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Book of the Week: Monstress, by Lysley Tenorio

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Lysley Tenorio‘s debut collection, Monstress (Ecco). His short fiction has appeared in such places as The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Manoa, and The Best New American Voices and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He lives in San Francisco, where he is an associate professor at Saint Mary’s College of California. In our upcoming interview with Tenorio, the author speaks with Quan Barry about identity politics: While Monstress is full of Filipino and Filipino-American characters, I see them first as individuals caught up in weird, sometimes ridiculous, and always (I hope) emotionally complex circumstances that have nothing to do […]


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Book-of-the-Week Winners: Arcadia

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Lauren Groff’s new novel Arcadia, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Patricia Selbert (@HouseofSixDoors) Helen Page (@bulkarn) Heather Galaska (@heatherlgalaska) 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!


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It's Short Story Month!

by The Editors

Happy Short Story Month 2012! Once again, we’ll be celebrating short stories all month here at Fiction Writers Review: Reviews of fantastic story collections Interviews with short story writers like Lysley Tenorio, Ben Fountain, and Laura Maylene Walter The return of our popular “Stories We Love” blog posts: writers on the stories that inspire them—and why Book of the Week giveaways highlighting short story collections Writing prompts to get you started on pieces of your own The 2012 Collection Giveaway Project—chances to win FREE short story collections from writing blogs all over the internet And more! We think short stories […]


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SSM 2012: The Collection Giveaway Project

by Lee Thomas

Welcome to Fiction Writers Review‘s third annual Collection Giveaway Project: a community effort by lit bloggers to champion great short story collections. The brainchild of Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus, 18 bloggers participated in the CGP 2011, giving away dozens of collections. Instructions on how to participate in The Collection Giveaway Project 2012. Note: Bloggers, please feel free to copy and borrow the CGP banner from this post for use on your own site. CGP 2012 Participants (updated daily!) David Abrams / The Quivering Pen: with Friday Freebies – Fires of Our Choosing, by Eugene Cross, This Will Be Difficult to […]


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Cooking from writing about eating

by Celeste Ng

When I was in elementary school, I used to read at the dinner table (my parents were just happy I was at the table!) and I’d always save particular books for mealtime perusal. Specifically, they were books that made me hungry with their descriptions of food. There was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, in which even a meal of yesterday’s bread with a smear of salt pork fat was treated as a feast. There was Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family, which was my introduction to foods I wouldn’t taste until years later: hamentaschen, challah, latkes. And in Jean Craighead George’s […]


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Books in the… tub?

by Celeste Ng

Here at the FWR blog, we have a thing for books: as furniture, as clothing, even in the bathroom. But this might just take the proverbial cake: a bathtub made of books. Neatorama pointed me to the above amazing art project/feat of book-engineering by artist Vanessa Mancini, at Who Cares About That?: This bath is made entirely out of books which Vanessa cut and fitted together over a metal frame to form a bath of books, which is suspended by four antique bath tub, lion-shaped feet. She intends to later cover it in layers of resin and has already applied […]


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Book of the Week: Arcadia, by Lauren Groff

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Lauren Groff‘s new novel, Arcadia (Voice/Hyperion). Groff’s past works include a collection, Delicate, Edible Birds and Other Stories (2009), and a novel, The Monsters of Templeton (2008). Her short stories have appeared in a number of journals, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Subtropics, as well as in the 2007 and 2010 Best American Short Stories , Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best New American Voices 2008. In her recent review of Arcadia, Founding Editor Anne Stameshkin writes: In Lauren Groff’s second novel, Arcadia, the community of this same name […]


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Book-of-the-Week Winners: A Land More Kind Than Home

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Wiley Cash’s debut novel A Land More Kind Than Home, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Zohreh Ghahremani (@SkyOfRedPoppies) Diane Dunning (@diane_dunning) Braden King (@braden_king) 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!




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