Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for February, 2009

Shop Talk |

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist / call for reviews

by Anne Stameshkin

This £10,000 prize will be awarded in May by Arts Council England (with Champagne Tattinger). Here, as listed on The Bookseller, are the longlisted books, whose English translations each published in the UK in 2008. The shortlist will be announced on April 1, 2009. My Father’s Wives by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn from the Portuguese (Arcadia) The Director by Alexander Ahndoril, translated by Sarah Death from the Swedish (Portobello) Voice Over by Celine Curiol, translated by Sam Richard from the French (Faber) The White King by Gyorgy Dragoman, translated by Paul Olchvary from the Hungarian (Doubleday) Night […]


Reviews |

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart

by Charlotte Boulay

E. Lockhart’s latest YA-novel–wherein Frankie Landau-Banks infiltrates her boarding school’s all-male secret society–is a lot of fun. The book is also a love letter to teenage girls asking them to value their own worth. As an antidote to the swooning of the Twilight crowd, Frankie’s gutsy determination is a welcome dose of a different kind of romance.


Shop Talk |

recommended reading: Jofie Ferrari-Adler's Q&A with four young editors

by Anne Stameshkin

As previously mentioned, I adore Jofie’s P&W “Agents & Editors” features, and this latest installment should especially interest FWR readers: Jofie (himself an editor at Grove/Atlantic) talks to editors Richard Nash (who, sadly, just resigned from Soft Skull Press), Lee Boudreaux (Ecco), Alexis Gargagliano (Scribner), and Eric Chinski (FSG) about falling in love with books for a living, choosing authors and manuscripts, surviving the future of publishing, and more.


Reviews |

Legend of a Suicide, by David Vann

by Greg Schutz

The stories in David Vann’s second book, Legend of a Suicide, circle compulsively around a central fascination—a father’s suicide. Partway through “Sukkwan Island,” the central novella in the collection, I decided I had to put the book down—just for a day, until I felt ready to read on. I mean this as praise. Legend of a Suicide is a very difficult book for the very best reasons: it is written with great honesty and journeys unflinchingly into darkness. It is a reckoning.


Shop Talk |

Netherland awarded PEN/Faulkner

by Anne Stameshkin

Congratulations to Joseph O’Neill, whose novel Netherland has won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. If you want to read more about the book, Natalie Bakopoulos wrote an in-depth review of Netherland and its reviews for FWR last year. The PEN/Faulkner finalists were: Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, A Person of Interest by Susan Choi, Lush Life by Richard Price (see FWR’s discussion review), and Serena by Ron Rash.


Shop Talk |

bestsellers or bust?

by Anne Stameshkin

In this rather depressing Haaretz article (found via the Practicing Writer), Super-Agent Binky Urban remains “optimistic” about the future of publishing but expresses concern about the fate of “mid-list authors”: Urban: “So fewer books will be published, and those whom we call midlist writers will no longer get published. The major writers will keep publishing, debut books will always be published, and the ones in the middle will have a problem.” So you won’t be able to nurture writers. Urban: “That’s exactly the point. When I met Richard Ford for the first time, he already had published three novels, which […]


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lit and tech linkage

by Anne Stameshkin

Can Twitter help publishers and stores sell books? Check out Ann Kingman’s findings on the Booksellers Blog. David Pogue hearts the new Kindle and answers concerns about the end of print publishing with three words: “Don’t be silly.” But Tim O’Reilly offers this “bold prediction”: “Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years. […] Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins.” Launching in March, Kachingle is a new online service that will encourage people to donate to newspapers, […]


Shop Talk |

r-e-s-p-e-c-t for novels by American women

by Anne Stameshkin

“Can a woman write the Great American Novel?” With this question in mind, Salon’s Laura Miller reviews Elaine Showalter’s new book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx: …The bestseller lists, though less intellectually exalted, tend to break down more evenly along gender lines; between J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer alone, the distaff side is more than holding its own in terms of revenue. But when it comes to respect, are women writers getting short shrift? The question is horribly fraught, and has been since the 1970s. Ten years ago, in a much-argued-about […]


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Mr. Dickens regrets he's unable to lunch today

by Anne Stameshkin

It would be criminal not to link to this great Dickens anecdote, as told on Terry Teachout’s blog; for the whole story, pick up a copy of Jane Smiley’s Charles Dickens (a Penguin Lives Biography). Can anyone think of a kinder way to phrase Dickens’ letter, which justifies breaking a social engagement in order to write? I’ve often longed to say something like this; hell, maybe the key to prolificacy is not worrying about the “kinder” bit. Teachout’s response: I like to think that after firing this off, Dickens burst into tears, then got on the computer and played Web […]


Shop Talk |

recommended reading on Oscars Day

by Anne Stameshkin

Based on my abysmal guesses last year, I can’t provide a reliable cheat sheet for your Oscar pool. But I can provide linkage: an interview with Slumdog Millionaire/Q&A author Vikas Swarup, discussing Simon Beaufoy’s film adaptation of his novel; a thoughtful piece from Garth Risk Hallberg on Revolutionary Road–the book, the film adaptation, and why the latter might not be up for more gold statues; a review of Milk from the New York Review of Books; BookFox’s critique of the adaptation of “New Boy,”one of the live-action short film contenders (FYI, you can download any of the short film nominees […]




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