Lee Thomas is a fiction writer. She was the Managing Editor of FWR from 2010-2013. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Charlotte Observer, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is finishing a story collection.
Prodigals on a grand scale who don’t want to go home. Matt Mullins packs 25 stories into his high-velocity debut Three Ways of the Saw. Don’t be misled by the Zenlike title, these characters come at you like a karate chop to the windpipe. Read on to find out exactly why you’ll be thanking him for that bruised trachea.
Does the lowly individual stand a chance against the blunt force of the mass? Anita Desai’s novella collection, The Artist of Disappearance, celebrates the wish to be left alone, and the raw agony of the desire to be seen.
This week’s feature is Miracle Boy and Other Stories, by Pinckney Benedict. Published this year by Press 53, the collection features a misfit cast of characters from the mountains of West Virginia. Known by names like “Lizard” and “mudman,” their very out-thereness commands the respect of reader. These backwoods folk may be wildly different from your friends and neighbors, but Benedict makes them impossible to ignore or dismiss, so vividly drawn they refuse easy definitions. Benedict is the author of two previous story collections, Town Smokes and The Wrecking Yard, and a novel, Dogs of God. Miracle Boy has been […]
Last week we featured the multi-genre craft anthology Lit from Within as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Michelle Hoover (@MichelleHoover_) Rick Fisher (@fishfire) Lit Drift (@litdrift) To claim your copy of this anthology, 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!
On a bright Friday morning in late April, I met up with Michele Kotler, Founder and Director of The Community-Word Project (CWP) for a classroom visit to PS/MS 279 in the Bronx. In their own words, CWP is a New York City based arts-in-education organization that inspires children in underserved communities to read, interpret and respond to their world and to become active citizens through collaborative arts residencies and teacher training program. The K-8 Captain Manuel Rivera, Jr. School bustled with activity. As we entered a classroom packed with 26 fourth-graders, David Ciminello greeted us. David brought poetry, visual art, […]
When I first read William Faulkner, in high school, it felt less like reading a book and more like an archeological find—unearthing something long dormant that I’d always known. His cadence, and that humid, repetitious, biblical world of the South, tapped into something in my bones. The first time I read David Foster Wallace’s “Incarnations of Burned Children,” at my brother’s strenuous recommendation, it struck me the same way—whole cloth, True in the capital-letter sense of the word, so perfect I didn’t want to deconstruct it as a writer, lest I drain a bit of its magic. A writing teacher […]
I love perspective shifts. The British mini-series “Collision” does this with a giant car accident on the A12 highway outside London. I’m just now embroiled in Colum McCann’s gorgeous Let the Great World Spin, which also refracts one moment in history through multiple lenses. One place that always takes perspectivism in unanticipated, fresh directions: poetry. Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is a classic. It allows the reader’s imagination as much air as poet’s own creation. It’s a series of docks jutting out into the lake, with you all sun-warmed in your swimsuit, merely disguised as a […]
Last week we featured Edith Pearlman’s story collection Binocular Vision as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Susan Ashley Michael, Mimi Asnes, and Christine Ha. Congratulations! To claim your signed copy of this collection, please email us at the following address: winners@fictionwritersreview.com To anyone who’d like to be eligible for our future drawings, visit our Facebook Page and “like” us. No catch, no gimmicks–just a great way to promote books we love. To everyone who’s already a fan, big thanks!
Short Story Month is off with a bang! Inspired by the Emerging Writers Network who inaugurated May as Short Story Month in 2007—and the Big Poetry Giveaway for National Poetry Month, Fiction Writers Review is excited to welcome you to our second year of The Collection Giveaway Project: a community effort by lit bloggers to raise attention for short story collections. Thanks to all who have already emailed FWR Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus, who is spearheading the CGP this year. For participating blogs, and details on how YOU can participate in The Collection Giveaway Project, please visit the CGP Home. […]
I’ve been wary of dog yarns ever since my mother sobbed through the final chapters of Where the Red Fern Grows, and I didn’t discover until years later the real fate of Old Dan. It was affecting – perhaps too much so – but I also felt cheated somehow, that an emotion so universally felt was a writer’s cheap shot. Some stories come like a revelation. Ann Pancake’s “Dog Song”—twenty-one pages of alchemical genius, pure voice, and indescribable originality—changed my mind about the dogs, and made me an evangelist. Evan Rehill has been championing this story, and gave it to […]
