Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘nonfiction’

Shop Talk |

summer reading by (and recommended by) Alan Cheuse

by Anne Stameshkin

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 recent novel, 2008’s To Catch the Lightning. Via NPR, don’t miss Alan Cheuse’s list of carefully chosen (and enthusiastically recommended) books you should read this summer, complete with compelling reviewlets and links to excerpts. If only all reviewers *loved* books the way Cheuse obviously does!


Shop Talk |

The Program Era: future FWR discussion?

by Anne Stameshkin

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 book, which I think might be a great one to discuss via a group review on FWR. Who would be interested in joining this group review, which we’d aim to do in early August? Celeste, I know you’re in (and thanks to both you and […]


Essays |

How It Feels to Get There: Reading Deborah Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes with Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext

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.


Shop Talk |

2008 Whiting Prize winners / recommended website: Brevity

by Anne Stameshkin

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 make Hohn’s work our “Weekend Read.” For a sampling of exquisite “concise creative nonfiction,” FWR highly recommends a detour to a website mentioned in said shout-out, Brevity. The site also features book reviews.




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