Suspend Your Disbelief

Author Archive

Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: The Oregon Experiment, by Keith Scribner

This week’s featured title is Keith Scribner’s The Oregon Experiment. Published last month by Knopf, this book is Scribner’s third novel. His first, The GoodLife, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2000. He is also the author of the 2003 novel Miracle Girl. Scribner’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared in such places as TriQuarterly, American Short Fiction, Quarterly West, The North Atlantic Review, the San Jose Mercury News, the Baltimore Sun, and the anthologies Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton) and Sudden Stories: The MAMMOTH Book of Miniscule Fiction. He received both Pushcart and O’Henry Prize […]


Shop Talk |

Book-of-the-Week Winners: Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

Last week we featured Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Valerie Suydam (@valeriesuydam) Chanel Dubofsky (@chaneldubofsky) Sara Habein (@sshabein) To claim your signed copy of this collection, 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!


Shop Talk |

Open a book, become someone else

by Celeste Ng

A Lithuanian bookstore has created a gorgeous campaign called “Become Someone Else” (“Pabū kuo nors kitu”) showing the transformative power of books. The Love Agency, the advertising firm that created the campaign, has all of the images up online. (Via GalleyCat.) And there’s evidence that books have literal (ha ha) transformative powers as well. A study in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine finds “each increasing quartile of print media use was associated with a 50% decrease in the odds of having MDD,” or major depressive disorder. In other words, the more teens read, the less likey they were […]


Interviews |

Perfume from Whale Vomit: An Interview with Keith Scribner

When WTO protestors mobbed downtown Seattle in 1999, breaking windows and burning dumpsters, Keith Scribner was a new father, and it made him wonder how it would feel to have that chaos on his own street. In an interview with J.T. Bushnell, Scribner talks about how those thoughts sparked his newest novel, The Oregon Experiment, what it means to pursue the writing life, and why perfume labels don’t list the ingredients.


Shop Talk |

A Kindle for Dickens

by Celeste Ng

If Charles Dickens had had a Kindle, what would it have looked like? That’s the question art student Rachel Walsh tried to answer for her design class, which asked her to explain something modern to someone who died before 1900. Walsh’s explanation involved creating a visual metaphor: Since a 19th-century author wouldn’t have had any concept of downloads, e-readers, or the Internet, Walsh had to create a metaphor for the device that would resonate with Dickens. Realizing that a Kindle is just a lot of books inside a big book, she created an old-school version consisting of literal little books […]


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar, edited by Richard Ford

This week’s featured title is Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work, edited by Richard Ford. This anthology was created as a benefit for 826michigan, a non-profit organization located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that is dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. They offer drop-in tutoring, writing workshops, storytelling and bookmaking field trips, nighttime and weekend workshops, and various other community-related events and services. All are free of charge, always. Founded by Ann Arbor writer Steven Gillis, 826michigan is a chapter […]


Shop Talk |

Book-of-the-Week Winners: Separate Kingdoms

Last week we featured Separate Kingdoms as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Alex Carrick (@Alex_Carrick) Jenny Shank (@JennyShank) Amy Silverberg (@AmySilverberg) To claim your signed copy of this collection, 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!


Shop Talk |

One book review? That'll be $99.00, please.

by Celeste Ng

What’s wrong with these two sentences? We will keep the book in our stacks for another two weeks. If you decide to order a review after that time, we will ask you to send another copy. That’s from an email Chad Post of Three Percent received recently from ForeWord Reviews. Yes, you read that right: “if you decide to order a review.” ForeWord Digital Reviews, as the email explained, charges authors to have their books reviewed: Digital Reviews is our new review service for books that meet our standards for worthy books, but which we can’t cover in our print […]


Essays |

The Sorrow and Grace of My People’s Waltz, by Dale Ray Phillips

by Forrest Anderson

Forrest Anderson on the semester he “caught fire as a writer,” when Ron Rash handed him a life-changing copy of Dale Ray Phillips’s debut, My People’s Waltz. Anderson describes the exquisite moments of grace in the collection when “all of the bad things to come are brewing on the horizon but haven’t yet managed to fully snag the family.”




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