Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2010

Shop Talk |

Literary Halloween Costumes

by Celeste Ng

With just a few days left before Halloween, have you figured out your costume yet? The internets have some suggestions. On Flickr, the “Literary Halloween Costumes” group provides inspiration, from a classic Alice in Wonderland getup to Friar Tuck and Edgar Allen Poe to the obligatory Harry Potter. Need step-by-step instructions? Check out these tutorials to dress up as Heathcliff, Elizabeth Bennett, John Galt, or Jean Valjean and Cosette. For the kids, Apparently Not Deranged has suggestions, including Little Women, Peter Rabbit, and Waldo. (Via.) And for the do-it-yourselfer, there’s this colossally awesome Max costume, from Beau Baby: What’s your […]


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Brief is beautiful

by Lee Thomas

Over on the Wall Street Journal’s newly-launched Book Review, Alexander McCall Smith laments the pitfalls of overwriting in “Block that Adjective!” Smith writes: Concise prose knows what it wants to say, and says it. It does not embellish, except occasionally, and then for dramatic effect. It is sparing in its use of metaphor. And it is certainly careful in its use of adjectives. Look at the King James Bible, that magnificent repository of English at the height of its beauty. The language used to describe the creation of the world is so simple, so direct. “Let there be light, and […]


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Terrifying Tweets

by Lee Thomas

Thanks to Anne for alerting me to this, it sounds like just the diversion for a drizzly October morning. Today is the last day of the challenge, so if you’re feeling inspired for some Halloween creepy tweeting, get typing! Bestselling author and former Booker Prize judge Frank Delaney is hosting a Halloween Writing Challenge on Twitter. From Monday, October 25 to Wednesday, October 27, he’s challenging people to introduce the creepiest character possible in 140 creepy characters. Please enter! (Don’t forget to include the hash tag #FDcreepy in your tweet.) You just might win a secret creepy prize picked by […]


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Book covers in your mailbox

by Lee Thomas

For better or worse, I’m one of those people who the postal service could charge $2 to send a simple letter and I’d still ante-up. With more of us sending email, especially in a work setting (I’m all for the environmental benefits of this), municipal mail service around the world has suffered. But there’s still something thrilling about receiving a handwritten letter – and they’re rare enough these days that a note from a friend in the mailbox can make my week. Enter: the perfect intersection of my admiration for the handwritten note and a love of cover design. Penguin […]


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Book of the Week Giveaway: The Swan Thieves, by Elizabeth Kostova

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 […]


Essays |

The 2010 Sozopol Fiction Seminar

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each spring the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation selects five English speaking writers and five Bulgarian writers to participate in the Sozopol Fiction Seminar, which takes places in the tiny, historic town of Sozopol, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea. Four of the 2010 English speaking fellows–Kelly Luce, Carin Clevidence, Charles Conley, and Paul Vidich–collaborate on a group portrait of their experience at this year’s seminar.


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The Story of Dzanc

by Lee Thomas

Here at Fiction Writers Review, we’re big fans of the work that nonprofit publisher Dzanc Books has done in the past four years to publish, promote and generally champion writers who “don’t fit neatly into the marketing niches of for-profit presses.” FWR’s own Jeremiah Chamberlin has a terrific piece on Poets & Writers website about the origins of Dzanc, and the Emerging Writers Network, started by Dzanc co-founder Dan Wickett: [The Emerging Writers Network’s] mission, like the goal of those very first reviews, was—and still is—to help develop a larger audience for emerging writers and established writers deserving wider recognition. […]


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Elizabeth Kostova on Tour for The Swan Thieves this week in Chicago, Madison, Milwaukee, and Ann Arbor

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Elizabeth Kostova–author of The Historian, co-founder of the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria, and long-time supporter of FWR–will be reading from her new novel, The Swan Thieves, at three of our favorites bookstores over the next several days: Women & Children First in Chicago (Sunday, 10/24)), A Room of One’s Own Bookstore in Madison (Monday, 10/25), and Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee (Tuesday, 10/26). Kostova’s new novel is centered on Andrew Marlow, a psychiatrist and amateur painter, who recounts one of the greatest challenges of his career: a patient named Robert Oliver. Oliver, a talented and influential painter, is delivered […]


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Who owns the library?

by Lee Thomas

In an article about the growing trend of private takeovers of public library systems, David Streitfeld of the New York Times poses the question: Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then? With vigorous debate on both sides of the issue, and many towns – and some states – on the brink of bankruptcy, what are your thoughts on the issue? For library systems that do go private, who decides which books are added to collections? […]


Essays |

Quotes & Notes: The Writer as Apprentice

by Steven Wingate

“Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.” —Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction




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