When Brian Bartels wasn’t writing or managing Fedora, the Greenwich Village bar and eatery that he co-owns with Gabriel Stulman, he spent 2012 trying to avoid the narcotic glow of his cell phone so he could spend more time reading. Here are the books that caught his attention last year.
Books for giving, again and again.
I’ll be totally honest: I really did not expect to like Frankie Thomas’s “The Showrunner” at all. It starts off at a casting session for a fictional Disney-esque tween series, and not only am I biased against stories that saturate themselves in current pop culture—I tend to like a little patina on my cultural [...]
The prolific Richard Bausch on fear as fuel, naïvité as strength, and keeping the writing fresh year after year.
Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (1908) is one of those stories—paralleled by certain films—that I always return to with an odd yearning. Each time, despite myself, I hope that the story (or film) will somehow end differently. That Connie won’t leave with Arnold Friend. That Christopher Reeve won’t discover that penny from 1979. Or, [...]
Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the third installment of our new blog series, “First Looks,” which highlights soon-to-be released books that have piqued my interest as a reader-who-writes. We publish “First Looks” here on the FWR blog around the 15th of each month, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments and your [...]
As a fiction writer, I have a litmus test for knowing if a book is one I love love love versus one that is merely admirable. A book that is truly fantastic for me is one that also makes me want to write. It’s not that I go into the reading experience looking to be [...]
Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the second installment of our new blog series, “First Looks,” which highlights soon-to-be released books that have piqued my interest as a reader-who-writes. We publish “First Looks” here on the FWR blog around the 15th of each month, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments and your [...]
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.
I’m thankful for many things this Thansksgiving–friends, family, bits of good fortune large and small that have come my way over the past year. But in terms of stories, there’s one I’m eternally grateful for: Julie Orringer’s “Pilgrims.”
I first encountered “Pilgrims” in The Best New American Voices 2001, where it was the lead-off story. [...]
