Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2010

Shop Talk |

Famous People: Can They Write?

by Celeste Ng

For some reason, I don’t think of celebrity authors as emerging writers. After all, they’ve got well-established careers of their own acting, directing, or being beautiful/audacious/infamous. It’s hard to think of someone like James Franco—who seems to be everywhere this year—as an “emerging” anything. But Franco recently published his first collection of short stories, Palo Alto, which officially makes him an emerging writer. He seems to be taking it seriously: according to Wikipedia, Franco “simultaneously attend[ed] graduate school at Columbia University’s MFA writing program, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking, and Brooklyn College for fiction writing, […]


Shop Talk |

…and when reality becomes fiction

by Celeste Ng

On the flip side of our earlier post on fiction becoming reality, reality is apparently becoming fiction just as fast. Classic pregnancy handbook What to Expect When You’re Expecting will soon be adapted into—yup, you guessed it—a romantic comedy. Entertainment Weekly reports: Jon-HammLionsgate has confirmed that they will adapt the bestselling pregnancy bible What To Expect When You’re Expecting and intend to give it the Love Actually and Valentine’s Day treatment. In other words, we’ll see a series of intertwining vingnettes with enough star wattage to blind most any moviegoer. For those of you looking to spin the straw of […]


Shop Talk |

When Fiction Becomes Reality

by Celeste Ng

Is it just me, or have the lines between the real world and fiction been even more blurred lately? According to the New York Times‘s ArtsBeat, Grove/Atlantic will publish Sterling’s Gold: The Wit & Wisdom of an Ad Man—a fictional memoir written by the fictional Roger Sterling of AMC’s Mad Men: In a deeply facetious news release Grove Press said a box containing the book “has been found in the basement of the home he once shared with his wife, Jane.” The release continues, “Though it has been out of print for many years, Sterling’s groundbreaking book gave readers a […]


Interviews |

Among Strangers: An Interview with Ruiyan Xu

“Writers can almost be defined as professional outsiders. It’s part of the job. You often have to step outside of a situation to observe it—to choose the right details—to reshape a mess of events into a narrative.”


Shop Talk |

What's your Governor reading?

by Lee Thomas

Just in time for the election yesterday, David Kipen went on The Madeleine Brand show on KPCC with a list of what he though would be good required reading for the new California Governor. His list included theory, biography and classics of political writing – and some fiction. Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, and The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice by Czech playwright, essayist and former President Václav Havel are just a few of the books Kipen selected. You can find his full list here. So now that the […]


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week Giveaway: Dakota, Or What's a Heaven For, by Brenda K. Marshall

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

At the end of August, Fiction Writers Review launched a Fan Page on Facebook. The goal is threefold: to introduce new readers to FWR, to create an informal place for conversations about writing, and also to give away lots of free books. Each week we’ll give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. All you have to do to be eligible for our weekly drawing is to be a fan of our Facebook page. No catch, no gimmicks. And once you’re a fan, you’ll be automatically entered in each subsequent […]


Shop Talk |

The new look of MQR

by Lee Thomas

Sometimes a fresh coat of paint and general sprucing up is all that’s needed to reinvigorate a literary journal’s true offering: knockout writing. Michigan Quarterly Review (MQR) has done just that with their website – redesigned as a clean, sleek affair in easy-on-the-eyes serifs and shades of charcoal and leafy green. Check out their new aesthetic here: michiganquarterlyreview.com Last year Jonathan Freedman assumed the role of Editor, taking over for Larry Goldstein, who ran MQR for more than three decades. In addition to welcoming on several Associate Editors – Michael Byers, who is on sabbatical this year, as well as […]


Shop Talk |

Robot Assistants: 2010 Edition

by Celeste Ng

Much has been said about what technology is doing to literature from the reading side. But what can technology do for those on the writing side? Several programs have recently been released to make the writer’s difficult task easier—or at least more manageable. Here’s a roundup, just in time for the start of NaNoWriMo: First, to help remove distractions, FocusWriter gives writers with a pared-down word processor that fills the entire screen, theoretically minimizing the temptation to waste time on the internet instead of writing. Unlike other stripped-down word processors, though, FocusWriter still provides basic features like word, paragraph, and […]


Reviews |

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender

by Jackie Reitzes

If you are what you eat, what happens when someone else eats what you are? In Aimee Bender’s latest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, 9-year old Rose first experiences this conundrum when she tastes her mother’s birthday cake, only to come away with the uncomfortable understanding of her mother’s lonely dissatisfaction with life. The cake betrays the inner feelings of the cook. Over the course of the novel and Rose’s life, the predicament continues, building to an unwanted fixation of what constitutes food and those who grow and prepare it.


Shop Talk |

Commemorating 1,000 Fans on Facebook

by Michael Rudin

At the end of August, Fiction Writers Review launched a Fan Page on Facebook. The goal was threefold: to introduce new readers to FWR, to create an informal place for conversations about writing, and to give away lots of free books. And though we’d always hoped this project would also help bring together a thriving literary community, we had no idea it would happen so quickly! After just two months, our Facebook community has grown to over 950 friends and we fast approach 1,000. Still, the best surprise has been in the wonderful range of individuals who have joined us […]




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