Little jaunt to the underworld? Don’t forget your passport. The second installment in Lev Grossman’s Fillory series, The Magician King, continues to play with realist fantasy and the right amount of irony to meld the two. Quentin and his pals provide a sly and subversive fairy tale for grown-ups, with a caution: be careful what you wish for. You might get it.
It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Eileen Pollack’s work at FWR. In fact, as our Founding and Features Editor, Anne Stameshkin, noted in an addendum to a 2009 interview with the author that we published on the site, Eileen Pollack–and her Contemporary Novel class at the University of Michigan–was one of the inspirations for the creation of Fiction Writers Review. So it’s with particular pleasure that we announce her new novel, Breaking and Entering, as our featured Book-of-the-Week title. Congratulations, Eileen! And we’re not alone in our admiration for this new book or Pollack’s work. In her laudatory […]
Last week we featured Leah Hager Cohen’s new novel, The Grief of Others, as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Jaclyn Watterson (@jaclynwatterson) Sarah Beth Hopton (@sbhopton) Anca Szilagyi (@ancawrites) 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!
Here’s my one tiny complaint about Gmail: it may be a little too good at filtering out the spam. I used to get tremendous joy (uh, no pun intended) out of the badly-phrased, ill-translated, nonsensical requests offering me “Turbines for your meat jet” or the opportunity to become a crude oil dealer. Thank goodness for the Spam Poetry Institute, which describes its mission thusly: The Spam Poetry Institute is an organization dedicated to collecting and preserving the fine literature created by the world’s spammers. Not only do these persistent individuals sell useful products like cable filters and international drivers’ licenses, […]
Artists/designers Sean Ohlenkamp and Lisa Blonder Ohlenkamp—the same folks who brought you “Organizing the Bookshelf” —have teamed up again to create another exuberant video, “The Joy of Books”. Writes Ohlenkamp: After organizing our bookshelf almost a year ago (http://youtu.be/zhRT-PM7vpA), my wife and I decided to take it to the next level. We spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto. Here’s the result, in which books dance their way around a bookshop after it closes for the night. Enjoy! (My favorite part? The Moleskine carefully turning the pages of the larger book. Adorable!)
Ever feel like reading genre without, you know, knowing what to expect? Cam Terwilliger on why Percival Everett’s Assumption—one volume, three mystery novellas—will kick your [ahem] assumptions to the curb.
When Twitter arrived on the scene, its proponents found themselves defending the very short. James Poniewozik put Twitter in historical context, and, in the New York Times, writer and teacher Andy Selsberg argued that writing short could make you a better writer. Now, in the L.A. Times, Pico Iyer writes a defense of the very long sentence: I’m using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment. […] Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered […]
This week’s feature is Leah Hager Cohen’s new novel, The Grief of Others, which was published in September by Riverhead. Cohen is the author of seven previous books: Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World (1994); Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things (1997); Heat Lightning: A Novel (1997); The Stuff of Dreams: Behind the Scenes of an American Community Theater (2001); Heart, You Bully, You Punk: A Novel (2003); Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight (2005); and House Lights: A Novel (2007). This new novel of Cohen’s, set in the suburbs […]
Last week we featured The Little Bride, by Anna Solomon, as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Rebecca Jacoby (@RLJPOV) shopemills (@shopemills) e. smith sleigh (@AuthorandPoet) 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!
That’s how I’d have capitalized this recent article by The Atlantic, which asked that rather big question. Describing Alex Jenni, a French biology teacher who recently won the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary award, the article noted, In the Alexis Jenni school of thought, a writer may be someone, anyone, with a compulsion to scrawl or the conviction of having something to say. A writer is not defined by his career, but the simple act of writing regularly. And authors who found success through the muck of making ends meet have taken that approach for some time now, in practice […]
