Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2010

Shop Talk |

Recently on FWR…

by Anne Stameshkin

In case you missed them, here are the latest features, which FWR was proud to publish over the past month: Greg Schutz reviews American Salvage, by Bonnie Jo Campbell, noting that many of the stories [evoke] the ache at the center of the rural experience with startling clarity and force. The stories in American Salvage know what it means to occupy landscapes in which humans are outnumbered by animals and in which nature, beautiful and indifferent, rushes in to fill the physical and emotional distances between individuals. Reviewing Laura van den Berg‘s debut collection What the World Will Look Like […]


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Typewriter, meet computer.

by Celeste Ng

At last, a middle ground between those who love their computers and those who prefer typewriters. Sort of. Artist Jack Zyklin has found a way to connect a typewriter to a computer: The USBTypewriter is a new and groundbreaking innovation in the field of obsolescence. Lovers of the look, feel, and quality of old fashioned manual typewriters can now use them as keyboards for any USB-capable computer, such as a PC, Mac, or even iPad! For the curious, Zyklin’s website offers a demo video and a schematic of how it works. And for those wanting to take the plunge, you […]


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Fact Checking Fiction?

by Celeste Ng

Like many writers, I often get caught up in details. While working on my novel, I found myself checking the phases of the moon for a particular night, the temperature and weather for a particular day, whether Post-It Notes had been invented by 1977 (no), and when those annoying fasten-seat-belt warning lights became standard in cars (earlier than you’d think). Yes, fiction is made up—but sometimes, if I find myself setting an event in a particular place at a particular time, I feel obligated to get the facts right. Now the Canadian literary journal Taddle Creek is taking fact-checking to […]


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Fighting (Writerly) Fatigue

by Celeste Ng

Maybe it’s summer—too sunny out to work inside!—or maybe it’s just the 80º+ weather in Boston, but I’ve been feeling a little… tired. Just in time, Paperback Writer has a post on how to combat fatigue—physical, mental, and, most importantly for writers, creative: Creating on demand, always being on, always being told we’re not good enough, we’re not successful enough, and we’re not doing enough. I’ve been working this gig for twelve years now and I can tell you this much: the pressure never ends. I understand the siren song of all the hype that’s attached to things like social […]


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Dzanc Books Summer Sale

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

As FWR readers know, we’re big fans of the work that Dzanc Books does for the literary world. Not just in terms of publishing, but also education. In addition to the Dzanc Writer In Residence Program, which helps put writers into Michigan schools, and the Dzanc Prize, which gives money to writers to conduct writing workshops in places like VA hospitals, prisons, and in refugee communities, they also offer online tutoring and manuscript consultation through the Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions. All of these are necessary and enriching programs, and we are grateful to have had the opportunity to partner with […]


Interviews |

Honest Travelers: An Interview with Marie Mutsuki Mockett

by Lee Thomas

As a young girl, Marie Mutsuki Mockett accompanied her father to antiques fairs and art galleries, observing lively debates over Japanese lacquer and porcelain. Her talent for zeroing in on the telling detail, as well as a connoisseur’s appreciation of the aesthetic tradition of Japan, both blossom in her debut novel Picking Bones From Ash. Lee Thomas sits down for a conversation with Mockett that spans child prodigies, the downside of unlimited freedom, the upside of nonprofit publishers, and the nature of travel.


Shop Talk |

Inside Indie Bookstores: Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee

by Anne Stameshkin

The July/August issue of Poets & Writers hit the newsstands earlier this week, and among the current features is the latest installment of FWR Associate Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin’s Inside Indie Bookstores series. Joining the ranks of previously featured stores like Square Books (Oxford, MS), Powell’s Books (Portland, OR), and Women & Children First (Chicago, IL) is Boswell Book Company (Milwaukee, WI). Jeremiah spoke with Boswell owner Daniel Goldin–who worked as the book buyer for Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops for nearly two decades before that illustrious store went out of business in 2009–about why he chose to open his own shop […]


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The Writer Who Forgot How to Read

by Celeste Ng

What happens to a writer who can no longer read? NPR’s Morning Edition presents this fascinating (true) story of Canadian novelist Howard Engel, who forgot how to read—literally—after suffering a stroke. Engel managed to teach himself to read again and shared his story with neuroscientist Oliver Sacks. When he looked at the front page — it was the Toronto Globe and Mail, an English-language journal — the print on the page was unlike anything he had seen before. It looked vaguely “Serbo-Croatian or Korean,” or some language he didn’t know. Wondering if this was some kind of joke, he went […]


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What's that Sound?

by Charlotte Boulay

It turns out it’s difficult to find a novel in which the phrase “Somewhere a dog barked” or something similar does not appear, as novelist Rosencranz Baldwin reports in Slate: Having heard the dog’s call, it seemed like I couldn’t find a book without one. Not The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Not Shadow Country. Not Ulysses. Not Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men, or Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue, or Stephen King’s It or Christine. Not Jodi Picoult’s House Rules. If novelists share anything, it’s a distant-dog impulse. Picture an author at work: She’s exhausted, gazing at her laptop and […]


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More on the "Young" Writer

by Celeste Ng

The publication of the New Yorker‘s “20 Under 40” list caused quite a stir in the literary world recently. Partly, this was because such a list, issued with such authority from such an authority, raises particular expectations. But it was also partly because of the emphasis on “young” writers. In fact, as we previously mentioned, one blog, Ward Six, was so fed up with the “Under 40” list that it offered its own list of writers over 80. But in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus takes a different perspective, pointing out that “the emphasis on futurity […]




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