 1), a journalist and how Brian reconciles that calling with his Indigenous identity while reporting on an assault on the Tuscarora reservation in New York state. Children’s author/illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh talks about an ancient form of work near and dear to all of us at Kirkus: bookmaking. Tonatiuh’s next project, A Land of Books (Abrams, Nov. 15), looks at how the craft was practiced by the ancient Mexihcah people of Central America.

Finally, be sure to listen to the episode of the Fully Booked podcast that drops Tuesday, Sept. 6, when host Megan Labrise talks with Ellyn Gaydos, author of Pig Years (Knopf, June 14). Gaydos has been a farm worker since the age of 18; her memoir is a beautifully written meditation on the practical and philosophical dimensions of making one’s living, often precariously, off the land.

Whatever your attitude toward your work—love, hate, or indifference—there’s something for you in the issue. 

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.