Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2010

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Real-Life Characters in Fiction

by Celeste Ng

Erika at Practicing Writing pointed us to this great post at The Guardian on real-life characters in fiction. Writes blogger Meg Rosoff: Six hundred words were suggested to tackle the important question of whether it is “right and fair” to fictionalise real-life characters. I could answer it in 15. Do what you like, only do it well – and don’t expect the relatives to approve. The possibilities for intersecting “real life” and fiction are many. Some works, like E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime sprinkle real-life personnages across their pages; others, like Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize–winning Wolf Hall, base the story upon […]


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Recently on FWR…

by Anne Stameshkin

Hiding out from the heat wave this weekend? Here’s the perfect reading material while you seek out some A/C: FWR’s features from the past two weeks, including three reviews of debut novels and an interview with a veteran: Michael Rudin reviews Hesh Kestin’s The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, observing: In the end, Iron Will isn’t about denial, it’s about confrontation. The confrontation of a Jewish people against the hardships they faced in World War II—“In melting-pot America [Jews] were heat-resistant, tempered by several thousand years of being close to, if not in, history’s fires”—just as it is about the […]


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Trailer as Logical Argument

by Lee Thomas

The book trailer is a relatively new phenomenon, but innovation has quickly become the rule. Take the trailer for Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, which features cameos by James Franco (a former MFA student of Shteyngart at Columbia), Jay McInerney, Edmund White, Mary Gaitskill, and Jeffrey Eugenides. It’s tongue-in-cheek, as to be expected from the author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, and contains some very funny non sequiturs – like how to blend in at a Paris Review party – and I knew virtually nothing about the book by the end. But conveying actual information is […]


Reviews |

The Quickening, by Michelle Hoover

Every work of fiction is grown from at least one seed of truth, whether it’s an emotional truth, an actual event, or a fact of nature. For Michelle Hoover, author of the elegant debut novel The Quickening, this seed was a fifteen-page document that her great-grandmother typed out in the final year of her life. In it, “broken hearted and sick in mind and body,” she recounted her seven decades as an Iowa farmwoman. Loosely based on this document and family oral histories, The Quickening follows the journeys of two Iowan families trying to build their lives amid the hardships of the Great Depression.


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All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my slushpile.

by Celeste Ng

With self-publishing on the rise, anyone can be an author. No more slush pile! No more snooty agents and editors as gatekeepers! The public will decide which books succeed through the glories of democracy! But what happens to the readers in this scenario? That’s what Laura Miller asks on Salon.com. As she puts it, is the public prepared to meet the slush pile? You’ve either experienced slush or you haven’t, and the difference is not trivial. People who have never had the job of reading through the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts sent to anyone even remotely connected with publishing typically […]


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Trailer for Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

by Celeste Ng

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go is being adapted to the big screen, directed by Mark Romanke and with a screenplay by novelist Alex Garland. Stars include Keira Knightly as Ruth, Carey Mulligan as Kathy, and Andrew Garfield as Tommy. It’s hard to say much about the plot without giving away the secret (and oh boy, is there ever a big secret!), but below is the recently released trailer: The movie isn’t out until October 1, so you’ve got 3 months to read the novel. (Click the image at left to find it at an indie bookstore near you.) […]


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Sunil Yapa wins Hyphen/AAWW Short Story Contest

by Celeste Ng

Hyphen Magazine and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop have named Sunil Yapa as the winner of their 2010 short story contest. From the announcement: Hyphen and The Asian American Writers’ Workshop have selected the 2010 Asian American Short Story Contest winner, Sunil Yapa, who penned “Pilgrims (What is Lost and You Cannot Regain)”, a poignant story of anguish and reconciliation. Yapa is a recent graduate from the MFA program at Hunter College in New York City. His work has appeared in Pindeldyboz: Stories that Defy Classification and The Multicultural Review, and he has received scholarships to the New York State […]


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Why buy the cow?

by Lee Thomas

The Los Angeles Times Book Section reported back in May that the top 10 e-books on Kindle are all free. Not surprisingly, Steig Larsson now holds the top three slots with his Millennium Trilogy, which range between $7.15 and $9.99. That still leaves plenty of free books in the top tier. The current top of the free e-book list is a debut novel, The Heir by Paul Robertson (Bethany House). It’s a page-turner, the kind of book I’ve torn through at the beach or on cold winter evenings, when it’s pitch black outside by 4 p.m. Robertson has come out […]


Reviews |

Sarah/Sara, by Jacob Paul

by Erika Dreifus

Jacob Paul’s debut, Sarah/Sara, is not a joyful read, but it is a deeply moving one. The novel unfolds as the journal of Sarah Frankel, an American-born Jew who, shortly after finishing college, moved to Israel, where she took the Hebrew version of her name (“Sara,” pronounced Sah-rah) and became far more ritually observant than she was raised to be. After her visiting parents are killed in a suicide bombing in the café below her Jerusalem apartment, Sara embarks on a six-week, solo kayaking trip through the Arctic. Throughout the beautiful yet dangerous trek, Sarah’s thoughts turn not only to her past—memories—but also to an imagined future, one that challenges her faith.


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More on 20 Under 40 (and one over 80!)

by Celeste Ng

The response to The New Yorker‘s “20 Under 40” list continues. Dan Wickett and Steven Gillis, co-founders of indie, non-profit publisher Dzanc Books, polled “nearly 100 independent publishers, agents, editors, bloggers and reviewers” to compile an alternate “20 to Watch” list—with no age limit: As the staff of The New Yorker went to the sources they knew best when creating their list, and most of the authors they reviewed have either been published in The New Yorker or with major New York publishing houses, so we focused on writers publishing with independent houses. We realize that our list reflects its […]




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