The Gilded Age, the HBO television series created by Julian Fellowes, chronicles the lives of a cast of characters living in 1880s New York City, including servants and maids living and working in the garden-level quarters of brownstone mansions, wealthy inhabitants of Manhattan from both old and new money, and Black families living in Brooklyn who reach levels of affluence in the post-Reconstruction period. Together, the characters create a layered portrait of a city where diverse classes come into often conflicted interaction. Write a personal essay that examines your own class status, reflecting on how it manifests in your encounters in society with friends, coworkers, family, and others. How have financial matters evolved through past generations in your family to bring you to where you are today?

Known for his postmodern satirical novels filled with secret conspiracies and government plots, Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Shadow Ticket, out this week from Penguin Press, begins in Depression-era Milwaukee and follows a private detective whose search of a runaway cheese heiress gets him entangled with the Chicago mafia, the Bureau of Investigation, British intelligence, Nazism, and international capitalist conspiracies. This week write a short story that makes use of a current event that might seem absurd or stranger than fiction, spinning off from the actual details of the real event into something weirder. How can you inject humor into a story that gestures to real concerns about paranoia and dysfunctional politics?

For the Poetry Society of America’s “In Their Own Words” series, Suzanne Buffam writes about her poem “Trying,” which circles around the effort to conceive a child. “The poem became, in a sense, a meditation on effort, in which the suspension of effort was the aim of my efforts,” writes Buffam. “I gave myself one constraint. Each paragraph I wrote would have to contain some form of the verb ‘to try.’” Taking inspiration from Buffam’s constraint for her piece, compose a poem that explores your process trying to reach a goal, whether big or small, tangible or more abstract. Play around with different forms of the verb “to try,” or another verb that gestures at effort, paying careful consideration to how the word conveys a sensation of persistence over the course of time and through various obstacles and setbacks.