Last week we featured Leah Hager Cohen’s new novel, The Grief of Others, as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to:

Jaclyn Watterson (@jaclynwatterson)
Sarah Beth Hopton (@sbhopton)
Anca Szilagyi (@ancawrites)

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 [...]

This week’s feature is Leah Hager Cohen’s new novel, The Grief of Others, which was published in September by Riverhead. Cohen is the author of seven previous books: Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World (1994); Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things (1997); Heat Lightning: A Novel (1997); The [...]

In her eighth book—and fourth novel—Leah Hager Cohen explores the dynamics of grief and mourning with her trademark curious mind and loving attention to detail. Steven Wingate and the author discuss “otherness,” withholding judgment on characters, and the importance of ritual.

In his powerful debut novel, The Art of Fielding, N+1 co-founder/editor Chad Harbach taps into the ephemeral baseball consciousness through a four-person starting rotation of narrators—all characters at a fictional small liberal arts school on Lake Michigan.

In his novel Animals, we follow Don LePan’s characters into a not-too-distant future, where human beings with birth defects are slaughtered as edible products. Readers’ sense of injustice will be roused by LePan’s descriptions of suffering in the feedlots–but can a novel inspire us to stop eating factory-farmed meat? Laura Roberts hopes it can.

In this wide-ranging review, Brad Wetherell looks at Tom Franklin’s newest novel Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and considers the way Franklin subverts genre expectations, as well as how e-readers like the Kindle have the potential to change readers’ expectations.

“What a bitch of a thing prose is!” Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter to his lover Louise Colet in 1852. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.” In this essay, contributing editor Travis Holland meditates on Flaubert’s influence and legacy in fiction.

A good place to die? Mary François Rockcastle’s second novel In Caddis Wood unfolds as call and response between a husband facing terminal illness, and his wife of more than thirty years. What does it look like to draw strength from a shared past, even as the future dwindles?

The key to the adult is often found in the child. Susan Henderson’s debut novel, Up From the Blue, perfectly balances the two crises of Tillie Harris: the year in childhood when her mother went mad and the present alarm of her premature labor.

Ever wish your problems would disappear? Jessica Gregson’s history-laced debut (released this week in the U.S. by Soho Press) follows a village of Hungarian women who “make angels” of abusive husbands. But it doesn’t end there. Yank on your rain boots and follow her into a complicated rural wasteland for a bracing read.