Here at the FWR blog, we have a thing for books: as furniture, as clothing, even in the bathroom. But this might just take the proverbial cake: a bathtub made of books.

Neatorama pointed me to the above amazing art project/feat of book-engineering by artist Vanessa Mancini, at Who Cares About That?:

This bath is made entirely out of books which Vanessa cut and fitted together over a metal frame to form a bath of books, which is suspended by four antique bath tub, lion-shaped feet. She intends to later cover it in layers of resin and has already applied proper taps and drain, so that it will be a utilizable, functional bath at all effects.

The idea is of immersing oneself in knowledge, books, truths, and ‘cleaning’ or ‘purifying’ one’s mind with from external, every day life bombarding from media, by reading ad reflecting on books,- ‘pure sources’, which is of course, metaphorical, implying we can become polluted by ideas of truths and knowledge, which we can only ‘clean’ by reading our way through to our own ideas and reflections.

On a metaphorical level, a bath made of books makes total sense, doesn’t it? For more photos and explanation of the project, read the full post at Who Cares About That?.

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Further Reading:
Way too many cool things people have done with books:

• Vases, carpets, and restaurants
• Dominoes
• Handbags, Kindle covers, and lifesavers (literally)
• Shower curtains and toilet paper (!)

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This week’s feature is Lauren Groff’s new novel, Arcadia (Voice/Hyperion). Groff’s past works include a collection, Delicate, Edible Birds and Other Stories (2009), and a novel, The Monsters of Templeton (2008). Her short stories have appeared in a number of journals, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Subtropics, as well as in the 2007 and 2010 Best American Short Stories , Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best New American Voices 2008.

In her recent review of Arcadia, Founding Editor Anne Stameshkin writes:

In Lauren Groff’s second novel, Arcadia, the community of this same name is a utopia within our actual world—a flock of hippies, vegans, pacifists, and dreamers settling in upstate New York in the late 1960s. The Arcadians live off the land, eschewing commercialism, capitalism, and even pets (keeping them is considered slavery). [...] Groff’s prose is lush and lovely throughout, as idealistic as her Arcadians’ vision.

We’re giving away a copy of Arcadia next week to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

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Further Reading

• Read the rest of Stameshkin’s review.
• Stephen King’s 2008 interview with Groff for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

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Last week we featured Wiley Cash’s debut novel A Land More Kind Than Home, and we’re pleased to announce the winners:

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!

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Short Story Month countdown: 7 days to May!

Fiction Writers Review will host the third annual Collection Giveaway Project: a community effort by lit bloggers to champion great short story collections. The brainchild of Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus, 18 bloggers participated in the CGP 2011, giving away dozens of collections.

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How to participate in The Collection Giveaway Project:

(1) Blog about a recently published short story collection (or two, or three).
Long or short, review or rave. Only rule: you, the blogger, read and loved the book(s).

(2) Offer a copy (or copies) as a giveaway to one lucky commenter.
You choose the winner – via drawing, wittiness, dartboard – whatever method you choose.

Note for blogger-authors: You can absolutely give away a copy of your own collection—but in an effort to keep CGP community-focused, please also offer a second book that isn’t yours.

(3) Announce the winner(s) by May 31, 2012, and arrange to send out copies of any books you are giving away.

(4) Email Lee [at] fictionwritersreview.com with a link to your giveaway post. We’ll add you to the list of participants and link to you from our CGP homepage (look for the CGP icon on our homepage on May 1).We’ll update the list throughout May.

Please spread the word, and thanks in advance to all participants!

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Click on over to Urban Dictionary and you’ll soon be Faulknering.  At least, according to one of that dictionary’s definitions of “Faulkner,” which is “To go from being a nerd to getting all the hot girls.”

Apparently, kids these days are giving authors’ names new meanings, and Urban Dictionary—the mass-edited compendium of language as it’s popularly used—is capturing them.  The New York Daily News has a roundup (via):

Keats: One who has much intelligence, yet is reclusive and worryingly geeky. Enjoys exercising excessive control over friends and family. Wears leggings. Eats pizza only.

Bronte: A girl of her own sexiness, her own way in life. Doesn’t care what people think. Very blissful and beautiful.

Walt Whitman: Slang for cocaine. (Whitman was known for his long poetic lines.)

Tolstoy: To make significantly longer than is necessary to convey the relevant message; derived from Leo Tolstoy, whose classic literature is quite long and wordy. Ex: Hey man, I just asked for a light, not your life story. You didn’t have to Tolstoy me.

Hemingway (v.): Writing a paper under the influence of alcohol, like noted author Ernest Hemingway. Ex: It’s due tomorrow. I totally have to hemingway that term paper tonight.

Foer: A hipster who has became vegan or vegetarian after reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals.” Like Foer himself, he/she may or may not cheat by eating meat on occasion but will still be sure to inflict guilt on any meat-eaters encountered. Also: foerified (vegetarian-inspired). Ex: I watched “Food Inc.” and thought it was good, but I’m not turning into a foer anytime soon.

Which authors would you turn into verbs? How about Oates-ing: to churn out writing prolifically? Or to pull a Suzanne Collins: to write young adult novels that become wildly successful with adults?

(Also: Is anyone else here reminded of Clueless? “There’s my mom… isn’t she a Betty?” “She’s a full-on Monet. From far away, it’s OK, but up close, it’s a big old mess.” “Okay, so he is kind of a Baldwin.” Or did I just show my age?)

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Soooo…this is awkward, no? For the first time since 1977, no Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction. Ann Patchett says this means we all lose, and I agree. I’ve never thought very carefully about how books are selected for these kinds of big awards. I guess I imagined a bunch of really smart people passionately arguing with each other, but that doesn’t seem to be what happened here. The voting committee members filled out ballots, and no book got a majority of the votes, so nobody won. Look, we already have a completely dysfunctional Congress that operates on those principles, can’t we do a little better in the literary world? Here are some process suggestions for the Pulitzer Board to consider for next year:

Have more voting members. Why should 18 people get to decide this prize of prizes?

Treat it like you’re the Vatican choosing the next Pope. If there’s no consensus in the voting, hash it out and vote again. Lock the doors: no one leaves until someone has changed his or her mind.

Give the prize to more than one book. I know this is radical, but the YA National Book Award debacle suggests to me that if prize committees screw up, or can’t decide between two fabulous books, maybe they should choose them BOTH. Our obsession with ranking things number one is exhausting. None of the books on the Pulitzer shortlist (The Pale King, Train Dreams, and Swamplandia!) are objectively “better” than any of the others. Loosen up, people. Let’s love as many things as we can.

Do you have any other suggestions for the Pulitzer Board? How should we choose the great fiction we celebrate?

(These disapproving bunnies are sending the Pulitzer Board a message…)

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We writers gravitate towards a few particular points of view: we love the first person singular, the ultra-personal “I”; we adore the third-person limited and its inside-outside-blurring stance; we even use the omniscient and look down on our characters as if we were gods.  Now and then, we’ll try the second person to switch it up—we’ve all read Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help and thought about it, haven’t we?

But what about the first person plural?  Why haven’t we, as writers, embraced this viewpoint and its potential?  A few of us—Jeffrey Eugenides, Steven Millhauser—have tackled it, but most of us just shrug our shoulders and turn to our old tried-and-trues.

First Person Plural, in Harlem, is looking to change all that with a series of readings, each of which contains pieces written in (yup) the first person plural. Why? Their site offers us several reasons, starting with:

“We” in literature is strange, it makes a claim that might make us uncomfortable: who is this “we,” how can a plural voice speak, think, or act? In some contexts the implications of “we” might be cultural or political, in others, they might be spookier, more existential. “We” is the limbic brain and the neighborhood, the family tree and the Gallup poll. “We” could be the voice of the future, the populated past, or the unparsed present. “We” seems impossible, like it’s just a second away from disappearing into an “I” or a “they.” And impossible seems like a good place to start.

Color us intrigued. Their next event is April 23.

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Further Reading:
Actually, more writers have tried the first person plural than you’d think:

• Ali Smith explores many variations on the first person (and the second person, and the third) in her collection The First Person
• In the Atlantic, Paul Bloom explores the idea that each of us has multiple selves vying for control of the body and mind they inhabit.
• And in this FWR interview, Allan Gurganus argues for a mental third-person-plural state: that ALL writers should wait to write until they have “some vision that includes not just you as first person singular, but “we.” That’s the movement of human life—from the singular to the plural.”

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This week’s feature is Wiley Cash’s debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, released this week by William Morrow. Cash’s stories have appeared in such places as the Crab Orchard Review, Roanoke Review and The Carolina Quarterly. He holds a B.A. in Literature from the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He and his wife currently live in West Virginia where he teaches fiction writing and American literature at Bethany College. He also teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Fiction and Nonfiction Writing at Southern New Hampshire University.

In his recent interview with the author, Contributor Brad Wetherell speaks with Cash about such things as finding his way back to his roots as a writer, the role of mentors in both his work and life, and the long road to finishing a first novel. When asked how he might define “Southern Literature,” Cash had this to say:

That’s a difficult question to answer because just as there are many “Souths,” there are also many types of “Southern Literature.” But I think one thing that defines the South broadly and Southern literature in general is the idea of struggle and all the forms it takes. Because of its historically agrarian economy, Southerners have always struggled with the land and tried to figure out the best way to reap the most from it. Unfortunately, that led to centuries of slavery, and there was a long struggle to end that and an even longer, on-going struggle to stamp out the racial prejudice that accompanied it. You can see both the struggles with land and the struggles with racial prejudice in the work of writers like Jean Toomer, Charles W. Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ernest J. Gaines.

Also, because of the South’s agrarian economy, people tended to live on large swaths of land and relied on their family members for everything from labor to emotional support. I believe this is why family struggle has so long been a hallmark of Southern literature; here I’m thinking of writers like William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Alice Walker. On the other hand, the tight cohesiveness of the Southern family can quickly turn those who aren’t related into real outsiders. So much of Southern literature, especially its local color, revolves around the mysterious and sometimes evil outsider who attempts to plunder something from those on the inside. Ron Rash, Flannery O’Connor, and several of Kate Chopin’s stories come to mind.

• To read the rest of this interview, click here.
• For more on this novel, tour dates, or to read an excerpt from this novel, please visit the author’s Website.
• You can also win one of three, signed copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers.
• To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

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Last week we featured Robert Garner McBrearty’s Let the Birds Drink in Peace as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners:

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!

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Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the third installment of our new blog series,  “First Looks,” which highlights soon-to-be released books that have piqued my interest as a reader-who-writes. We publish “First Looks” here on the FWR blog around the 15th of each month, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments and your recommendations of forthcoming titles. Please drop me a line anytime: erika(at)fictionwritersreview(dot)com, and thanks in advance.

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Susan Woodring and I are graduates of the same low-residency MFA program. Although we overlapped for a couple of semesters, we were never assigned to the same workshop. Still, I’ve been expecting her to become a “big name” in the literary world for about a decade now, since a long-ago evening when a group of us students gathered in the dorm living room for an informal reading. It was the first time I encountered Susan’s writing. I knew instantly that her fiction was already at a level different from—superior to—almost everything the rest of us were doing. Some things you just can’t explain.

So I wasn’t surprised to watch from afar as Susan’s excellent stories showed up in journals, won contests, and were gathered in a collection (which was, incidentally, one of my very first e-book purchases). And I’m not surprised that on April 24, St. Martin’s Press is releasing Susan’s second novel: Goliath.

I’d be eager to read this novel even without Bret Lott’s endorsement: “Goliath is a beautiful and quietly moving story of love, grief, forgiveness and redemption—heady themes handled here with a big heart and a deft hand. In prose exquisitely clear and with details that will make your heart ache, Susan Woodring has written a meaningful portrait of small town life, and what it means to move through grief toward love.” Which reminds me that I should also recommend Susan’s wonderful blog posts, where I first read of Bret Lott’s influence on her work.

I’d love to tell you all about another new book scheduled for imminent release—but I’ve already reviewed it for another publication, and until that review is published, I shouldn’t spill too many beans. But I will say that I can’t wait to see the other reviews that will be published about HHhH, a debut novel by Laurent Binet (translated by Sam Taylor), simply because I’m eager to see how other readers respond to it. And I’ll say this, too: If I ever teach historical fiction again, I’ll be assigning this novel, which blends historical fiction and metafiction as it reconstructs Operation Anthropoid, the plot to assassinate Nazi Reinhard Heydrich.

Until next month…

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Further Reading

• You can read the first chapter of Susan Woodring’s Goliath online.
• You can also find some of Susan’s short stories online, in journals including Ruminate and turnrow.
• If you’d like to learn more about HHhH, you can read its starred review from Publishers Weekly.

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