Suspend Your Disbelief

Author Archive

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"This Book Made Me Want to Die"

by Celeste Ng

Here’s a great blog post from FWR favorite Aryn Kyle, on writing “happy literature”: “You should write something happy,” people tell me, and I don’t understand. Happy like Anna Karenina? Happy like The Grapes of Wrath? Happy like Lolita or Catch-22 or Revolutionary Road? Happy like Hamlet? What, I’d like to ask people, are these “happy books” you speak of, and who is writing them? I was an English Literature major, for sobbing out loud! I’ve never read a happy book in my whole life! Unless you count Jane Austen, who could usually be depended on to wrap things up […]


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Is it better to burn out, or fade away?

by Celeste Ng

Would you rather have one smash hit, or a long series of good—if not mind-blowing—little hits? Robert McCrum asks that very question in The Observer: Original work is, by definition, exceptional. Often, it seems to come out of nowhere in a explosive flurry of excitement. Anglo-American and European literature is notable for its sprinters as well as its long-distance runners. There are so many brilliant one-offs, especially at the more popular end of the business: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, or Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, for example. Rosamond Lehmann had a long career, but most readers know […]


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Literary Tees from Out-of-Print Clothing

by Celeste Ng

We’ve talked about literary T-shirts on the blog before, but here’s another combination of bookishness and fashion—plus a dose of do-goodery. Out of Print Clothing has a twofold mission: 1. Provide awesome T-shirts based on iconic book covers. 2. Help those with little or no access to literature by donating books to Africa: one book per T-shirt sold. Says the company’s website: For each shirt we sell, one book is donated to a community in need through our partner Books For Africa. How we read is changing as we move further into the digital age. It’s unclear what the role […]


Reviews |

Best European Fiction 2010 (Aleksandar Hemon, ed.)

by T. M. De Vos

What is it about the European cultures, tucked like bats into their tiny cubbies, that seems so much more specific than our own? How do Belgium or Luxembourg achieve “culture” in little more space we might use to construct a Wal-Mart megastore? What is it about confinement that breeds a more tribal than national identity? What are we doing when we sit down to read a collection of fiction culled from a continent?


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Big Think: Lionel Shriver on the "Unwholesome" Side of MFA Programs

by Celeste Ng

Should you get an MFA? On Big Think, novelist Lionel Shriver discusses the downsides of attending an MFA program: [It] does have a kind of indulgent, middle-class gestalt. The grim truth is that most people who get MFAs will not go on to be professional writers and therefore when I’ve been on the other side of it and occasionally taught creative writing, I felt a little bit guilty because so many of the people that you should be encouraging, because there’s no point to it if you’re not encouraging, are not going to make it. And I think that’s true […]


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"…just another boring little middle-class boy hustling his way to the top."

by Celeste Ng

That’s what Gore Vidal had to say about John Updike in 2008. Think that’s bad? Examiner.com’s Michelle Kerns has compiled the 50 best author vs. author put-downs, and Vidal’s comment is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Nathaniel Hawthorne called Edward Bulwer-Lytton “the very pimple of the age’s humbug.” James Gould Cozzens declared, “I can’t read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up.” Faulkner called Twain “a hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe.” Read the rest at Examiner.com, and don’t miss Part 2, where Evelyn Waugh wonders if Proust was “mentally defective” and […]


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Glass Wave: Lit-Inspired Music

by Celeste Ng

Ever wonder what happens when literary professors make music? Glass Wave is what happens. Composed of four literary scholars—Thomas Harrison of UCLA and Robert Pogue Harrison, Dan Edelstein, and Christy Wampole of Stanford—plus drummer Colin Camarillo, Glass Wave has just released its first, self-titled album, with songs based on canonical Western literature. Inside Higher Ed profiles the band and the album: The 11-track album adapts themes and narratives from Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Vladimir Nabokov, and sets them to musical compositions, generally in the vein of 1960s and ’70s progressive rock typified by […]


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So, What's Really Killing Fiction?

by Celeste Ng

You may have already seen this essay by Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, blaming too many MFA programs and their “navel-gazing” writers for the sorry state of fiction these days: But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism. Now, […]


Reviews |

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, by Laura van den Berg

by Liana Imam

“I imagine the seasonally unspecified stories in Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us must be set in spring because spring is a time that makes me feel young, young as girls and in as much danger. And then there’s always this odd moment of realization that I am young and a girl and in some dangers. I’m still in too-close contact with boys I once loved, still prone to crying in public, still not aware of the dynamic personal lives of adults. Spring in the Midwest is about babies and hope and vitality, but it’s also about knowing that eventually a late frost is going to swing in out of no place and kill everything you haven’t collected in the shed. And I wanted the people in these stories locked up safe.”


Shop Talk |

Literary Action Figures

by Celeste Ng

I am secretly envious of Star Wars and Star Trek geeks, because they get to decorate their desks (and cubicles and shelves and windowsills) with action figures in heroic poses. It’s like saying to the world: I’m letting my geek flag fly. I also suspect that when no one is around, they play with the action figures. As a literary geek, though, I must make do with pithy quotes by E. L. Doctorow and the like. It’s just not the same. Apparently I am not alone. The Huffington Post alerted me to this video, which surfaced on YouTube recently and […]




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