Suspend Your Disbelief

Author Archive

Shop Talk |

nothing new under the sun…

And this article, in fact, is 1.5 years old. But here are what Bob Harris (via the NY Times‘s “Paper Cuts” blog) names the “seven deadly words of book reviewing,” worn expressions to avoid if you want that novel you’re reviewing to sound remotely fresh. Briefly, they are: poignant, compelling, intriguing, eschew, craft (verb), muse (verb), lyrical; read the whole entry for Harris’s compelling case against each. (Oops.) I’ll happily give the rest up…but can I keep lyrical? And don’t miss the readers’ comments; some of my favorites include: The “much-anticipated debut.” By whom? The author’s landlord? “that said” makes […]


Shop Talk |

Call for submissions from Waccamaw

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Back in May we announced the launch of Waccamaw’s Spring 2009 issue as one of our recommended lit journals. Starting today, this award-winning publication out of Coastal Carolina University will begin their summer reading period for unsolicited work. From July 15 – August 31, Waccamaw will accept unsolicited submissions of poems, stories, and essays via their online Submission Manager system. Authors should limit submissions to 3-5 poems, one story, or one essay. They request only one submission in a single genre per reading period, and do not consider submissions of previously published work in any form (including prior internet publication). […]


Essays |

Literary Life on the Black Sea: The 2009 Sozopol Fiction Seminar

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each year the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation selects five native English speaking (NES) writers and five Bulgarian writers to participate in the Sozopol Fiction Seminar, which takes places in the tiny, historic town of Sozopol, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea. And this summer I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the NES fellows.It was, in a word, amazing. And though I’m by no means a photographer, I hope that a few of these snapshots might begin to capture the experience of being in such a unique place with so many generous and talented individuals.


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The Status Galleys Book Club

In the New York Observer, Leon Neyfakh recently named this summer’s “status galleys,” the ones you get pick-up lines and publishing cred for reading on the subway. And over at Neyfakh’s former home, Gawker‘s Foster Kamer sprays the mystique off one of them, Joshua Ferris‘s The Unnamed (due to publish in January 2010), in this first installment of the Status Galley Book Club. He gives the novel a very positive review, but notes that the mainstream buzz anticipating its publication is too loud (and its galleys too widely distributed) for its status to be Truly Hip. Silly as it may […]


Essays |

Quotes & Notes: Peering and Leaping into the Author/Character Vortex, Part II

by Steven Wingate

“Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.”
–Gustave Flaubert

Practitioners of fiction may find this Flaubert quote hard to embrace, because if we’re honest with ourselves we’ll probably have to make some difficult admissions. Many of us—especially those who fell in love with the craft early, perhaps under the spell of Austen or Kerouac or Salinger—embarked on the fiction endeavor with an eye toward self-discovery. Most writers started writing because we found ourselves immersed in the character-self vortex as readers, identifying with fictional characters so intensely (as we searched for ourselves in them) that it became second nature to live in their worlds. From there it’s a small but decisive step to the other side of the formula: entering into the vortex as a writer and deciding to participate in literature as a transmitter of emotional signals rather than as a receiver alone…


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summer reading

The Guardian, true to its list-loving proclivities, offers “Text on the Beach,” the 50 “best summer reads” of all time. Which ones did they miss? I’d add The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Michael Chabon) and Sag Harbor (Colson Whitehead). Or Goodbye, Columbus (Philip Roth), paired with essays by Mary McCarthy. For a real scorcher? Dante’s Inferno.


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novel excerpts: Lorrie Moore and Jonathan Lethem

This week’s New Yorker features an excerpt (titled “Childcare”) from Lorrie Moore’s long-awaited new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, coming this September from Knopf. I agree with The Millions, however, that novel excerpts can be hazardous to your reading health–and having read the ARC, I must say this particular morsel doesn’t stand alone as a story or represent the fabulous feast it comes from. So if you can restrain yourself, wait until this book is out and read the whole thing. And in case you missed it, the November 4, 2008 issue featured an excerpt (titled “Lostronaut”) from what […]




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