Twice recently, while riding the train, I’ve noticed someone reading David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion, and both times I’ve found myself wondering if– hoping, really–the someone was reading a particular story from that book: “Good Old Neon.”

“Good Old Neon” offers in heartbreaking detail a first-person account of the psychological suffering that leads the apparent narrator, Neal, to suicide. The story begins, “My whole life I’ve been a fraud,” and goes on to unpack the causes and consequences of that statement.

Over at The Millions, Sonya Chung’s essay “The Mommy Problem” throws more questions at a question I’m still trying to answer. I, too, have indulged in her habit of close-reading women writers’ biographies for suggestions of children and clues as to their familial satisfaction to productivity ratio. While the argument over how writers should spend [...]

Neela Banerjee talks with Kathryn Ma, the first Asian American to win the Iowa Prize in that contest’s 40-year history. Ma channels rage and its antidote, humor, in her debut collection, All That Work and Still No Boys, which features unapologetically Asian American characters who don’t do any cooking or talking to ghosts.

Are you “smarter in print than in person?” (I’m raising my hand.)
And are you behind in your reading? (That’s me. Again.)
n the Sept. 27 NY Times Sunday Book Review, Arthur Krystal investigates why good writers aren’t necessarily great conversationalists. Should we blame the antisocial demands of our work? Or do our mouths stammer because they’re [...]

“Every book I publish is an opportunity for me to reinvent myself as a writer.” — Steve Katz

The easy thing to do when we finish one writing project, the default thing, is to simply think about what we’re going to write next. Katz’s words, however, call us to engage in a deeper kind of reconsideration of ourselves, because what we write and who we are as writers are two crucially different things.

I finally succumbed and joined Twitter’s ranks this weekend. Shortly after joining, I learned through a topic called #AmazonFAIL — 5 million+ comments — about Amazon’s new and highly sketchy policy regarding “adult” books. Below is Amazon’s response to author Mark Probst about why his YA book’s sales figures are no longer listed, followed [...]

Happy Pesach from FWR!
I was planning to link to some Passover-themed short stories or poems, but it turns out they’re in short supply, at least in free textual online form. My own favorite ode to the holiday is William Finn’s song “Passover” from his heartbreaking song cycle Elegies. Like many of Finn’s songs, it [...]

In a comment to an earlier blog post, Celeste asked the following questions, which deserve a discussion of their own:
I think this is an issue that writers of any minority group–-religious, ethnic, and so on–-face: must we write about our “own” group? Do we have a responsibility to write about our own group? And, on [...]

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Hyphen announced today that Shivani Manghnani’s “Playing the Sheik” has won their 2008 Short Story Contest. The story will appear this April in Hyphen’s Issue 17.
Among the finalists is FWR contributor Celeste Ng, for her story “Girls, At Play.” Congrats to Shivani, and to Celeste and the other finalists!

The [...]

In her debut novel, Preeta Samarasan tells the story of both one ethnic Indian family and the whole country of Malaysia, reminding us that History is the individual people it happens to.