Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2010

Shop Talk |

Love Letter to the Deckle Edge

by Celeste Ng

If all the recent talk about the iPad and the Amazon/Macmillan ebook pricing catfight has you longing for a simpler time, look no further than this ode to the deckle edge on The Millions: Opening a book can already feel like opening a gift. Armed with a knife and freeing the pages and the story hidden beneath the folds, it becomes something more, “a penetration of its secrets” and an act of discovery, shot through with a suggestion of violence and danger or of the painful gestation of the words themselves. This act of cutting open pages to read a […]


Shop Talk |

Allison Amend's Tips for a DIY Book Tour

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

The current Glimmer Train Bulletin features a short essay by Allison Amend with her instructions for a Do-It-Yourself Book Tour. Amend is the author of the acclaimed 2008 story collection Things That Pass for Love. Her novel Stations West publishes this month. Here is the opening of her essay: It is a truth universally acknowledged that book tours don’t really sell books. Or at least they don’t sell a lot of books in comparison to the amount of time and expense involved. So then why do authors continue to go on them? Well, book tours have ancillary benefits, otherwise publishers […]


Essays |

Every Line Matters: In Memory of Barry Hannah (1942-2010)

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This morning I woke to hear the sad news that Barry Hannah had died. He was 67, and the apparent cause was a heart attack, according to the Jackson Free Press. Barry had had several bouts with cancer over the last ten years, yet I was still shocked to hear that he was gone. I guess I’d come to think of him as oddly invincible.


Shop Talk |

Barry Hannah Gone (1942-2010)

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This morning I woke to hear the sad news that Barry Hannah died yesterday afternoon. He was 67, and the apparent cause was a heart attack, according to the Jackson Free Press. Barry had had several bouts with cancer over the last ten years, yet I was still shocked to hear that he was gone. I guess I’d come to think of him as oddly invincible. Maybe it’s also because Barry’s prose felt like it was carved out of stone. Not weighty, but permanent. With a hint of the divine. That crazy Old Testament kind of divinity that’s equal parts […]


Shop Talk |

Single-serve Short Stories on Kindle

by Celeste Ng

Most of the talk about e-readers centers on full-length books. But The Atlantic has recently worked out a deal to publish a series of Kindle-only short stories, each retailing for $3.99. It’s the literary equivalent of a pop single. Six stories have been published so far, by authors such as Jennifer Haigh, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Paul Theroux. Here’s a description of Patricia Engel’s story “The Bridge”: Available exclusive to the Kindle, “The Bridge,” by Patricia Engel, is the story of Carlito and Reina, a brother and sister from Miami. When he was a boy, Carlito was thrown from a bridge […]


Shop Talk |

When one book closes…

by Anne Stameshkin

After finishing a book you love, is it hard to move on? How long do you wait to open another — and how do you shake that feeling it won’t measure up to the last? On the Kenyon Review‘s KR Blog, Elizabeth Ames Staudt considers this dilemma: An insistence on finding a book that’s impossibly similar to the last will ultimately prove as disappointing as eating a falafel sandwich anywhere in Paris but at L’As du Fallafel, as will an arbitrarily ‘opposite’ selection when you’re still craving fried chickpeas. What’s an appropriate pining period when it comes to novels? How […]


Shop Talk |

Ball State Seeks Assistant Professor in Fiction

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Due to the unexpected retirement of one of their faculty members, Ball State University has had a sudden opening for a tenure-track position in fiction writing. The ad was posted last week on their website. Here is the announcement: Assistant Professor/Fiction Writing, Department of English Tenure-track position available August 20, 2010. Responsibilities: teach and develop a wide range of undergraduate and graduate creative writing courses, particularly in fiction; publish fiction. Minimum qualifications: earned MFA or PhD in creative writing by August 1, 2010; strong record of publication in fiction; record of effective teaching at the college or university level. Preferred […]


Interviews |

The People We Know: An Interview with Donald Ray Pollock

Donald Ray Pollock, author of the 2008 collection Knockemstiff, left high school at seventeen to work at a meatpacking plant. A year later, he landed a union job at the Mead Paper Mill in Chillicothe, where he worked for the next thirty-two years. He didn’t start writing until his forties, and even then he kept his day job—writing mornings, nights, and weekends. Lydia Fitzpatrick and Kate Levin talk with the author about coming to writing late, getting an MFA, and making disreputable characters empathetic.


Shop Talk |

"Rules" of Writing

by Celeste Ng

Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, the Guardian recently asked several contemporary authors for their own rules of writing. Writers such as Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx, Jonathan Franzen, Philip Pullman, Zadie Smith, and many others answered the call ((Here’s Part One; and here’s Part Two). You may have noticed that at Fiction Writers Review, we take our rules with a pinch of skepticism. (Steven Wingate’s Quotes & Notes series has investigated some of the “rules” embodied in writing-related quotes.) But writing is a hard job, and we all long for the magic formula that will help us get […]


Shop Talk |

Three Ways to Support Indie Bookstores

by Anne Stameshkin

1. Subscribe to Poets & Writers. The magazine is continuing their special deeply discounted subscription rate for FWR readers: only $12 a year. Anyone who orders before March 15 will receive the current issue, featuring Powell’s Books in Portland. With this deal, you’ll not only get the magazine at one-third the normal price: you’ll also be showing your support for independent bookstores and Jeremiah Chamberlin’s Inside Indie Bookstores series. In each P&W issue, he profiles an important independent bookstore around the country, featuring an interview with the owner. (In the Jan/Feb issue, that bokstore was Square Books, of Oxford, Mississippi.) […]




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