Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2011

Shop Talk |

Stories We Love: "Irish Girl"

by Forrest Anderson

I don’t mind admitting that I get stuck as a writer—occasionally. Well, pretty often. Okay, I mean constantly. And I’m not talking about jamming up over a flowery paragraph or a pivotal scene. I’m saying that I’ll be four pages into a new story (on what I’ve come to imagine on my worst days as the road to hell, thanks to a willful misinterpretation of Ron Carlson Writes a Story) and I’ll not only forget how to write a sentence, but I’ll lose sight of how a short story should even look. I used to feel ashamed about my lapse […]


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Book of the Week: Orientation, by Daniel Orozco

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Orientation, by Daniel Orozco. Published in May by Faber & Faber, this long-awaited and much-anticipated collection is Orozco’s first book. His stories have appeared in such places as Zoetrope: All Story, Ecotone, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, StoryQuarterly, Mid-American Review, Seattle Review, and Story. In 1995 the title story of this collection was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories, and in 2005 “Officer’s Weep” was anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories. He was a Scowcroft and L’Heureux Fiction Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Fiction in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. He has […]


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Book-of-the-Week Winners: Miracle Boy

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Miracle Boy as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Kate Thompson (@kateEthompson) Francesca Miller (@creoleimp) Angela Meyer (@LiteraryMinded) To claim your 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!


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Where's Alice Bliss?

by Celeste Ng

Earlier this summer, we looked at BookCrossing, a website that allows users to “catch” and “release” books around the world and track where their books have gone. Now author Laura Harrington is using BookCrossing in an unusual promotion for her novel, Alice Bliss. Writes Harrington: Where’s Alice Bliss? is a campaign to send copies of the novel Alice Bliss to as many countries and U.S. states as possible. Through bookcrossing.com, copies of Alice Bliss will be registered and tracked as they travel around the world, passing from one reader to the next. […] We want to send Alice to four […]


Shop Talk |

Help save the St. Mark's Bookshop!

by Celeste Ng

New Yorkers know and love the St. Mark’s Bookshop, a stalwart on the Lower East Side. But lately, the bookstore has been struggling to pay the market rent asked by its landlord, Cooper Union. The NY Daily News reports: The co-owners of the book shop, Terry McCoy and Bob Contant, are set to meet with the school’s officials Wednesday to discuss a rent reduction. The last time the two sides met, in early 2010, Cooper Union was unwilling to budge on the rent, which has increased to $20,000 a month. And the New York Times covers the deep sacrifices the […]


Shop Talk |

Morris Lessmore

by Celeste Ng

We’ve talked a lot about how technology can bring books to life in new and exciting ways, but I hadn’t seen an example of an ebook that got me really excited until someone pointed me to this one. The brainchild of William Joyce, The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore is a wonderful amalgalm of movie, book, and game. A story about a book-loving man who stumbles into a world inhabited by books, it’s at once a dramatization of the power of words and a meta-commentary on literature. Joyce was previously a designer for Pixar, and it shows in the […]


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Get Writing: or rather, Getting (Back to) Writing

by Anne Stameshkin

Even the most dedicated writers go through “not-writing” phases, deliberate or accidental ones. And when we return to our writing desks after that week or month or year away, our fingers and voices may feel…rusty. How do we get back that indescribable “it,” the voice that drives our prose and compels us to write it? The following exercise has helped me get my groove back on more than one occasion. It’s adapted from an assignment used by my former teacher Blanche Boyd (Terminal Velocity, The Revolution of Little Girls), who designed it for beginning writers–yet its usefulness extends to writers […]


Interviews |

Find Your Metaphor: An Interview with Daniel Orozco

by Michael Shilling

Daniel Orozco’s debut has been a long time coming. Now fans of his prizewinning fiction can enjoy an entire collection, Orientation: And Other Stories. Michael Shilling calls him in Idaho to talk geographic love letters, G. Gordon Liddy, and the peculiar challenge of gimmicks.


Shop Talk |

Under the Influence: A Parable of Courage

by Helen W. Mallon

When I send out submissions, I’m easily spooked. After receiving my 4,575th “positive rejection”—i.e., “Not a good fit this time… send more”—I wonder if He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is mwa-ha-ha-ing behind the scenes: “Everyone Else is Going to Be Published. Die, Sucker.” Fortunately, better writers than me have endured the soul-sucking chill of the Dementor’s Kiss. My go-to writing mantra is a story about a Really Successful Writer (hereafter known as Harry Potter) told to me by my favorite writing mentor, whom I’ll call… Hermione Granger. Perhaps the story means so much because she believed in my work. When I can’t maintain faith […]


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Under the Influence… of Janet Peery

by Mary Westbrook

For me, the beauty of Janet (besides her flowing hair and karaoke skills, obviously) is that she forces students to name things, to make the abstract concrete. She won’t tolerate imprecise language, lazy writing, limp sentences.  I think her “Janet-isms” are in keeping with that. A lot of her funny sayings, some of them her own creations and others drawn from a lifetime of reading and study, concisely label common student writing flaws. Another former writing instructor once wrote in the margin of one of my stories, “I’m bored.” Fair enough. But, for me, that criticism was never helpful. After […]




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