Ethan Gilsdorf, a former Dungeons and Dragons addict and seasoned pop-culture and travel journalist, chronicles his international odyssey through the worlds of Harry Potter bands, medieval reenactment societies, World of Warcraft guilds, and massive fantasy conventions, to name only a few. In the process he learns to come to terms with his own attachment to the imaginary that has persisted into his forties. As a dedicated fairytale and myth fanatic myself, my curiosity was piqued by the title of the book which is at once a memoir, an insider’s guide to the world of gaming, and a quest that takes him all around the world to find answers not only to his own life, but to the larger question of why tens of millions of people turn away from reality and fully embrace fantastical other-existences.

Scribner caused a stir earlier this year by announcing it would publish a “restored” edition of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Why? Because the original edition was edited after the author’s death by Hemingway’s fourth wife and literary executor, Mary, who reordered parts of Hemingway’s unfinished manuscript and included parts he had wished to [...]

NPR’s “Voice of Books” has a new book of his own, a collection of travel essays called A Trance After Breakfast. New Yorkers, come hear him read from it on Monday, June 22, at 7 PM at McNally Jackson (52 Prince St.)–and check out FWR’s interview with the author following the publication of his most [...]

After a hermitish week and weekend of work, I finally had the chance to sit down with my New Yorker this morning and read Louis Menand’s essayistic review of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard UP, Apr. 2009). It inspired me to order a copy of the [...]

I love hearing about other writers’ processes, how they perceive of and describe them. There’s always the hope that this will yield some magical secret–or at least a scrap of empathy. And I think it serves writers well to read about how artists in other mediums work through a piece. This post on Henry [...]

Happiness is a warm puppy (and also a good book). Paced like an epic novel, David Michaelis’ Schulz and Peanuts is the perfect biography for fiction-lovers.

Quite early on in The Art of Subtext, Charles Baxter gives a tongue-in-cheek suggestion for a compelling story: “give the character exactly what s/he wants, and see what happens.” In Eisenberg’s stories, having what one wants is an unexpectedly fraught condition.

The Whiting Prizes are annual honors bestowed on emerging writers who show “exceptional talent and promise.”
Congratulations to fiction writers Mischa Berlinski, Laleh Khadivi, Manuel Muñoz, Benjamin Percy and Lysley Tenorio. Click here to see a full list of winners.
Whiting-winning essayist Donovan Hohn got a nice shout-out from Harper’s Wyatt Mason, who invites us to [...]