Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Valerie Laken’

Shop Talk |

Shout-out: FWR’s Celeste Ng on Five Chapters

Yes, we here are FWR are hardworking editors bringing you the best reviews, interviews, and essays we can find—but we’re also writers ourselves.  So we’re happy to share that Celeste Ng, our own editor-at-large (and longtime blog editor)  has a story up on Five Chapters. If you’re not familiar with Five Chapters, they’re a great online journal publishing one story each week, in five parts—a little throwback to the old days of serial literature. Celeste’s story, “The Kind of Man,” features a troubled marriage, a meddling father-in-law, a nine-year-old with an unfortunate crush, and… Dick Cheney?  Don’t worry: the entire […]


Shop Talk |

Shout-out: FWR’s Celeste Ng on Five Chapters

Yes, we here are FWR are hardworking editors bringing you the best reviews, interviews, and essays we can find—but we’re also writers ourselves.  So we’re happy to share that Celeste Ng, our own editor-at-large (and longtime blog editor)  has a story up on Five Chapters. If you’re not familiar with Five Chapters, they’re a great online journal publishing one story each week, in five parts—a little throwback to the old days of serial literature. Celeste’s story, “The Kind of Man,” features a troubled marriage, a meddling father-in-law, a nine-year-old with an unfortunate crush, and… Dick Cheney?  Don’t worry: the entire […]


Shop Talk |

Thoughts on Shorts: Valerie Laken

“With short stories, you never really expect the World at Large to care one way or the other. It’s a labor of love, and no one disputes that, and I think the purity of that endeavor is very liberating.” ~ Valerie Laken Further Reading: Read more about Valerie Laken on Fiction Writers Review Looking for something to read? Check out the Stories We Love Need inspiration? Try our Get Writing exercises


Shop Talk |

Book-of-the-Week Winners: Separate Kingdoms

Last week we featured Separate Kingdoms as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Alex Carrick (@Alex_Carrick) Jenny Shank (@JennyShank) Amy Silverberg (@AmySilverberg) To claim your signed copy of this collection, 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” us!


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: Separate Kingdoms, by Valerie Laken

This week’s featured title is Valerie Laken’s story collection Separate Kingdoms, which we’re pleased to announce has recently been longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award! Laken was born and raised in Rockford, Illinois. She majored in English and Russian at the University of Iowa, then worked and studied in Moscow, Prague, Krakow, and Madison, before moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan. There, she received an MA in Slavic Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, where she taught for several years. Her first novel, Dream House, was published in 2009. She is currently […]


Essays |

The Magical, Dreadful First Hundred Pages: From the 2010 AWP Panel "From MFA Thesis to First Novel"

“For those of you who have yet to publish your first book, I can predict with about 96% certainty how it will go: It won’t happen when you want it to, or in the way you expect. Of course it’ll take longer than you want — you know that. It’ll take so long you could grow a tree, learn forestry and paper-making, then print and bind it yourself and carry it by hand to every last remaining independent bookstore in the country. That is, if you don’t succumb first to addiction, poverty, despair, humiliation, or suicide. In short, it will take longer than you think you can stand, and yet, in the end, as you struggle to make your last-chance, oh-my-God-this-is-going-out-in-the-world? revisions, you’ll inevitably feel rushed and wonder where all that time went.”