Suspend Your Disbelief

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And the gold medal in writing goes to…

by Celeste Ng

You read that right. Did you know the Olympics used to offer medals in the arts—including creative writing? Mental Floss has the story: The rules for the five [arts] events, which were far less restrictive than the original guidelines drafted for the 1908 Games, were published in September 1911. Among them: All works presented were required to be original and directly inspired by the idea of sport. Size didn’t matter, except for sculptors, who were required to submit “small models not larger than eighty centimeters in height, width, and length.” While there were no language restrictions, the jury—a multinational collection […]


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Texts from famous authors (and characters)

by Celeste Ng

I get a childish delight out of anachronistic mashups, so the Paris Review’s drunk texts from Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, and more are right in my wheelhouse: Read the full set on the Paris Review‘s site. Meanwhile, on The Hairpin, Mallory Ortberg imagines texts from Jane Eyre–the character: JANE WHERE HAVE YOU GONE I AM BEREFT AND WITHOUT MY JANE I SHALL SINK INTO ROGUERY i am with my cousins WHICH COUSIN IS IT THE SEXY ONE Please don’t try to talk to me again IT IS YOUR SEXY COUSIN “ST. JOHN” WHAT KIND OF A NAME IS […]


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tl;dr? Not for a semicolon lover.

by Celeste Ng

If you’re a semicolon kind of guy (or gal), you’re not alone: Ben Dolnick, writing in the New York Times, tells the story of his love affair with that much-misused punctuation mark: My disdain for semicolons outlasted my devotion to Vonnegut. Well into college I avoided them, trusting in the keyboard’s adjacent, unpretentious comma and period to divvy up my thoughts. I imagined that, decades hence, if some bright-eyed teenager were to ask me for advice, I’d pass Vonnegut’s prohibition right along, minus the troublesome bit about transvestites and hermaphrodites. By now I’d come across Isaac Babel’s famous description of […]


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Book of the Week: The Boiling Season, by Christopher Hebert

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Our new feature is Christopher Hebert‘s debut novel, The Boiling Season (Harper). Hebert graduated from Antioch College, where he also worked at the Antioch Review. He has spent time in Guatemala and taught in Mexico, and he worked as a research assistant to the author Susan Cheever. He earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and was awarded its prestigious Hopwood Award for fiction. He is Jack E. Reese Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee Libraries, and lives in Knoxville with his son and his wife, the novelist Margaret Lazarus Dean. In Michael Shilling’s introduction to […]


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Book-of-the-Week Winners: Albert of Adelaide

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

For the last two weeks we’ve been featuring Howard L. Anderson’s debut novel Albert of Adelaide, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Janna McMahan (@JannaMc) anna sutton (@bridgetjonesish) Marisa Birns (@marisabirns) 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!


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And Now for Something Completely Different: Electronic Literature

by Steven Wingate

Going to writers’ conferences like AWP, I usually know what to expect: I’ll go to panel discussions and readings, meet friends I haven’t seen in years, and listen to my fellow fictionistos talking about agents, and publicity. Not so with the recent conference of the Electronic Literature Organization, hosted this June by the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University. The ELO, co-founded by metafictionist Robert Coover, is one of a handful of organizations working to study and produce literary projects designed for (and frequently created by) computers. I came to the conference armed with nothing but curiosity and […]




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