Suspend Your Disbelief

Author Archive

Essays |

The Enduring Magic of Stephanie Vaughn’s Sweet Talk

From the Archives: In 1990, Stephanie Vaughn published her debut collection of short fiction, Sweet Talk. Critical reception was overwhelmingly positive. A reviewer for Mother Jones Magazine wrote, “There is not a weak story in Sweet Talk and few are less than spectacular … Hers is a wise, touching, extraordinary voice—the sort rarely achieved at the end of a gifted career, let alone at the beginning.” To date, Vaughn’s first book has also been the only one her adoring fans have seen.


Reviews |

The Forbidden Thought: A review of Zone One, by Colson Whitehead

by Michael Rudin

From the Archives: We celebrate Valentine’s Day with an homage to the living dead: Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. Don’t fancy a date with scary slavering? No matter. Michael Rudin finds the novel reads like an existential valentine to New York City, and that’s something even a zombie can love.


Interviews |

The Nuance of Noir: An Interview with Edwidge Danticat

From the Archives: Renowned for her stirring and insightful stories about Haitian life, Edwidge Danticat recently turned her eye to genre as the editor of Haiti Noir, part of Akashic Books’ noir series. The book was published in December, following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Danticat discusses the disaster’s impact on the book and the way that noir captures some of the mystery, darkness and complexity of her homeland.


Shop Talk |

Help FWR grow—join The Great Write Off! (UPDATED)

Here at Fiction Writers Review, we run this website as volunteers, in our spare time and out of our own pockets. We think we’ve got a great site with great content—and since you’re here, reading this blog, we hope you agree! This fall, we’re running our first-ever fundraiser, and it’s your chance to help FWR just by doing what you do normally: writing. On October 3-5, Fiction Writers Review will compete in The Great Write Off, a three-day write-a-thon. (Think walk-a-thon, but with writing.) It’s a friendly fundraising competition involving six Michigan lit organizations—each fielding its own team of writers. […]


Shop Talk |

Is it okay to say "Boring!" in workshop?

by Celeste Ng

Author and teacher Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich says YES—and in fact, she hopes more people will say it. Writes Marzano-Lesnevich: [W]orkshop students tend to forget that they’re required to be there. I don’t mean in attendance, sitting around a large table, but rather in the page—in the world of the story. They’re required to read. They’re even required to finish the piece. This simple requirement changes everything about their relationship to what’s on the page. I’ve come to think that this gap is at least partially responsible for stories that do well in workshop sometimes floundering out there in the real world. […]


Shop Talk |

Are You There, Author? It's Me, A Lazy Student

by Celeste Ng

As we’ve seen of late, sometimes professional book reviewers (or, rather, less-than-professional ones) forget that Authors Are People, Too. Well, so do book-reviewing students. Behold this exchange, in which a student turned to Yahoo! Answers to help write his book report on DC Pierson‘s The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To… and the author responded. Pierson posted the kid’s question and his response on his Tumblr feed, giving the kid some reasons he might actually want to read the book and suggesting strategies for doing it. Here’s an excerpt: I’m not going to sit here and act like […]




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