Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2009

Shop Talk |

The End of Oprah

by Celeste Ng

Oprah gave book publicists a collective fit of the vapors when she announced her show—and its high-profile book club—would be ending in 2011. Many fretted over the effects on publishing, calling it “a blow”: “Other than a book being turned into a popular movie nothing brings readers to a book like Oprah,” said Dawn Davis, editorial director of the Amistad imprint of News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers. […] “She brings a variety of readers to a variety of books. Her impact is immeasurable.” Another publicist mourned, “If it is the end of her daily talk show,we probably won’t see something else […]


Shop Talk |

Literary Gifts #1: EWN's Holiday Shopping Guide and more

by Anne Stameshkin

During this holiday season, many FWR contributors and readers enjoy giving friends and family gifts of the literary variety: novels we know they’d love, subscriptions to lit magazines or journals, a Kindle or Nook, blank notebooks, the perfect pen, novelist-friendly software like Scrivener. Want some inspiration? We’ll be linking to bookish gift ideas throughout the holiday season. Be sure to visit the Emerging Writers Network frequently over the next month: the site has just kicked off its Holiday Shopping Guide; in the EWN’s most recent newsletter, Dan Wickett tells us the guide will feature numerous posts (at least one a […]


Interviews |

Listening to the Tiny Voice: An Interview with Kathryn Ma

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.


Shop Talk |

Largehearted Lit, with Marie Mutsuki Mockett and Emma Straub

by Anne Stameshkin

NYC-based writers: on Sunday, December 6 at 5 PM, gather for a free and awesome Largehearted Lit event at the Knitting Factory (361 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn). We at FWR are big fans of (and frequent linkers to) David Gutowski’s LargeheartedBoy.com, a music-lit-culture website whose Book Notes column gives established and emerging authors the chance to create and discuss music playlists connected to–or inspired by–their books. Now a new Largehearted Lit series, curated by Brooklyn-based fiction author Jami Attenberg (Instant Love, The Kept Man, The Melting Season), actualizes these playlist interviews into live readings with musical performances. In this interview, David […]


Reviews |

Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker

Life in Russia, said author Aleksander Snegirev, at Housing Works’ September 21 Rasskazy event, is uncomfortable, but always interesting. So, too, are the stories in this plump new anthology from Tin House: Arkady Babchenko’s beleaguered soldier returns to Chechnya a page away from German Sadulaev’s lyrical descriptions of Chechnya’s devastated countryside. The binding is a veritable trench across which both narrators peek at each other warily.


Shop Talk |

Mentors, Muses, and Monsters event at Greenlight Books

by Anne Stameshkin

NYC-based writers, head to Brooklyn’s newest bookstore, Fort Greene’s Greenlight Books (686 Fulton St., at S. Portland), tonight (Monday, November 23) at 7:30 PM for a special event featuring local authors and the editor of Mentors, Muses, and Monsters, a book that we at FWR are excited to read. This is also the bookstore’s first installment of what promises to be an exciting series of events featuring both authors and lit bloggers. On a personal note, I’m thrilled at Greenlight’s birth, if a bit heartsick that I had to leave Fort Greene about a month before it opened; when I […]


Shop Talk |

Bestselling authors speak out against big-box discounting

by Celeste Ng

For the past few months, writers at FWR — like those across the literary blogosphere–have been responding to and critiquing the Target-Walmart-Sears-Amazon price-war kerfuffle. Yet outside the publishing and writing worlds, it’s not clear if anyone sees big-box discounting as a Bad Thing; maybe people are too excited about snagging $9 hardback new releases. Recently, though, two big-name authors spoke up about the scary ramifications for emerging writers. In a Big Think talk, John Irving discusses how much harder it is for first-time novelists to get started today, admitting that his first novel would not have been published today. (The […]


Shop Talk |

Best American Short Stories by the numbers

by Celeste Ng

The Millions pointed us to this interesting analysis of the Best American Short Stories series from the blog Years of BASS. Jake, the brain behind Years of BASS, has read all of the collections since the 1978 edition and compiled some statistics. C. Max Magee (of The Millions) reports: Interestingly, Alice Munro, though Canadian, has made the most BASS appearances over the last 30 years by a wide margin with 18 appearances. After her come some more of the leading lights of short fiction: Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike with nine stories each; Mavis Gallant (another Canadian) with eight; […]


Shop Talk |

NPR's "What We're Reading"

by Celeste Ng

Last week, NPR launched a new feature on its website: “What We’re Reading,” which describes itself as “Staff picks of standout books.” The first installment included Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, Philip Roth’s The Humbling, and Paul Auster’s Invisible. My favorite part of this column, though, is that NPR reporters and hosts chime in with their reactions. Here’s what All Things Considered host Guy Raz had to say about Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Eating Animals: It’s part memoir, part investigative journalism — a departure from what Foer’s done in the past. But he still uses a novelist’s pen. It’s very […]




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