Suspend Your Disbelief

Author Archive

Shop Talk |

Short Stories vs. Novels: The Final Smackdown

by Celeste Ng

Just kidding. I don’t mean versus as in fight to the death / zero-sum / there can be only one winner. I mean versus as in: what’s the difference? How are these two forms alike and where do they diverge, and if we’ve been speaking the language of one for a while, how can we shift our thinking so as to be fluent in the other? Because let’s face it: novels are what sell. Send a bunch of agents short stories, and they’ll ask, “But do you have a novel?” That’s the hard-headed, business side of writing—writing a novel is […]


Interviews |

Mishpocha and Beyond: An Interview with Erika Dreifus

by Anne Stameshkin

In conversation with Anne Stameshkin, debut author Erika Dreifus shares true stories that inspired her collection, Quiet Americans; wonders when it’s kosher for authors to write characters from backgrounds they don’t share; explores how reviewing books makes us better fiction writers; and recommends favorite novels and collections by 21st-century Jewish authors.


Shop Talk |

Curl Up with some Good Stories…from Narrative

by Anne Stameshkin

Is SSM really almost over?! Thankfully we can read stories year round, but I still feel the urge (while they’re center stage) to list two recommendations this week. They both come from Narrative magazine, which does require (free) registration. But I promise, these stories are so good, it’s worth filling out a quick form to read them. And Narrative offers a huge, inspiring, and ever-growing archive of fiction from emerging writers to authors as well known as Margaret Atwood and T. C. Boyle; if I weren’t headed to a wedding this afternoon, I might curl up with this site all […]


Shop Talk |

Stories We Love: "Incarnations of Burned Children"

by Lee Thomas

When I first read William Faulkner, in high school, it felt less like reading a book and more like an archeological find—unearthing something long dormant that I’d always known. His cadence, and that humid, repetitious, biblical world of the South, tapped into something in my bones. The first time I read David Foster Wallace’s “Incarnations of Burned Children,” at my brother’s strenuous recommendation, it struck me the same way—whole cloth, True in the capital-letter sense of the word, so perfect I didn’t want to deconstruct it as a writer, lest I drain a bit of its magic. A writing teacher […]


Shop Talk |

This Week in Shorts

by Celeste Ng

For the last weekend of Fiction Writers Review’s Short Story Month celebration, here’s one more helping of short-story-related news (and some gratuitous shorts-related photos&#151you know you enjoy them): READ: Ninth Letter shares a story by Rachel Cantor, “Zanzibar, Bereft,” to read online. At The Millions, Paul Vidich reflects on the livelihood of the short story: “Is today’s short fiction not as good? Hardly. Why aren’t readers holding up their part of the bargain? The answer, let me suggest, is related to how readers are given the opportunity to read – distribution, in commercial terms.” Still not enough short stories for […]


Shop Talk |

Knockout Punches: a guest post by Stacie M. Williams

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our ongoing Short Story Month Celebration, we are delighted to present the following guest post by Stacie M. Williams of Boswell Book Company. A fellow bookseller, when inclined to discuss my fiction reading habits, described my taste simply and accurately as “dark and twisty.” This, fortunately or unfortunately, is all too true, and when you are a reader of things that are dark in nature, violent in content, lustfully raw, and stormy in mood, it’s sometimes best to take it in small, brief doses. This post honors that taste, with a nod to new favorite […]


Interviews |

Fundamentalism and Compassion: An Interview with Jess Row

by Charlotte Boulay

Jess Row’s second collection of stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, is an examination of some of our most intense impulses, and the debates, quandaries, and mysteries in these seven stories will stay with you. Charlotte Boulay talks to Jess Row about the intersection between compassion and extremism.


Shop Talk |

Stories We Love: Self-Help

It may have been written before I was born, but Lorrie Moore’s debut collection Self-Help holds a special place on my bookshelf. Maybe it’s because it was Moore’s MFA thesis from Cornell, or maybe it’s her complete disregard for standard writing rules, but the collection brought me into a world I didn’t want to leave. Her jab at the lucrative but clichéd self-help genre offer often jaded advice on how to be. As a near-graduate of an MFA program, the idea of my thesis becoming a published work is an intriguing yet frightening idea. Living a life of letters and […]


Shop Talk |

Stories We Love: The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story

by Shawn Andrew Mitchell

In her pithy introduction to the recent Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, Anne Enright waltzes around the question that all anthology editors seem obligated to address: what makes a short story a short story? And, in the case of this anthology, what makes the Irish short story exceptional? Enright considers, rejects, and modifies many possibilities. She draws on that old master of the form, Frank O’Connor: the story is dictated by its needs alone; the story is always about human loneliness; the story thrives among “submerged population groups.” She quotes Sean Ó Faoláin’s demand that a story be […]


Shop Talk |

Journal of the Week: American Short Fiction

by Michael Rudin

In the end, I don’t have many literary magazines because I give most away. Leaving them at coffee shops and airports, with friends and family, I pay my journals forward, margin notes and all. But I kept American Short Fiction Volume 13, Issue 47. My experience with #47 began with its second-to-last-story—a sin the editors must forgive me, for I had not yet learned of the careful strategy with which they assemble every issue’s order. I started there because the story, “Walker, Wallace, Warren” had been written by Matt Bell, and his was the first name I recognized in the […]




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