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

Ted Thompson (@Tednotedward)
Daniel Perry (@danielperrysays)
Louis Dzierzak (@WriterLou)

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 [...]

Bulgarian-American author Miroslav Penkov’s debut short story collection East of the West (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) comes at a time when his native country’s literary star is on the rise in the west. In this auspicious moment, Penkov delivers a heck of a book.

This week’s feature is Bruce Machart’s debut story collection Men in the Making, published this week by Houghton Mifflin. He is also the author of the acclaimed 2010 novel The Wake of Forgiveness, which won the Steven Turner Prize for debut fiction from The Texas Institute of Letters. It was also selected by Independent Booksellers [...]

“Thunderstruck,” Aaron Cance describes his reading of Bruce Machart’s two debut books: a novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, and a story collection, Men in the Making, out this week. They also discuss the themes of faith, masculinity, and love, and how a New England basement is a helpful metaphor for writing.

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” [...]

This week’s feature is Orientation, by Daniel Orozco. Published in May by Faber & Faber, this long-awaited and much-anticipated collection is Orozco’s first book. His stories have appeared in such places as Zoetrope: All Story, Ecotone, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, StoryQuarterly, Mid-American Review, Seattle Review, and Story. In 1995 the title story of this collection was [...]

Daniel Orozco’s debut has been a long time coming. Now fans of his prizewinning fiction can enjoy an entire collection, Orientation: And Other Stories. Michael Shilling calls him in Idaho to talk geographic love letters, G. Gordon Liddy, and the peculiar challenge of gimmicks.

After waiting impatiently for Daniel Orozco’s debut story collection, J.T. Bushnell finds that it exceeds all expectations. Bushnell calls these stories “full of satire and absurdity and insight.”

Alissa Nutting has “story” written in ink on every page of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, her lively, well-imagined, and jaw-droppingly smart prize-winning debut. Imagine Donald Barthelme writing smart feminine narratives, Mary Gaitskill sans the kinky sex, or Margaret Atwood turning to dry, Colbert-style humor, and you may start to get an idea of what to expect.

When The Clash asked the question “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Jennine Capó Crucet had an answer. In How to Leave Hialeah, Crucet’s debut short story collection, characters wrestle with how the places they’re from shape their identity, how to grow beyond them, and why leaving is sometimes the only answer. In this interview, Melissa Scholes Young and Jennine Capó Crucet discuss the influence of setting and place in fiction, the intoxicating pull of hometowns, and the realities of the American Dream.