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 [...]
The debut author on the inherent tensions of Appalachia, choice and chance, and how opportunistic, narcissistic, desperately flawed teenagers provide the fertile ground for Wild Girls.
This summer some dear family friends gave us a few antique German children’s books for our son. They included a huge and heavy tome of Wilhelm Busch’s work for children – author of the savagely funny and come-uppance-heavy Max and Mortiz (look it up, it’s worth it) – and a curious little volume of (what [...]
By October 1 all those start-of-the-school-year jitters have worn off (especially if, like me, you’ve no current connection to an academic calendar). In honor of the younger generation of readers, for the month of October FWR will highlight YA lit. Books for young people differ slightly from children’s literature, bridging the gap where Squirrel Nutkin [...]
Not for the faint of heart. Glitter, doom, and a bracing imaginative landscape await in Binder’s debut collection.
This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You, British author Jon McGregor’s new collection, assures you otherwise with plenty of big, bad, foreboding tales.
Most stories we read, hear, even tell — we forget. A scant few haunt us across years. The best ones never leave.
I still remember the first time I read One Story issue #141 on the F train. Early November in New York, when wet, bare branches foreshadow winter. It begins:
Freda weighed eighteen pounds when she [...]
Your one person dies. Does life’s plot float away like a sinister version of the house in Up? Amelia Gray’s debut novel, Threats, gets cozy with chaos. Anxious? You damn well should be.
Steven Millhauser! Yes, I know that news broke last week. But Anne and I attended the event on behalf of FWR – quite the literary crowd, Hannah Tinti further down our row, spotted Paul Vidich in the aisle. Here are some highlights:
Don Delillo described going back to stories he’d written in the late 1970s and [...]
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.
