Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2009

Shop Talk |

Gary Shtyengart: a novelist-debutante's handbook

by Anne Stameshkin

I stumbled upon this Asylum article via the ever-excellent Practicing Writing (who in turn credits Nextbook for the find): Gary Shtyengart (Absurdistan) offers sage wisdom on being a writer: Take a lot of Xanax in the morning to really calm the hell down. Try to wake up no later than 11. Work from 11:30 to 4:30, then go see the shrink, then meet some friends for drinks. Find a good bar where everyone knows your name and you can get a nice buyback. Try to relax. This is the major problem. Writing is both boring and stressful, it’s the worst […]


Shop Talk |

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's…a book-loving PRESIDENT!!

by Anne Stameshkin

Michiko Kakutani is thrilled (and aren’t we all!) that our new president is a bonafide, enthusiastic reader. Here’s to an era of empathetic, intelligent governance; all hail the book-loving chief!! Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who […]


Shop Talk |

FWR merch for sale!

by Anne Stameshkin

Show your support for Fiction Writers Review at our new CafePress store. By buying your dog a new t-shirt or treating yourself to a coffee mug, you’ll be putting a dollar or two toward some of the costs it takes to run this site and take FWR to AWP. Which means helping fiction get reviewed. Which means…drum roll please…helping fiction thrive. And while there’s no bookmark option on CafePress, you can order a fictiontastic thong. I’m still working on resizing the logo for magnets, which will be our AWP giveaway. Why magnets? They’re more durable than bookmarks or stickers, more […]


Shop Talk |

The caliber of umbrage it rouses in me cannot be contained by my usual disparagements.

by Anne Stameshkin

I’m thrilled to announce that Colson Whitehead has joined our discussion review. Well, OK, not quite…but he did pen a rib-tickling pastiche of How Fiction Works—“Wow, Fiction Works!”— in Harper’s (digested-read style). Fellow Wood readers (and really anyone), enjoy. Here’s a taste: Of the “perfect” sentence The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, Whitehead-as-Wood writes: The provenance of the sentence is not the issue; its terse, fierce beauty most assuredly is. Who is this brown fox, and how did he get so fast? To what can we attribute the lethargy of the canine—is it some onerous matter of […]


Shop Talk |

how publishing really works

by Anne Stameshkin

Welcome to an alternate reality where editorial assistants start at $80,000, 18 copyeditors are assigned to each book, and blogs are hailed as a higher art form…but can we please never say, even in jest, that a novel takes between 10 and 30 years to write? **sound of my head exploding** Thanks, Kathryn, for the link!


Shop Talk |

mind your manners

by Anne Stameshkin

Did you learn your manners from reading Victorian novels? I find this scientific study fascinating…but I’d argue that if novels like Pride and Prejudice teach us how to behave as a society, they also beg us to misbehave, or at least to deviate from a “normal” path (and thank god!). Excerpt from a Telegraph.co.uk article (thanks, Tori!): Researchers believe the novels act like “social glue”, providing instructions on how society should behave. In particular they believe that the novel reinforces beliefs that maintain the community and warn against destructive influences and character traits. The study suggests that good literature “could […]




Literary Partners