Do yourself a favor and read this fantastic essay, “How Reading Junot Diaz Can Help America Prosper,” by friend of FWR Dean Bakopoulos, right now. It’s one of the most eloquent, passionate explanations for why fiction matters that I’ve ever seen. I’d like to quote the whole thing, but here’s just a taste: [...]
Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin writes an appreciation of the work of his former teacher and mentor, Charles Baxter, on the occasion of the publication of his new book.
Curtis Smith returns to Rick Bass’s story collection The Watch after two decades in order to remind himself what it was in this particular book that sparked a young man to want to become a writer, as well as to see whether the stories still hold up to his fifty-year-old self.
Joshua Furst grapples with the human condition by creating characters on the edge. They inhabit the fringes of society, sanity and cultural norms, but remain incredibly grounded in a common American experience, with all its oddball rituals and quirks. In his conversation with Lee Thomas, he defends the merits of dissent, even when the dissidents self-destruct: “To dismiss them out of hand for those bad choices becomes, I think, in our public conversation, a way of dismissing the truth behind those choices.”
Graywolf published Benjamin Percy’s much-anticipated debut novel The Wilding earlier this week. Shawn Mitchell talks with the acclaimed story writer about making the transition between the short and long forms, his apprenticeship to the craft of story, the obsessions that drive his work, and how he manages to balance his fiction and family life with teaching, traveling on assignment for magazines like Outside and The Wall Street Journal, and contributing regularly to publications like Esquire, Men’s Journal, and Poets & Writers.
Since the death of The Virginia Quarterly Review’s Managing Editor, Kevin Morrissey, at the end of July, there has been much discussion in the literary, academic, and publishing communities about what led up to this tragedy. Some of the reporting has been sensational, some praised as investigative journalism. Frequently, both have been said of the [...]
In an essay for the New York Times, professor of logic Timothy Williamson examines the connections between imagination and reality—and comes to some counterintuitive conclusions:
On further reflection, imagining turns out to be much more reality-directed than the stereotype implies. If a child imagines the life of a slave in ancient Rome as mainly spent watching [...]
onathan Franzen is on the cover of the August 23 issue of TIME Magazine, with an article marking the publication of his latest novel, Freedom. Since he’s the first living author to be so featured in over a decade (the last being Stephen King), it’s caused quite a stir in the lit world. [...]
Did you miss FWR Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin on the “Living Writers” show on Wednesday? No worries. You can now stream the podcast on iTunes preview—mouse over the August 11th episode and click play, or click “View in iTunes” to download. The interview starts at about 15:30.
“Living Writers” airs every Wednesday [...]
We’re excited to announce that FWR Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin will be this week’s guest on “Living Writers”, hosted by T. Hetzel. “Living Writers” airs every Wednesday at 4:30pm on WCBN-FM Ann Arbor. Tune in to hear him discuss Fiction Writers Review, his own writing, the Inside Indie Bookstore series he publishes in Poets & Writers [...]
