In her seventh novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey updates Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre so smoothly and skillfully that you’d barely even notice.

A finalist for the National Book Award, Julie Otsuka’s innovative novel The Buddha in the Attic pushes the bounds of narrative form with a collective narrator and a resistance to fixed fates. By inviting the reader to consider what could have happened, instead of what did, Otsuka makes her complicit in the fate of the story’s mail-order-brides.

At age 53, Joan Leegant published her first book, the critically heralded story collection, An Hour in Paradise. With her debut novel, Wherever You Go, she has continued to prove her presence as a preeminent Jewish-American writer. Jody Lisberger taught fiction at Harvard with Joan Leegant, and their interview explores questions of structure, identity, listening to your characters and the treatment of ethical issues in fiction.

“What a bitch of a thing prose is!” Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter to his lover Louise Colet in 1852. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.” In this essay, contributing editor Travis Holland meditates on Flaubert’s influence and legacy in fiction.

Writers are continually told to trim their work down, but is that always the best course of action to follow? Not if you don’t know why.

In her sixth novel, State of Wonder, Ann Patchett delivers an adventure story that still rests comfortably on the shelf of Literary Fiction. Researcher Marina Singh leaves her Minnesota lab for the Amazon to investigate a coworker’s death and evaluate the research of a field team deep in the jungle.

The appeal of Jo Ann Beard’s coming-of-age novel In Zanesville transcends both age and gender.

This week’s feature is Tyler McMahon’s How the Mistakes Were Made, published this week by St. Martin’s Griffin. Born and raised in the Washington, DC area, Tyler McMahon studied at the University of Virginia and Boise State University. Before writing his first novel, he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador, a surf [...]

Last week we featured Orientation as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to:

amyguglielmo (@amyguglielmo)
Taisa Frank (@ThaisaFrank)
Randy Simons (@RJSimonz)

To claim your copy of this collection, 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” [...]

Tyler McMahon’s new novel, How the Mistakes Were Made, is a tragedy set to rock and roll. In this conversation with Caleb Winters, McMahon recalls the paranoia of Cold War America, shares his experiences touring with a band, and reveals how writing can be like church.