The Flyleaf
by Tom Toro
The secret fantasy of unpublished writers everywhere.
Not awesome enough? How about Rosa Parks reading a children’s book about herself, Gabriel Garcia Márquez wearing a book like a hat, or William S. Burroughs reading to Kurt Cobain? Much more at the Awesome People Reading Tumblr site. (You’re welcome.)
What is wrong with that story? One of these three common mistakes may be holding it hostage.
Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the latest installment of our “First Looks” series, which highlights soon-to-be released books that have piqued my interest as a reader-who-writes. We publish “First Looks” here on the FWR blog around the 15th of each month, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments and your recommendations of forthcoming titles. Please drop me a line anytime: erika(at)fictionwritersreview(dot)com, and thanks in advance. Within the next few weeks, two debut novels with military connections will be published, one set within the context of the Iraq War and the other bonded to Afghanistan. Another commonality: Both […]
Our new feature is L. Annette Binder‘s debut story collection, Rise (Sarabande). Binder was born in Germany and grew up in Colorado. She has degrees from Harvard, Berkeley, and the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Rise received the 2011 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Laura Kasischke. Her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Pushcart Prize XXXVI, One Story, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, Third Coast, Fairy Tale Review, Bellingham Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and others. In Lee Thomas’s recent review of the collection, she writes: Pick up nearly any […]
Our most recent feature was The Boiling Season, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: SamanthaBayarr (@SamanthaBayarr ) Carolyn West (@temysmom) Alexis Apfelbaum (@AlexisRachel ) 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!
Not for the faint of heart. Glitter, doom, and a bracing imaginative landscape await in Binder’s debut collection.
There’s an art to book blurbing, as anyone who’s tried to write one can tell you. Over at the Kenyon Review, Jake Adam York takes a stab at classifying them. For example, there’s the “Lavish” type: The genre of the recommendation letter, a friend once observed, is hyperbole. Everything has to be stated in the superlative, so one reads for degrees of overstatement, hyper- and hypo-hyperbole, becoming a progressively more sensitive seismograph, searching out quavers and tremors or microscopic proportion. The blurb is a clear cousin or sibling, at least in the most common form in which sparrows of adjectives […]
I am an unabashed Mad Men fan, and this past season was possibly the best—but I will admit that a few times, I was able to tear my eyes from Don Draper in PJs to look at the book in his hands. You know you’re a word-nerd when you watch TV and realize you’re scoping out what the characters are reading. Leave it to Flavorwire to compile the actual reading lists of Rory Gilmore, Don Draper, Daria (whoa ’90s flashback) and more. Rory reads The Bell Jar. Don reads The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Daria reads Being […]
