Laura Maylene Walter talks about writing her IPPY-winning debut collection, Living Arrangements, using awkward high school photos to promote it, and honoring those who helped inspire it.
It’s high time for some heartbreak: Urban Waite describes how love’s power to heal or destroy animates Rajesh Parameswaran’s debut story collection.
Every story that I write feels like a kind of experiment. The challenge in crafting a story is how to engage a reader emotionally, intellectually, experientially. I’m always looking for some kind of challenge, some kind of structural or narrative constraint to try and figure out. […] I mean, the story “Orientation” is a gimmick. […] But so what? All that matters is that a story, whatever the structure, must be grounded in the humane. ~ Daniel Orozco Further Reading: Read more about Daniel Orozco on Fiction Writers Review Looking for something to read? Check out the Stories We Love […]
On June 9, 1992 I turned seventeen years old and my father gave me a single gift: a book that contained a short story that changed my life. The book was Septuagenarian Stew by Charles Bukowski and the short story was the first in the collection: “Son of Satan.” It’s a simple story, really, just six and a half pages long, propelled by curse-riddled dialogue and clipped, action-filled sentences. Classic Bukowski. But unlike many of Buk’s bum and whore populated tales, “Son of Satan” is told by an eleven-year-old narrator. After the narrator and his two friends accuse another boy […]
Big events alone do not a memorable story make. Celeste Ng on why certain stories succeed, and leave a lasting impression.
This week’s feature is Kevin Moffett‘s new story collection, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (Harper Perennial). He is also the author of Permanent Visitors, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, judged by George Saunders, and was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Believer Book Award. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in such places as Tin House, the Harvard Review, American Short Fiction, the Chicago Tribune, the Believer, A Public Space, and in three editions of The Best American Short Stories. The title story for this new collection won the National Magazine Award […]
Last week we featured Lucia Perillo’s collection Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Dana (@danadilly) Rachel Farrell (@rachelfarrell) Connor Ferguson (@csferguson) 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!
It just kept nosing its way into my own novel—“A&P” by John Updike. I’d first read it when teaching lit classes years before, and now, as I finished my third novel, my characters kept making references to it: a girl’s mind “just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar” or the way the boy at the register sees the girls’ bathing suits. Knowing it’s best to let the subconscious have its way while writing fiction, I let the story in, even as I wondered what it was doing there. My novel, Grand Isle, was in print a […]
It’s all about choices in Kevin Moffett’s new collection—Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events—bizarre, unsettling, gut-wrenching choices.
We were delighted to learn that FWR contributor extraordinaire Daniel Wallace made an appearance on Prairie Schooner‘s podcast, Air Schooner, this past week. Along with travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Daniel reads from his work on his traveling to Syria and living in the Old Quarter of Damascus under the Assad regime. You can listen to Air Schooner #9 on the Prairie Schooner website. Congratulations, Daniel! Further Reading: Like what you heard? Read more of Daniel Wallace’s work on FWR, and visit Daniel’s blog to learn more about him.
