Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2009

Shop Talk |

Dispatch from Bread Loaf #3: Maud Casey on Historical Fiction

by Celeste Ng

Toward the end of the conference, I was seriously overstimulated and running on an average of 5 hours of sleep per night. But the title alone of Maud Casey’s lecture, “The Secret History: The Power of Imagined Figures in Historical Fiction,” lured me out of bed that very last morning. Although I haven’t yet written any historical fiction myself, I’m especially interested in the space where the fictional meets the real, and how writers balance the responsibilities they have toward historical fact with the responsibilities they have toward emotional and aesthetic truths. Casey’s lecture was more than worth the lack […]


Shop Talk |

Happy 30th Birthday, Square Books!

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Square Books, the famed independent bookstore in Oxford, Mississippi, celebrates three decades in business this month. Festivities began last Thursday, September 10th, with a special program on Thacker Mountain Radio, which broadcasts a live show made up of “literary readings and an eclectic mix of musical performances” each week from Off Square Books. This most recent one featured musical guests King Curly and Sanders Bohlke, as well as a reading by John Brandon, the current John Grisham writer in residence at Ole Miss. John received his MFA from Washington University, in St. Louis. His first novel, Arkansas, was recently published […]


Shop Talk |

[reviewlet rewind] She Got Up Off the Couch, by Haven Kimmel

by Katie Umans

Reviewlets give FWR contributors the chance to recommend books of all genres that other fiction writers might enjoy. Reviewlet Rewinds like this one highlight books published more than two years ago, and Reviewlet Classics refer to books published more than twenty years ago. At first I was not so sure about She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana (Free Press, 2005), the sequel/companion to Haven Kimmel‘s A Girl Named Zippy. She Got Up seemed like outtakes from its predecessor, and the aw shucks introduction justifying a sequel worried me. (“I didn’t expect much from […]


Shop Talk |

[reviewlet rewind] A Girl Named Zippy, by Haven Kimmel

by Katie Umans

Reviewlets give FWR contributors the chance to recommend books of all genres that other fiction writers might enjoy. Reviewlet Rewinds (like this one) highlight books published more than two years ago, and Reviewlet Classics refer to books published more than twenty years ago. You know that moment in life when you realize that stories of the things that loomed large in childhood — your terror of the woman who lives next door or your absolute certainty that some of the playing cards in a deck are female and some, male — can be condensed, as if through a trash compactor, […]


Shop Talk |

recommended event: short plays by Brian Bartels

by Anne Stameshkin

NYC-based writers: On Tuesday, September 22 at 7 PM, head to the Rattlestick Theater to see a one-night only reading of Mulletfingers: Short Plays on Hands and Fingers by FWR contributor Brian Bartels. I was lucky enough to attend another night of Brian’s hilarious yet thought-provoking plays, Versus, in March, and the short pieces resonated together like a stories in a thematically linked collection. The Rattlestick is located at 224 Waverly Place (2nd Floor). Break a leg, Brian and company!


Shop Talk |

recommended event: The Brooklyn Book Festival

by Anne Stameshkin

This Sunday, I’ll sadly be driving away from Brooklyn, but if you’re lucky enough to live in or near King’s County, check out this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival. Where: Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza When: Sunday, Sept. 13 from 10 AM – 6 PM What: A book fair surrounded by a variety of wonderful events — readings, panels, interviews, tributes, literary quiz games, film screenings, a comics jam, and workshops in book-making and cartooning. All events are free, but some require that you reserve space by picking up tickets one hour before the event at one of the info booths […]


Shop Talk |

recommended site: Lit Drift

by Anne Stameshkin

New on the lit blog scene is the very fun Lit Drift, a self-described “resource and community dedicated to the art & craft of storytelling in the 21st century.” Our name is a nod to how traditional forms of storytelling are, well, drifting into forms wholly new and unexpected. We’re interested in sifting through the palimpsests known as the Internet, the arts, and the in-between to uncover those new forms and techniques in constructing fiction. We believe that literature should be fun in an age when it’s only too easy to turn on the TV and watch shitcoms instead. We […]




Literary Partners