Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2011

Shop Talk |

Marginalia and the e-reader

by Celeste Ng

Partway through his essay on marginalia, Sam Anderson tells the story of lending a friend his copy of Infinite Jest—complete with his own annotations—then borrowing it back partway through: The fresh one, she told me afterward, felt a little lonely by comparison: she missed the meta-conversation running in the margins, the sense of another consciousness co-filtering D.F.W.’s words, the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes. On our wedding day, my husband received a copy of Infinite Jest from his childhood friend as a wedding gift, complete with dogeared pages and scrawled marginal notes. “This book,” said […]


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Lit and video games: a forbidden love story?

by Celeste Ng

Why aren’t more novelists writing video games? That’s what the Guardian asked recently: Part of the problem is clearly to do with priorities. As the game writer and former critic Rhianna Pratchett says in the film: “Story is often the last thing thought about and the first thing pulled apart.” So much effort goes into making spectacular worlds, tackling the technical logistics and ensuring the playing experience is enjoyable that decent plot and dialogue fall by the wayside. Yet there are trickier issues involved. As a few people say in the film, gaming presents a unique challenge in terms of […]


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Book of the Week: The House on Salt Hay Road, by Carin Clevidence

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

We’re pleased to announced that this week’s featured title is Carin Clevidence’s debut novel The House on Salt Hay Road. Clevidence is the recipient of such accolades as a Ronna Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Last summer she was also a fellow at the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, in Bulgaria, which she chronicled in a photo essay for Fiction Writers Review with fellow participants Kelly Luce, Charles Conley, and Paul Vidich. Her short fiction has appeared in such places as Story, The Indiana Review, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. In a […]


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Dzanc Day Approacheth

by Celeste Ng

Dzanc Books‘s second annual National Workshop Day—also known as Dzanc Day—is coming up on April 9, 2011. Says the event’s site: Consisting of dozens of creative writing workshops in almost as many cities, Dzanc Day provides local, affordable two-to-four hour sessions led by professional writers, authors, and editors, all open to attendance by the public for a very affordable fee. Sessions are conducted in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, and are generally suitable for writers of all levels. Dzanc day helps writers in more ways than one, too: it helps fund Dzanc Books’s charitable endeavors, including the prestigious Dzanc Prize and […]


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New Yorkers: Slow down and… read the novel pages.

by Celeste Ng

New Yorkers are not known for slowing down and looking around. But a stunt by an anonymous novelist may be getting them to do just that. Someone has been pasting pages of his (or her) novel, “Holy Crap,” to lampposts around the East Village, transforming the streets into a kind of choose-your-own-adventure—or literary Burma Shave ad. Reports Yahoo!: Pages began mysteriously appearing on lightpoles in the city’s East Village neighborhood. As of yet, nobody has come forward to claim the work. So far, eight pages in total have made their way to the public. […] At the bottom of that […]


Reviews |

The House on Salt Hay Road, by Carin Clevidence

Carin Clevidence’s debut novel, The House on Salt Hay Road, tells the story of three generations of the Scudder family living on Long Island in the 1930s just before a catastrophic hurricane moves in. This novel’s careful balance of happiness and tragedy, success and failure, leads Dana Staves to consider how the writing achieves this alchemy.


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Do Americans Spend More on Books or Movies? Conventional Wisdom Is Often Wrong.

by Joshua Bodwell

Borders filed for bankruptcy on February 16, and the bookselling behemoth will be pulled from the New York Stock Exchange today, March 21. This collapse of the second-largest bookseller in the U.S. hangs like a pall over the entire book industry. Just as the growing interest in digital reading devices has led some pundits to cry that the “death of books” is nigh, some would have us believe that the Borders book bungling is representative of the entire book industry. So how healthy is the bookselling industry really? On the day Borders filed for bankruptcy protection, Publishers Weekly put numbers […]


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When to kill a novel? Before it kills you.

by Celeste Ng

In the New York Times, Dan Kois takes a peek into the abandoned novels of famous writers. Evelyn Waugh, Nicolai Gogol, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, and many more all scrapped novels. So if there’s a novel slowly decaying under your bed, take heart. You’re in good company—and possibly wise: “A book itself threatens to kill its author repeatedly during its composition,” Michael Chabon writes in the margins of his unfinished novel “Fountain City” — a novel, he adds, that he could feel “erasing me, breaking me down, burying me alive, drowning me, kicking me down the stairs.” And so Chabon […]


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Recently on FWR

by Anne Stameshkin

Hello, blog readers! In case you’ve missed any of our features so far this month, here’s a quick rundown: REVIEWS Lee Thomas reviews Michael David Lukas’s debut, The Oracle of Stamboul, recommending the novel—with its “sun-drenched marble, the heat and clamor of the bazaar, and a warm, salt breeze off the Sea of Marmara”—as an antidote to mid-winter malaise. (Yes, please!) The book features a precocious prodigy, eight-year-old Eleonora Cohen, as a guide through Lukas’s tale of political intrigue in late 19th-century Stamboul. The Oracle of Stamboul was also FWR’s March 1 Book of the Week. In his review of […]


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An idea is worth… Three MILLION dollars

by Celeste Ng

I am selling my story that I have been creating for 10+ years. (not constantly writing, but of piecing everything together in a cohesive manner) It can be compared to stories like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Matrix, Indiana Jones and other titles in those categories. This is a really great story I have. This story needs to be completed by a professional writer or Ghost Writer. I am by no means a writer. Thus begins a recent listing on eBay. The item up for auction? Not the story, but the story idea. The listing continues: I […]




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