Vintage Fringe

Rumble Groan Dream

What's it like to work in a cannery? The Working Issue closes with this vintage short short from Issue 4. Remember: Six cans a minute, six cans a minute, or you are fired. Twenty-five cents an hour. more »

Longer Poetry

From "Locus: A Choose Your Own Adventure Series"

An excerpt from the longer work, "Locus: A Choose Your Own Adventure Series." more »

Features

Inside The World of 'Unskilled' Labor

Anna Lena Phillips reviews Gabriel Thompson's Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do, a new book of nonfiction about how immigrants earn their way in the U.S. more »

Fiction

Home at the Bistro

Sooner or later – one way or another – gravity is going to grab you, too. In this age of economic uncertainty, gravity is one thing you can count on. more »

Nonfiction

Résumé Against Boredom

Objective : I began work at age 14 to save for a car. Relevant Experience: * Retail Salesman I walked the floor of a costume and accessory shop to encourage sales. Leering masks of the worst celebrities, augmented into even more... more »

Features

Paul Buhle: The Comic Monger

Paul Buhle adapted Studs Terkel’s oral history masterpiece, Working, into a comic book. He talks to Fringe’s Alexandra Sheckler about what working means to individuals and how comics reveal the lives of ordinary people in a way that prose... more »

Criticism

Advertising as Imperial Agency in Jane Eyre

In a decisive break from archetypal Bronte scholarship, feminist theorist and literary critic Sharon Marcus analyzed how Jane’s identity becomes framed in terms of “abstractions” (i.e. printed texts, ads, portraits, shortened names, etc.),... more »

Nonfiction

Outsourcing

The village of Tehri faces certain death. When construction of the world’s fifth largest hydropower-producing dam is completed, Tehri (in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand) will be flooded and over 10,000 people inhabiting the surrounding area... more »

Fiction

Mesh and Lace

I wonder how I’m supposed to tell Miriam I know quite well where she can find Tony, how we married after he got me pregnant on prom night, because condoms were a sin that didn’t even feel good. more »

Features

Kim Addonizio: The Poet by Starlite

Addonizio talks about how a poet is like a musician, being inspired by “Little Orphan Annie,” overcoming fear of failure, and what it takes to be a working poet. more »

(de)Classified

Cake it!

Thea Zimmer’s decades of employment in an increasingly “feminized” corporate America provides the fodder for Cake It! In the vignettes that make up Cake It!—the jottings that bring together the real life, the... more »

Poetry

Three Poems

"Let Go", "Universe Management" and "An Office Bestiary" more »

Short Short

The Last Moonshiner

All the voices coming from the holes in the ground were talking to themselves, sometimes shushing themselves, too. They were hiding from the Bully, the one that got Popcorn. more »

Nonfiction

Someone Else's Ivy

For a long time, when asked what profession I was in, I would reply by saying that I was a professional milk steamer. I worked behind the counter at a small café in Harvard Square, Cambridge, in the shadow of the most prestigious university in the... more »

Featured Artwork

5 Pieces by Martin Askem