Suspend Your Disbelief

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Dispatch from Bread Loaf #3: Maud Casey on Historical Fiction

by Celeste Ng

Toward the end of the conference, I was seriously overstimulated and running on an average of 5 hours of sleep per night. But the title alone of Maud Casey’s lecture, “The Secret History: The Power of Imagined Figures in Historical Fiction,” lured me out of bed that very last morning. Although I haven’t yet written any historical fiction myself, I’m especially interested in the space where the fictional meets the real, and how writers balance the responsibilities they have toward historical fact with the responsibilities they have toward emotional and aesthetic truths. Casey’s lecture was more than worth the lack […]


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Happy 30th Birthday, Square Books!

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Square Books, the famed independent bookstore in Oxford, Mississippi, celebrates three decades in business this month. Festivities began last Thursday, September 10th, with a special program on Thacker Mountain Radio, which broadcasts a live show made up of “literary readings and an eclectic mix of musical performances” each week from Off Square Books. This most recent one featured musical guests King Curly and Sanders Bohlke, as well as a reading by John Brandon, the current John Grisham writer in residence at Ole Miss. John received his MFA from Washington University, in St. Louis. His first novel, Arkansas, was recently published […]


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recommended event: short plays by Brian Bartels

by Anne Stameshkin

NYC-based writers: On Tuesday, September 22 at 7 PM, head to the Rattlestick Theater to see a one-night only reading of Mulletfingers: Short Plays on Hands and Fingers by FWR contributor Brian Bartels. I was lucky enough to attend another night of Brian’s hilarious yet thought-provoking plays, Versus, in March, and the short pieces resonated together like a stories in a thematically linked collection. The Rattlestick is located at 224 Waverly Place (2nd Floor). Break a leg, Brian and company!


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recommended event: The Brooklyn Book Festival

by Anne Stameshkin

This Sunday, I’ll sadly be driving away from Brooklyn, but if you’re lucky enough to live in or near King’s County, check out this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival. Where: Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza When: Sunday, Sept. 13 from 10 AM – 6 PM What: A book fair surrounded by a variety of wonderful events — readings, panels, interviews, tributes, literary quiz games, film screenings, a comics jam, and workshops in book-making and cartooning. All events are free, but some require that you reserve space by picking up tickets one hour before the event at one of the info booths […]


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recommended site: Lit Drift

by Anne Stameshkin

New on the lit blog scene is the very fun Lit Drift, a self-described “resource and community dedicated to the art & craft of storytelling in the 21st century.” Our name is a nod to how traditional forms of storytelling are, well, drifting into forms wholly new and unexpected. We’re interested in sifting through the palimpsests known as the Internet, the arts, and the in-between to uncover those new forms and techniques in constructing fiction. We believe that literature should be fun in an age when it’s only too easy to turn on the TV and watch shitcoms instead. We […]


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Dispatch from Bread Loaf #2: On Lushness, Irony, and Honesty

by Celeste Ng

At Bread Loaf, the first thing people asked–after “What’s your name?”–was often “What genre do you write?” There wasn’t any great divide between poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers, but somehow it seemed important to know. Maybe this is because we tend to think of our genres as very different forms with very different concerns and goals. I can’t count how many times I heard fiction writers say, “But I don’t know anything about poetry…” and poets say, “Well, I don’t get plot.” But actually, I think that poets and fiction writers have more overlap than they often believe. A […]


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impulse buy: Gourmet Rhaposdy by Muriel Barbery

by Anne Stameshkin

On Thursday I emerged from a fog of editing work and serious reading in need of a pick-me-up, so I headed to Borders, hoping to get my hands on that much-hyped smeary deliciousness known as “Me and Mrs. Palin.” Alas — it’s in the October, not September, issue of Vanity Fair, and since I’m no longer a New Yorker, I’ll have to wait until Sept. 8 to buy a copy. To assuage my (embarrassing) disappointment, I reminded myself that I was in a bookstore, a struggling one at that. Never mind the towering to-read pile of books on my nightstand: […]


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DISPATCH FROM BREAD LOAF #1: What I (Heard) Read This Summer

by Celeste Ng

I was lucky enough to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont this summer, as a tuition scholar, and I’m still processing all that I learned. In the 12 days I spent on the mountain, I heard 101 people read in 24 separate readings. I attended 5 workshop sessions, 5 lectures, 3 craft classes, and countless cocktail hours. And I’m still kicking myself for not doing more. But I guess that’s part of the experience. Bread Loaf is an exercise in excess: a positive glut of new ideas and voices and inspirations. I left completely overstimulated, with a stack […]




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