Suspend Your Disbelief

Author Archive

Shop Talk |

Bread Loaf-bound

by Anne Stameshkin

FWR writer (and often behind-the-scenes editor) Celeste Ng has been invited to attend the “oldest writing conference in America,” the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, this August as a Scholar. She’s promised to send us dispatches from the beautiful Green Mountains. Two other FWR contributors, Steven Wingate and Preeta Samarasan, were both Bread Loaf Fellows in 2008, and Steven was awarded the Bread Loaf-sponsored Bakeless Literary Prize in Fiction for stories from his debut collection, Wifeshopping. (Steven even talked a little about the conference in an essay for FWR last month.) Here are links to more about this year’s conference and […]


Interviews |

Who We Are Now: A Conversation with Colson Whitehead

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

At the Ann Arbor Book Festival, FWR’s Jeremiah Chamberlin talks with acclaimed novelist Colson Whitehead about the process of writing his latest book, Sag Harbor, the art of manufacturing genuine nostalgia, and the duality of veering “between the capricious horribleness of the everyday and the absurd beauty of existence.”


Shop Talk |

Catskill Studio for Writing

by Anne Stameshkin

The fabulous Thisbe Nissen (Out of the Girls Room and Into the Night, Osprey Island, The Good People of New York, The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook) is starting a summer writing workshop in the Catskills. In her own words: Dear Everyone, Some of you may know that up here in Saugerties, NY we’ve been hatching a plan for a summer writing workshop, and now that we’ve got some official flyer-type-things and an application form and even a website, I’m sending this out in the hope that you all might pass it along to potentially interested students, former students, or anyone you know […]


Shop Talk |

new interview with Colson Whitehead on FWR

by Anne Stameshkin

At the Ann Arbor Book Festival, FWR’s Jeremiah Chamberlin talked with acclaimed novelist Colson Whitehead about the process of writing his latest book, Sag Harbor, the art of manufacturing genuine nostalgia, and the duality of veering “between the capricious horribleness of the everyday and the absurd beauty of existence.” Click here to read their conversation.


Shop Talk |

What are you doing this summer?

by Anne Stameshkin

FWR’s contributors are participating in some very cool programs, and we’re eager to know what other writers are up to over the next few months. Leave a comment here, or email fictionwritersreview@gmail.com to tell us where you’ll be writing, teaching, or otherwise fictionizing. (And check in tomorrow to hear more about the Catskill Studio for Writing.) 1. Natalie Bakopoulos is currently teaching a week-long writing workshop on the Greek island of Andros as a part of the Aegean Arts Circle, which was founded in 2003 by Amalia Melis. Stratis Haviaris, a poet and the founding editor of the Harvard Review, […]


Reviews |

Pretty Monsters, by Kelly Link

by Charlotte Boulay

I want my life to be a Kelly Link story. I mean it, even though many of the characters in her stories are a little lost, literally or emotionally, and even though others are in danger. Pretty Monsters is intended to be a young adult collection of short stories. This in itself is new—there aren’t many YA story collections, are there? But even if there are, there is nothing like Kelly Link. It’s useful that a few of the stories in Pretty Monsters are republished from her earlier collections, Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen, because I can’t talk about Kelly Link without talking about the story “Stone Animals,” which first appeared in the Best American Short Stories in 2005, and then in Magic. I still dream about it sometimes. There was a period of almost a year after I first read it when, no matter what else I was reading, I wished it was “Stone Animals.” I’ve read it a dozen times. I sort of want to be reading it right now.


Shop Talk |

recommended reading: L.A. Times's "Writers on Writing" series

by Anne Stameshkin

Thanks to Erika/Practicing Writing for alerting FWR to the L.A. Times‘s new “Writers on Writing” feature, which publishes every Friday. This week’s upcoming installment will the the fifth, but there are already some very interesting essays, including a piece by Taylor Antrim on writing the second novel and last week’s essay by Rich Cohen: “Will Facebook kill literature’s ‘leave the past behind’ themes?” Read more about (and excerpts from) Taylor Antrim’s debut novel, The Headmaster Ritual, here, and more about Rich Cohen’s books, The Avengers and Tough Jews, here.


Shop Talk |

FWR dinner party, San Francisco-style

by Anne Stameshkin

FWR Associate Editor Lee Thomas and I finally met face-to-face at this lovely dinner at Lee’s apartment. Behold her (amazing) homemade lasagna and plum cake! Not pictured: excellent conversation, graphic novel recommendations, and happy plotting for our website’s future.


Shop Talk |

In Protest of Dullness, or Why I'm Glad Our President Reads Novels

by Anne Stameshkin

This nearly week-old David Brooks op-ed is infuriating for many reasons (such as its writer’s blatant scoffing at and outright denial of–despite the current economic disaster–the notion that to run a truly successful company or country, a leader should have the prescience to realize that the world around him or her is always changing, the ability to connect with and understand that world and the people in it, and the imagination and flexibility to adjust to that world’s advancements and its people’s diverse and changing needs), but in the name of this website and our shared passion for fiction, dear […]


Shop Talk |

new review on FWR: Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link

by Charlotte Boulay

a taste: I want my life to be a Kelly Link story. I mean it, even though many of the characters in her stories are a little lost, literally or emotionally, and even though others are in danger. Pretty Monsters is intended to be a young adult collection of short stories. This in itself is new—there aren’t many YA story collections, are there? But even if there are, there is nothing like Kelly Link. It’s useful that a few of the stories in Pretty Monsters are republished from her earlier collections, Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen, because I […]




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