Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2009

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recommended event: 5th Annual Hudson Valley Literary Festival

by Anne Stameshkin

From the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) (who are celebrating their 40th anniversary!): Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 — All LIT Up: 5th Annual Hudson Valley Literary Festival Come to the Hudson Valley for a day-long festival produced by the CLMP (with the Hudson Opera House, Fence Books and Hudson Wine Merchants) celebrating literature and literary publishing. **All events free and open to the public.** 11 AM – 4 PM: Bargains! Bargains! Bargains! Literary Magazine & Small Press Book Fair Hudson Opera House, 327 Warren Street, Hudson, NY Hundreds of books and lit mags published by regional and national […]


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new review on FWR: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

by Brian Short

A preview: The first things you feel are joy and awe. The stories in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower’s first collection, are pieces that care, first and last, about telling a damn good story. Tower’s use of compression and summary to contextualize poignant or dramatic scenes is elegant and efficient. The granular and hilarious detailing of landscapes—North Carolina’s landscapes, in particular, are exuberantly and beautifully rendered in this collection—and of characters is solid, remarkable. The virtuosic moments in Tower’s prose make us gape, wince, laugh out loud: the hilarious or heart-rending one-liners, the hard-eyed endings, the way in which […]


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new review on FWR: Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

by Natalie Bakopoulos

a preview: Colson Whitehead’s fourth novel, Sag Harbor, is driven not by plot but by time, by the fleetingness of summer and its constant reminder of that fleetingness. The beginning is slow, with the sense of months ahead, time to digress and ponder and imagine and internalize, with the thickest, most dense prose socked in the middle of July, the more desperate, urgent bursts as we careen toward Labor Day. The writing is wonderfully languorous throughout, like summer itself, and a perfect match for adolescence: unrestrained and indulgent but wonderfully self-conscious as well. Click here to read the whole review […]


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Blog Tour! Bridget McNulty, author of Strange Nervous Laughter

by Anne Stameshkin

FWR is thrilled to host South African debut novelist Bridget McNulty for a stop on her book blog tour. In addition to sharing an excerpt from her book Strange Nervous Laughter, Bridget has also written a great post about the story and process behind it. (And if you haven’t yet seen “The Lonely Cupcake,” a one-minute whimsical fable/preview of the novel, watch it today; and check out behind-the-scenes photos from that project.) An excerpt from Strange Nervous Laughter: He arrived at her house in a hearse, which was perhaps not the best omen for a first date. What was unusual […]


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recommended event: Ann Arbor Book Festival

by Anne Stameshkin

FWR will have a table at the 2009 Ann Arbor Book Festival (in the Writing Conference), which begins this Friday! Michigan-based writers, stop by and say hello to Jeremy, and also check out the Emerging Writers Network and Hobart. In addition to a book fair, this festival will feature an array of exciting panels (the one on the Future of the Book sounds especially interesting!), readings from authors like Colson Whitehead (Sag Harbor) and Sung J. Woo (Everything Asian), and other events, such as this exploration of how a play comes to life “from page to stage,” a breakfast with […]


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Short Story Month rec: "Carry the Water, Hustle the Hole" by Allison Amend

I have a hard time remembering that I actually like short stories, even though Elizabeth Crane and Melissa Bank and Lorrie Moore are some of my favorite living authors, and short fiction is some (or all) of their best work. So when our wise and talented editor raved about Allison Amend’s newest collection, it took me half a year to get around to reading it. Don’t wait as long as I did. Things that Pass for Love is beautiful and brilliant, each story distinctly separate and distinctly wonderful. It’s hard to choose a favorite, but let’s go with “Carry the […]


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FWR Tupperware Recap

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

A wonderful time was, indeed, had by all. We missed you, Anne. But thanks for sending all the great books! They found many good homes. Thanks also to Johanna Hines from Norton for review copies, and Karl Pohrt at Shaman Drum for some of the same. And, of course, a big thanks to everyone for coming. It was lovely to spend an evening in the backyard together, and a great excuse for me to barbecue a turkey. If only I’d remembered to have someone snap a photo of me in my Fiction Writers Review apron… Most importantly, though, here’s the […]


Reviews |

The Nightingales of Troy, by Alice Fulton

The Nightingales of Troy is renowned poet and critic Alice Fulton’s fiction debut. In this collection, she displays a knack for the ineffable, for creating stories that are more than the sum of their intricately assembled parts. Her best stories not only exhibit her architectural prowess, they also remind the reader of the near-magical capaciousness of the story form.


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new review on FWR: The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker

by Celeste Ng

an excerpt: Tiffany Baker’s debut novel, The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, contains an apparent contradiction in its title: a little giant? Truly Plaice, the character so dubbed, is no Paul Bunyan: she doesn’t tower over rooftops or create canyons with her feet. But she’s plenty big enough to cause a stir: at five, she’s two inches taller than her seven-year-old sister, and she just keeps growing bigger and heavier. So she becomes known as Aberdeen’s “little giant,” a position that shapes her fate. And that oxymoron encapsulates this whimsical novel, which is, at its heart, about the yoking together […]




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