Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for February, 2009

Reviews |

Cheating at Canasta, by William Trevor

by Preeta Samarasan

William Trevor is a God anyone can believe in–ever-loving and omniscient, but not omnipotent. Even as he reveals lives destroyed or halted, one is calmed by his authority, safe in his hands. It’s true; there is nothing he can do to save his characters from themselves. But in his latest collection, Trevor does not just bear silent witness: unlike most contemporary short-story writers, he spells out his stories’ moral lessons, traces them to their furthest conclusions, and even ties up loose ends.


Reviews |

Home, by Marilynne Robinson

by Lee Thomas

Jack Boughton returns home to Gilead, Iowa after a twenty-year, largely silent absence, offering his family no details about those lost years or the cause of his return. Home is a quiet book, one without dramatic plot devices; Robinson’s characters carry out the pure weight of life–playing the piano, going to the store, washing dishes– all while facing the ever-present sense of life’s brevity.


Shop Talk |

apostrophes banned in Birmingham

by Anne Stameshkin

This sounds like an Onion article. It’s not. From now on, no sign produced by Birmingham City Council will contain the punctuation mark. Debates over whether Kings Norton really should be King’s – or even Kings’ – Norton may rage on, but they will be useless. And nearby Druids Heath – which was never actually home to one, let alone many, druids – will never take on the possessive, no matter how furious local apostrophe advocates become. The council said the move had been taken for the purposes of consistency and to avoid costs and confusion over whether place names […]


Shop Talk |

write…or die

by Anne Stameshkin

If you need extra motivation to put more words-to-screen during a writing session, Dr. Wicked‘s web app Write or Die might help. From Dr. Wicked’s site: Write or Die is a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you’re fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences. […] The idea is to instill in the would-be writer a fear of not writing. Depending on the mode you choose, consequences are: […]


Shop Talk |

Harper Perennial celebrates the short story

by Anne Stameshkin

Harper Perennial is already building buzz for its upcoming Summer of the Short Story campaign, declaring that “it’s high time to celebrate the much-loved, but oft-overlooked, short story form.” The publisher will promote six new collections (due to publish this summer and fall)—along with six collections of classic shorts. The festivities will begin in earnest this May, but in the meantime, Perennial is featuring a new story every week in 2009 on a site called Fifty-Two Stories. According to Cal Morgan: Some of them will be new stories from our original collections, or from upcoming hardcovers; some original contributions never […]




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