Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2011

Shop Talk |

Curl Up with a Good Story: "A Simple Heart," by Gustave Flaubert

by Anne Stameshkin

Flaubert, best known for his part in fathering the modern novel, also wrote wonderful short fiction. This Saturday morning, I recommend curling up with “A Simple Heart.” A tribute to George Sand, this story was first published in 1877 as part of Flaubert’s final finished work, Three Tales; almost 100 years later it inspired Julian Barnes to write the novel Flaubert’s Parrot, which was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize. Here’s a taste from “A Simple Heart”: For fifty years the ladies of Pont-l’Évêque envied Madame Aubain her servant Felicity. For a hundred francs a year she cooked, and cleaned, […]


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This Week in Shorts

by Celeste Ng

The Short Story Month celebration continues all over: READ: Follow author Emma Straub on her year-long, 12-city “book tour” for her collection Other People We Married. She writes, “There are twelve stories in Other People We Married, and each story takes place in a different location. Every month for the next year, I will read a story in its location, or as close as I can get. This blog will follow my travels, my snacks, my impulse-buys, and more. For bonus points, send me a photo of OPWM in an exotic locale, and I will post it here, and send […]


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Stories We Love: "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face"

So there we were. Full count, bases loaded, two out. Championship game. A score of 1 – 0. The whole season narrowing down to a single pitch. Cue the slow-motion. Cue the Hollywood score: soaring strings, a drumbeat to match the rhythm of our hearts. We’ve seen this moment before. What we’ve not seen is the twist in Tom Perrotta’s short story “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face.” The pay-off pitch strikes the catcher’s mitt, and our narrator, the volunteer umpire, refuses to make the crucial call. But we are Americans, you say. We are all about winning and losing. […]


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Where I've Been Reading (Online): a guest post by Matt Bell

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our continuing celebration of Short Story Month, we’re delighted to present a guest post by Matt Bell, editor at Dzanc Books and of the literary magazine The Collagist. There’s so much good fiction online that writing about only a few of the magazines out there seems an incredibly unfair task: During my reading for the Best of the Web anthology that we publish at Dzanc, I’ve read thousands of pieces from hundreds of magazines, and there are probably dozens of magazines you should be reading as often as humanly possible. To make my task in […]


Reviews |

You Know When the Men Are Gone, by Siobhan Fallon

Siobhan Fallon’s debut story collection You Know When the Men Are Gone lets readers into a secret world of military families. Behind perfectly manicured lawns and Family Readiness Groups, Fallon’s stories reveal the stress of repeated deployment, wounded service members, and the difficulties of homecoming. Beth Garland, herself a military spouse, reviews a collection infused with “grief, heroism, and bitter disappointment.”


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Journal of the Week subscription winners: The Missouri Review

by Michael Rudin

We’re delighted to announce the winners of our Missouri Review Journal of the Week giveaway, chosen at random from our Twitter followers. Congratulations to: Nathan Golden (@nathgolden) Robert Yune (@robertyune) Spirit Authors (@SpiritAuthors) You’ll each receive a complimentary one-year subscription to The Missouri Review! Please contact us at winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com with your contact information and we’ll coordinate the rest. If you missed the profile of The Missouri Review and the exclusive interview with Managing Editor Michael Nye, you can read the whole thing in our blog archives. And remember: if you’d like to be eligible for future journal giveaways, […]


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Stories We Love: "Body Count"

by Erika Dreifus

I adore all of The Pale of Settlement (2007), a collection of linked stories by Margot Singer that won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. I’ve reread the entire book. But the story that I’ve returned to most often—many times—is “Body Count.” Initially published in Prairie Schooner (and therefore available online to those with JSTOR access), “Body Count” presents us with a protagonist who appears across the collection: Susan Stern. In 2002, Susan, an American-born Jew with close family in Israel, is living in New […]


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Book of the Week: The New Valley, by Josh Weil

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s featured title is Josh Weil’s story collection The New Valley. Weil was born in Roanoke, Virginia, to a family of would-be “back-to-the-landers.” With an agronomist father and a mother “deeply attuned” to nature, it comes as no surprise that Weil pays such careful attention to the natural world in his writing. The New Valley (Grove Press, 2009) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. The book also won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the New Writers Award from the Great Lakes Colleges Association, and a “5 Under […]


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Stories We Love: “Some Other, Better Otto”

by Daniel Wallace

Some stories feel found, not written, their lines etched on the walls of ancient Lemuria, or coded into the seams of certain carbon isotopes, no more the product of fallible modern humanity than the laws of arithmetic or the curve of the Milky Way. The opening chapters of The Great Gatsby, for instance, possess this kind of inevitability, as does Deborah Eisenberg’s short story “Some Other, Better Otto,” from her 2006 collection, Twilight of the Superheroes. Eisenberg’s Otto is a man who transmutes every conversation, philosophical conjecture, and family gathering into material for his own mental processes, seeking in the […]


Reviews |

Dzanc Duo: Aaron Burch and Matt Bell

Two recent releases from Dzanc imprint Keyhole Press expand the scope of literary fiction. How to Predict the Weather by Aaron Burch and How They Were Found by Matt Bell create provocative new worlds in their debut collections of short stories. Consistent with this press’s production of thought-provoking fiction, Burch and Bell unravel beautiful and unsettling tales with exquisite prose.




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