Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for July, 2011

Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: The Oregon Experiment, by Keith Scribner

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s featured title is Keith Scribner’s The Oregon Experiment. Published last month by Knopf, this book is Scribner’s third novel. His first, The GoodLife, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2000. He is also the author of the 2003 novel Miracle Girl. Scribner’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared in such places as TriQuarterly, American Short Fiction, Quarterly West, The North Atlantic Review, the San Jose Mercury News, the Baltimore Sun, and the anthologies Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton) and Sudden Stories: The MAMMOTH Book of Miniscule Fiction. He received both Pushcart and O’Henry Prize […]


Shop Talk |

Book-of-the-Week Winners: Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Valerie Suydam (@valeriesuydam) Chanel Dubofsky (@chaneldubofsky) Sara Habein (@sshabein) To claim your signed copy of this collection, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!


Shop Talk |

Open a book, become someone else

by Celeste Ng

A Lithuanian bookstore has created a gorgeous campaign called “Become Someone Else” (“Pabū kuo nors kitu”) showing the transformative power of books. The Love Agency, the advertising firm that created the campaign, has all of the images up online. (Via GalleyCat.) And there’s evidence that books have literal (ha ha) transformative powers as well. A study in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine finds “each increasing quartile of print media use was associated with a 50% decrease in the odds of having MDD,” or major depressive disorder. In other words, the more teens read, the less likey they were […]


Interviews |

Perfume from Whale Vomit: An Interview with Keith Scribner

by J.T. Bushnell

When WTO protestors mobbed downtown Seattle in 1999, breaking windows and burning dumpsters, Keith Scribner was a new father, and it made him wonder how it would feel to have that chaos on his own street. In an interview with J.T. Bushnell, Scribner talks about how those thoughts sparked his newest novel, The Oregon Experiment, what it means to pursue the writing life, and why perfume labels don’t list the ingredients.




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