Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2012

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Rejection Love

by J.T. Bushnell

I save rejection slips. In graduate school, someone mentioned an acquaintance who had wallpapered her bathroom with them, and I liked that idea. There was something honest and humbling about it. So when I started submitting my own stories to literary journals, I saved the rejections, imagining I might do the same one day. It would be a necessary complement, I imagined, for a living room mantel cluttered with prestigious awards, framed reviews, and my many excellent books. I’ve long since backed off both the wallpapering and the cluttered mantel, but I haven’t stopped saving the slips. And I have […]


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tiny library + tiny video = big funds?

by Celeste Ng

The town of Shutesbury, in rural western Massachusetts, needs a new public library to replace their tiny, antiquated one (there’s no running water!). The state will cover 60% of the cost—IF the town can raise $1.4 million by June 30. Shutesbury has made this adorable video explaning the situation and making the case for a new library. (And if that’s not enough to convince you to watch, I have two words for you: ukulele soundtrack.) This video—especially the lists of things the patrons hope to do in their new library—remind me that libraries aren’t just shelves of books: they’re community […]


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Soundtracking a story

by Celeste Ng

Earlier this week, I mentioned Heidi Julavits’ novel The Effect of Living Backwards, and how she thanks Track 4 of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in the acknowledgements. She suggests she listened to it over and over while writing the novel—but knowing this, would be interested to read the novel while listening to that track, wouldn’t it? The concept of a soundtrack to a book isn’t exactly new. For some time, the fabulous book and music blog Largehearted Boy has asked writers to make playlists for their books, and the resulting lists include the author’s notes on how the song relates […]


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First Looks, March 2012: The Pretty Girl and Conversations with David Foster Wallace

by Erika Dreifus

Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the second installment of our new blog series,  “First Looks,” which highlights soon-to-be released books that have piqued my interest as a reader-who-writes. We publish “First Looks” here on the FWR blog around the 15th of each month, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments and your recommendations of forthcoming titles. Please drop me a line anytime: erika(at)fictionwritersreview(dot)com, and thanks in advance. Here are just two of the many intriguing books scheduled to be released before we meet again one month from now: A few weeks ago, I received an email from […]


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Book of the Week: Sweet Talk, by Stephanie Vaughn

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Stephanie Vaughn’s story collection, Sweet Talk, which has just been re-released by Other Press. The book was originally published in 1990 by Random House, and it garnering critical praise upon its release. Vaughn received her MFA from the University of Iowa (Writers’ Workshop) and was both a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford. She is currently a Professor of English at Cornell University, as well as co-faculty director of “Imagining Rome: Art Studio & Creative Writing workshop in Italy,” a special program run through Cornell Summer Sessions. Her stories have appeared in […]


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Book-of-the-Week Winners: Three Ways of the Saw

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Matt Mullins’s debut collection, Three Ways of the Saw, as our Book-of-the-Week title. Here are this week’s winners: Deena Drewis (@deenadrewis) Elena Mac (@elenamac) Romina Rovira (@RerryLV) 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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I'd like to thank the Academy…

by Celeste Ng

On Oscar night, no one listens to the thank-you speeches—except the people being thanked. Likewise, no one reads the author acknowledgements of a book—or do they? On The Millions, Henriette Lazaridis Power delves into the stories behind this oft-overlooked section of a book, from the Brontë sisters to Zadie Smith to Robin Black. And Power argues that the acknowledgements are more than polite thank-you notes; they’re an opportunity: Everyone reads the acknowledgements. In fact, for many of us, the first thing we do when we pull a book off the store shelf is to flip to the back. The writers […]




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