Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2011

Shop Talk |

Sims, meet literature. Literature, meet The Sims.

by Celeste Ng

Perhaps you’ve seen the work of Next Media Animation, which animates recent news stories into (unintentionally?) hilarious Sims-style 3-D video clips. (Seriously. If you haven’t seen these before, check them out now. Go ahead. I’ll wait right here.) Anyway, now this 3-D technology is being used for something educational. The New York Times reports that college literature classes are using 3-D animations to bring literature to life for students: Prof. Katherine Rowe’s blue-haired avatar was flying across a grassy landscape to a virtual three-dimensional re-creation of the Globe Theater, where some students from her introductory Shakespeare class at Bryn Mawr […]


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Short Story Month 2011: The Collection Giveaway Project

by Lee Thomas

Inspired last year by the Emerging Writers Network—who inaugurated May as Short Story Month in 2007—and the Big Poetry Giveaway for National Poetry Month, Fiction Writers Review is excited to launch our second year of The Collection Giveaway Project: a community effort by lit bloggers to raise attention for short story collections. Warm thanks to FWR Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus, who suggested FWR as a home for this project last year and will not only be participating on her own blog, but will also be helping FWR run the project right here. To participate in Short Story Month 2011: The […]


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Can Online Book Clubs Work?

by Charlotte Boulay

A couple of months ago there was an online kerfuffle after Bitch Magazine posted a list of 100 feminist YA books, and then removed three books from that list after a few commenters complained about them, for various reasons. Then other commenters cried censorship, including some other authors on the list who asked to be removed. You can read our original post about the melee here, and, should you dare, the 432 original comments here. To soothe and engage, Bitch decided to let readers vote on five books that would become an online YA book club. On the first Friday […]


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Lisa Simpson's Book Club, Hamlet's iPod

by Celeste Ng

So they’re not real—but they appreciate pop culture. As a Simpsons geek, I was delighted to discover the Tumblr site Lisa Simpson’s Book Club, which is documenting all the works of literature referenced by the surprisingly literate second-grader on The Simpsons. The site features screengrabs of Lisa reading, along with quotes and comments about her reading material of choice—including both real books like Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and On the Road as well as spoofs like the How, Why, and Huh? Book of Weather and The Babysitter Twins. But then, The Simpsons has always […]


Reviews |

Touch, by Alexi Zentner

by Casey Dembowski

Alexi Zentner’s debut, Touch, began as a short story and grew to a mythical realist novel that delivers monsters, secret family histories and three generations of the Boucher family – all nestled in Sawgamet, a northwoods logging town. Casey Tolfree unpacks the book’s elegant mingling of past and present, reality and myth, and loss that gives the living strength.


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Last chance: BOMB's 2011 Fiction Contest—EXTENDED to April 25!

by Celeste Ng

Just a reminder: the deadline for BOMB Magazine‘s fifth Fiction Contest is tomorrow, April 16 deadline extended to April 25!. This year’s judge is Rivka Galchen, author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances. The winner will receive $500 and publication in First Proof, BOMB’s literary supplement. Full content details and submission instructions are here. And to learn more about the journal, check out BOMB’s website, back issues, and blog.


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Motivation… for the Unmotivated

by Celeste Ng

“The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Easy for Mary Heaton Vorse to say, perhaps, but what if you need a little more help getting those two seats together? Writers, being creative people, come up with lots of creative ways to get motivated. Two friends of mine from grad school would get together for enforced writing time; if one of them didn’t write, she would be forced to donate money to a cause she loathed, like the NRA. I don’t know if either of them ever actually […]


Reviews |

The Art of Losing, by Rebecca Connell

by Sarah Van Arsdale

The skill of disclosure is often at the heart of good fiction; never more so than in The Art of Losing, by Rebecca Connell, just out from Europa Editions. Contributor Sarah Van Arsdale explicates what makes this book work so well by looking at it alongside The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.


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Thursday Morning Candy: Algonquin's "Ask an Editor" Series

by Celeste Ng

Ever wanted an insider’s view on the publishing process? Algonquin Books has launched the “Ask an Editor” video series on their blog to give you just that. (Via.) Says the site: Have a question about the publishing world? Submit it in the comments section and one of our editors may very well answer it in a future episode. The first video features Executive Editor Chuck Adams answering the question “How did you acquire Water for Elephants?” Watch it below: Readers have already chimed in with questions from “What other changes should literary writers expect in publishing for the next five […]


Shop Talk |

License to Write: Further Thoughts on Author Bios

by Celeste Ng

Have you noticed that more and more often, writer bios emphasize everything about the author’s life but writing? Authors list their credentials from the odd jobs they’ve worked: door-to-door knife salesman, pig farmer, department store perfume-sprayer—okay, I made those up, but pick up virtually any book by an up-and-coming author and you’ll see that they’re not far afield. Writer Edan Lepucki discusses this phenomenon in an insightful essay on The Millions: Or is my annoyance at the non-standard bio about something else? With the authors who have held a dozen, motley jobs, I worry that book writing is just a […]




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