Suspend Your Disbelief

Author Archive

Shop Talk |

RopeWalk Writers Retreat

by Anne Stameshkin

Benjamin Percy writes to FWR about RopeWalk, where he taught earlier this month: Historic New Harmony, Indiana, was the site of two nineteenth century utopian experiments, and in the same spirit, the The RopeWalk Writers Retreat offers up a small slice of heaven. Here, a competitively chosen pool of students study for a week under four prominent writers (faculty over the past few years include Andrew Hudgins, Erin McGraw, Sigrid Nunez, Lee Martin, Marianne Boruch, Kyoko Mori, among others). There are workshops and panels and readings and one-on-one conferences — the standard fare — but unlike other conferences, no one […]


Shop Talk |

summer reading by (and recommended by) Alan Cheuse

by Anne Stameshkin

NPR’s “Voice of Books” has a new book of his own, a collection of travel essays called A Trance After Breakfast. New Yorkers, come hear him read from it on Monday, June 22, at 7 PM at McNally Jackson (52 Prince St.)–and check out FWR’s interview with the author following the publication of his most recent novel, 2008’s To Catch the Lightning. Via NPR, don’t miss Alan Cheuse’s list of carefully chosen (and enthusiastically recommended) books you should read this summer, complete with compelling reviewlets and links to excerpts. If only all reviewers *loved* books the way Cheuse obviously does!


Shop Talk |

"I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy."

by Anne Stameshkin

In a single day — June 16, 1904 — Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus walked the streets of Dublin and the pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Today in cities across the globe, fans of the novel are celebrating with races, walking tours, pub crawls, readings, and performances. If you’re in Dublin itself, events began on June 13 and culminate today with a walking tour, Bloomsday breakfasts at the James Joyce Centre, readings and songs in Meetinghouse Square, and a screening of John Huston’s The Dead at the Irish Film Institute. New Yorkers, if you haven’t experienced Bloomsday on Broadway (at […]


Shop Talk |

the controversy in the rye

by Celeste Ng

Remember Holden Caulfield? Young, angst-ridden, wandering the streets of New York? In the novel 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, by Fredrik Colting, Holden is seventy-six-year-old “Mr. C,” still angst-ridden and wandering the streets once more. Holden’s sister Phoebe and prep-school roommate Stradlater also make appearances. But does Colting have the right to use these characters–and a fictionalized version of J.D. Salinger himself–in his own work? We’ll see. Salinger is suing Colting, claiming that 60 Years Later is “a rip-off pure and simple.” Colting and his lawyers insists the novel is neither plagiarism nor a sequel to Catcher in […]


Reviews |

The Believers, by Zoë Heller

by Lee Thomas

In her latest novel, The Believers, Zoë Heller once again proves herself a master of the unsettling. If conflict is the seed of narrative, then Heller’s storytelling is a Black Forest of strife. Aging radicals Joel and Audrey Litvinoff live in Greenwich Village, a perch from which they still hold sway over their three adult offspring. The Litvinoffs are a messy, complicated family who face a crisis when Joel, the patriarch, suffers a stroke in the middle of a courtroom–while defending a man accused of a terrorist plot; his stroke uncovers the family’s dissatisfactions.


Reviews |

The Moon in Deep Winter, by Lee Polevoi

by Tyler McMahon

Like a cold, northeastern version of Thomas McGuane’s 92 in the Shade, Lee Polevoi’s impressive debut novel, The Moon in Deep Winter, is the story of a misguided homecoming gone wrong. After years spent as a bit player on the margins of Southern California’s criminal underworld, Parker returns to his rural New England town, hoping to reconcile differences with his mother, his younger half-siblings, and his dictatorial step-father. He soon finds that his family secrets run even deeper and darker than he thought.


Shop Talk |

four ways of looking at a novel

by Anne Stameshkin

To answer the personal question “Do I love books, or do I love reading?” — and the larger question “In which format(s) is the book most likely to endure?” — author Ann Kirschner (Sala’s Gift) tried Dickens’s Little Dorrit in four formats: paperback, audio, iPhone, and Kindle. She discusses her impressions of each in this Chronicle of Higher Education article. Among them: the particular pleasures of audio books, why the iPhone e-reader is “a Kindle killer,” and the power of story to transcend any device. Read Little Dorrit in paperback. Listen to Little Dorrit as an audio book Read Little […]


Shop Talk |

new lit journal from Dzanc

by Anne Stameshkin

Dzanc Books announced yesterday that they are launching a monthly online literary journal, The Collagist, which will feature stories, poems, essays, and book reviews; the first issue will publish on August 15. Each month The Collagist will deliver outstanding new short stories, poems, and essays from both emerging and established writers, as well as an exclusive excerpt from a forthcoming novel. Early excerpts will include works from the standard bearers of independent publishing, including Coffee House, Two Dollar Radio, and Unbridled Books. The Collagist will also publish several new book reviews in every issue. The Collagist is immediately open for […]




Literary Partners