Marriage is so last century. Natalie Bakopoulos contemplates the demise of the marriage plot and Jeffrey Eugenides’s complex, undermining revival of it in his aptly-titled novel, The Marriage Plot. Is love still the ultimate trump card? Dear reader, it is. With some qualifications.

We celebrate Valentine’s Day with an homage to the living dead: Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. Don’t fancy a date with scary slavering? No matter. Michael Rudin finds the novel reads like an existential valentine to New York City, and that’s something even a zombie can love.

Musical, prayerful, mindful, compassionate—FWR’s Aaron Cance talks with Melanie Rae Thon (The Voice of the River) about what these qualities mean in fiction and in life.

Last week we featured Margot Livesey’s new novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners.

Mira Bartok (@miraslist)
Ben Pfeiffer (@bppfeiffer)
Nadine Feldman (@Nadine_Feldman)

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 [...]

Jesús Ángel García’s debut “transmedia” novel, badbadbad is fast, fun, irreverent, and unlike anything else in the fiction aisle. Starring a lead character who shares the author’s name, the book follows his descent from devout webmaster to the obsessed savior of a pornographic social network. Also included: a documentary, a soundtrack, a chapter-by-chapter YouTube playlist.

This week’s feature is Margot Livesey’s new novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, which was published last week by HarperCollins. Livesey is the author of six previous novels: Homework (1990), Criminals (1996), The Missing World (2000), Eva Moves the Furniture (2001), Banishing Verona (2004), and The House on Fortune Street (2008). Her first book, Learning [...]

“There are people who talk about themselves in the first person, people who talk about themselves in the third person, and people who don’t talk about themselves at all,” says a character in A Meaning for Wife. Yet poet Mark Yakich’s debut novel is narrated–quite successfully–in the controversial second-person.

In her seventh novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey updates Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre so smoothly and skillfully that you’d barely even notice.

Last week we featured Eileen Pollack’s new novel, Breaking and Entering, as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations:

Nisa (@14writer)
Procrastinatress (@denfemte)
Jason Atkinson (@jasoncatkinson)

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 and “follow” [...]

A finalist for the National Book Award, Julie Otsuka’s innovative novel The Buddha in the Attic pushes the bounds of narrative form with a collective narrator and a resistance to fixed fates. By inviting the reader to consider what could have happened, instead of what did, Otsuka makes her complicit in the fate of the story’s mail-order-brides.