If this story were submitted to a MFA workshop, the results would be—forgive me—a hatchet job.
Angela Carter’s “The Fall River Axe Murders” breaks all the rules we learn in writing classes. Let us count its sins: The entire 17-page story takes place in the few seconds before the Borden family—as in Lizzie Borden—wakes up on [...]
Scientific American: Novelist Ariel Djanikian talks with Celeste Ng about her vision of dystopia in The Office of Mercy.
Airports. Vacation spots. Subway commutes. Sunday. For whatever reason, even into the most well-read literary life a little twaddle reading does fall. At the risk of surrendering any and all professional credibility, the Fiction Writers Review editorial staff kindly confessed to their favorite guilty pleasure reads. And they don’t plan on giving them up for [...]
Between the hurricane and the election, perhaps you missed it–but the winners of the Whiting writing awards were recently announced, and we’re delighted to note that two writers we’ve covered here at FWR, Alan Heathcock and Hanna Pylväinen, were among the winners!
Congratulations, Al and Hanna!
Further Reading:
Read our review of Alan Heathcock’s collection Volt, in [...]
It is probably ridiculous to even put “J.K. Rowling” and the word “emerging” in the same thought. (Excerpts from the Wikipedia article about her: “best-selling book series in history,” “net worth US$1 billion,” “forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007,” and “Most Influential Woman in Britain”—and that’s only in the introduction.) But I’m tempted to [...]
Author and teacher Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich says YES—and in fact, she hopes more people will say it. Writes Marzano-Lesnevich:
[W]orkshop students tend to forget that they’re required to be there. I don’t mean in attendance, sitting around a large table, but rather in the page—in the world of the story. They’re required to read. They’re even [...]
As we’ve seen of late, sometimes professional book reviewers (or, rather, less-than-professional ones) forget that Authors Are People, Too. Well, so do book-reviewing students. Behold this exchange, in which a student turned to Yahoo! Answers to help write his book report on DC Pierson’s The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To… [...]
What an awesome and terrifying idea: novelist Silvia Hartmann will write her next novel live on Google Docs and let anyone who wants to follow along—and send her feedback on her work. (Via.) Hartmann explains in a press release on her website:
This project, known as “Hartmann Book Live” aims to go one step further [...]
Okay—so perhaps your take-home message from the recent Giraldi-Ohlin incident was “Oh my god, I hope that I never get a review like that.” Unfortunately, at some point, every writer usually gets some harsh feedback—in a workshop, in a review, or from a reader. (Discuss: which writer is most fortunate, and why?)
Anyway, when [...]
Recently, Publishers Weekly posted a provocative list of “5 Perfect Sentences.” Here’s one, from “A Romantic Weekend” by Mary Gaitskill:
He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers.
Now, I love this sentence, but the list raises the [...]
