Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for April, 2012

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SSM 2012: The Collection Giveaway Project

by Lee Thomas

Welcome to Fiction Writers Review‘s third annual Collection Giveaway Project: a community effort by lit bloggers to champion great short story collections. The brainchild of Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus, 18 bloggers participated in the CGP 2011, giving away dozens of collections. Instructions on how to participate in The Collection Giveaway Project 2012. Note: Bloggers, please feel free to copy and borrow the CGP banner from this post for use on your own site. CGP 2012 Participants (updated daily!) David Abrams / The Quivering Pen: with Friday Freebies – Fires of Our Choosing, by Eugene Cross, This Will Be Difficult to […]


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Cooking from writing about eating

When I was in elementary school, I used to read at the dinner table (my parents were just happy I was at the table!) and I’d always save particular books for mealtime perusal. Specifically, they were books that made me hungry with their descriptions of food. There was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, in which even a meal of yesterday’s bread with a smear of salt pork fat was treated as a feast. There was Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family, which was my introduction to foods I wouldn’t taste until years later: hamentaschen, challah, latkes. And in Jean Craighead George’s […]


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Books in the… tub?

Here at the FWR blog, we have a thing for books: as furniture, as clothing, even in the bathroom. But this might just take the proverbial cake: a bathtub made of books. Neatorama pointed me to the above amazing art project/feat of book-engineering by artist Vanessa Mancini, at Who Cares About That?: This bath is made entirely out of books which Vanessa cut and fitted together over a metal frame to form a bath of books, which is suspended by four antique bath tub, lion-shaped feet. She intends to later cover it in layers of resin and has already applied […]


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Book of the Week: Arcadia, by Lauren Groff

This week’s feature is Lauren Groff‘s new novel, Arcadia (Voice/Hyperion). Groff’s past works include a collection, Delicate, Edible Birds and Other Stories (2009), and a novel, The Monsters of Templeton (2008). Her short stories have appeared in a number of journals, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Subtropics, as well as in the 2007 and 2010 Best American Short Stories , Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best New American Voices 2008. In her recent review of Arcadia, Founding Editor Anne Stameshkin writes: In Lauren Groff’s second novel, Arcadia, the community of this same name […]


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Book-of-the-Week Winners: A Land More Kind Than Home

Last week we featured Wiley Cash’s debut novel A Land More Kind Than Home, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Zohreh Ghahremani (@SkyOfRedPoppies) Diane Dunning (@diane_dunning) Braden King (@braden_king) Congrats! To claim your free copy, 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! Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!


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The Collection Giveaway Project 2012

by Lee Thomas

Short Story Month countdown: 7 days to May! Fiction Writers Review will host the third annual Collection Giveaway Project: a community effort by lit bloggers to champion great short story collections. The brainchild of Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus, 18 bloggers participated in the CGP 2011, giving away dozens of collections. How to participate in The Collection Giveaway Project: (1) Blog about a recently published short story collection (or two, or three). Long or short, review or rave. Only rule: you, the blogger, read and loved the book(s). (2) Offer a copy (or copies) as a giveaway to one lucky commenter. […]


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Verb your authors

Click on over to Urban Dictionary and you’ll soon be Faulknering.  At least, according to one of that dictionary’s definitions of “Faulkner,” which is “To go from being a nerd to getting all the hot girls.” Apparently, kids these days are giving authors’ names new meanings, and Urban Dictionary—the mass-edited compendium of language as it’s popularly used—is capturing them.  The New York Daily News has a roundup (via): Keats: One who has much intelligence, yet is reclusive and worryingly geeky. Enjoys exercising excessive control over friends and family. Wears leggings. Eats pizza only. Bronte: A girl of her own sexiness, […]


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No Pulitzer for Fiction

Soooo…this is awkward, no? For the first time since 1977, no Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction. Ann Patchett says this means we all lose, and I agree. I’ve never thought very carefully about how books are selected for these kinds of big awards. I guess I imagined a bunch of really smart people passionately arguing with each other, but that doesn’t seem to be what happened here. The voting committee members filled out ballots, and no book got a majority of the votes, so nobody won. Look, we already have a completely dysfunctional Congress that operates on those principles, […]




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