On The Rumpus, author Steve Almond explains why he recently decided to self-publish a book of short stories and essays, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey–and it’s probably not for the reasons you’d think:
If this were a traditional publishing endeavor, the next question would be how to get the book a “bigger platform,” meaning [...]

Most of Leni Zumas’s stories in her exceptional (and stylistically exciting) debut, Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008), are compact studies of paralysis in the tradition of Beckett and Ioensco. Sherwood Anderson could have been describing Zumas’s characters as they, too, are “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.” In “Farewell Navigator,” one character envies a group of blind schoolchildren for having teachers “to pull them. Nobody expects them to know where to go.” And in “Leopard Arms”—a story told from the perspective of a gargoyle—a father fears “of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand.”

Donald Ray Pollock, author of the 2008 collection Knockemstiff, left high school at seventeen to work at a meatpacking plant. A year later, he landed a union job at the Mead Paper Mill in Chillicothe, where he worked for the next thirty-two years. He didn’t start writing until his forties, and even then he kept his day job—writing mornings, nights, and weekends. Lydia Fitzpatrick and Kate Levin talk with the author about coming to writing late, getting an MFA, and making disreputable characters empathetic.

Every book we feature on Fiction Writers Review has won the admiration of our reviewers. But because it’s a new year, and it’s award season, and today is the official holiday of love, we asked our contributors to tell us which books of 2009 they most adored, cherished, and crushed on. What we received often transcended mere lists; writers shared why these certain books affected them, woke them up, even made them jealous. So in addition to the “favorites” that received the most votes, we’ve also included some of these endorsements and mini-reviews. Most selections are arranged by genre (Novel, Story Collection, etc.), and then there are less conventional categories–like Book You Loved But Would Be Embarrassed to Be Caught Reading.

In his gem of a first story collection, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Knopf, 2009), acclaimed novelist Kazuo Ishiguro explores variations on temptations performers face: to deny their own humanity for the sake of high art, or career advancement. Music is an art of immersion. Like water–which can be experienced only through drinking it or actually getting wet–the suggestion of music ripples only in the mind. Writing (or reading) about music puts us outside the place where we experience it, in the same way that a watcher of rivers stands on the shore. Ishiguro, like a consummate outsider, lures his first-person narrators onto a deceptively quiet bank, the better to confront them with the whirlpool at the center of each story.

In Malie Meloy’s most recent collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, there are no clear lines, no obvious right answers. Meloy’s characters are caught between two choices that are both right—or both wrong—and that’s what makes their decisions so difficult, and makes these stories so compelling. In reading them, you feel, as the author puts it, “both the threat of disorder and the steady, thrumming promise of having everything [you] wanted, all at once.”

The National Book Foundation has announced the 2009 National Book Award Finalists. Here are the contenders in fiction:

Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W. W. Norton & Co.)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
Marcel [...]

On September 20th, at a ceremony in Cork, Ireland, the 34-year-old author Simon Van Booy collected the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and a 35, 000 Euro check for his collection, Love Beings in Winter (Harper Perennial, 2009).
When last year’s O’Connor Award was given to Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, judges did away with even [...]

Perhaps, in keeping with the stricter labeling laws, Aleksandar Hemon’s new collection of stories should list its primary ingredient first. Impediments, more than love, are the foundation of Love and Obstacles: Stories (Riverhead, May 2009). Foreignness, prepubescence, awkward bookishness… Even sex itself is a liability: the characters look ridiculous pursuing it, worse doing it, and we think less of them afterward. Men offer up their partners for it, threaten each other’s mothers and sisters with it, reminisce about it, and thwart each other’s pursuits of it. Aleksandar Hemon’s vivid prose serves as the overlit bar mirror, showing us every wax bead in his characters’ pores.

I saw Wendy and Lucy this past April, and there wasn’t any sound for the first ten minutes. Well, not no sound; there were the suggestions of breathing, some ambient rustling. The whispers filling the theater were mainly curious—could this be some new super-indie technique, perfected by director Kelly Reichardt for her second film? It turned out to be a technical mistake, and I found out what I missed when I read Jon Raymond’s “Train Choir,” the closing piece in his first collection, Livability, and the story on which Reichardt’s film is based.