Suspend Your Disbelief

Author Archive

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New Yorkers: Slow down and… read the novel pages.

by Celeste Ng

New Yorkers are not known for slowing down and looking around. But a stunt by an anonymous novelist may be getting them to do just that. Someone has been pasting pages of his (or her) novel, “Holy Crap,” to lampposts around the East Village, transforming the streets into a kind of choose-your-own-adventure—or literary Burma Shave ad. Reports Yahoo!: Pages began mysteriously appearing on lightpoles in the city’s East Village neighborhood. As of yet, nobody has come forward to claim the work. So far, eight pages in total have made their way to the public. […] At the bottom of that […]


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Do Americans Spend More on Books or Movies? Conventional Wisdom Is Often Wrong.

by Joshua Bodwell

Borders filed for bankruptcy on February 16, and the bookselling behemoth will be pulled from the New York Stock Exchange today, March 21. This collapse of the second-largest bookseller in the U.S. hangs like a pall over the entire book industry. Just as the growing interest in digital reading devices has led some pundits to cry that the “death of books” is nigh, some would have us believe that the Borders book bungling is representative of the entire book industry. So how healthy is the bookselling industry really? On the day Borders filed for bankruptcy protection, Publishers Weekly put numbers […]


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The House on Salt Hay Road, by Carin Clevidence

Carin Clevidence’s debut novel, The House on Salt Hay Road, tells the story of three generations of the Scudder family living on Long Island in the 1930s just before a catastrophic hurricane moves in. This novel’s careful balance of happiness and tragedy, success and failure, leads Dana Staves to consider how the writing achieves this alchemy.


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When to kill a novel? Before it kills you.

by Celeste Ng

In the New York Times, Dan Kois takes a peek into the abandoned novels of famous writers. Evelyn Waugh, Nicolai Gogol, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, and many more all scrapped novels. So if there’s a novel slowly decaying under your bed, take heart. You’re in good company—and possibly wise: “A book itself threatens to kill its author repeatedly during its composition,” Michael Chabon writes in the margins of his unfinished novel “Fountain City” — a novel, he adds, that he could feel “erasing me, breaking me down, burying me alive, drowning me, kicking me down the stairs.” And so Chabon […]


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Recently on FWR

by Anne Stameshkin

Hello, blog readers! In case you’ve missed any of our features so far this month, here’s a quick rundown: REVIEWS Lee Thomas reviews Michael David Lukas’s debut, The Oracle of Stamboul, recommending the novel—with its “sun-drenched marble, the heat and clamor of the bazaar, and a warm, salt breeze off the Sea of Marmara”—as an antidote to mid-winter malaise. (Yes, please!) The book features a precocious prodigy, eight-year-old Eleonora Cohen, as a guide through Lukas’s tale of political intrigue in late 19th-century Stamboul. The Oracle of Stamboul was also FWR’s March 1 Book of the Week. In his review of […]


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An idea is worth… Three MILLION dollars

by Celeste Ng

I am selling my story that I have been creating for 10+ years. (not constantly writing, but of piecing everything together in a cohesive manner) It can be compared to stories like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Matrix, Indiana Jones and other titles in those categories. This is a really great story I have. This story needs to be completed by a professional writer or Ghost Writer. I am by no means a writer. Thus begins a recent listing on eBay. The item up for auction? Not the story, but the story idea. The listing continues: I […]


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Bound, by Antonya Nelson

by Jackie Reitzes

In this review of Antonya Nelson’s fourth novel, Bound, Jackie Retizes examines the role of serial killers as literary signifiers, how Nelson navigates multiple points of view, and why the author succeeds (when many less expert writers don’t) in favoring ambiguity over conclusions, “offering delicate moments of attachment in a book that is less about permanence than it is about restoration.”


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Thursday Morning Candy: DailyLit

by Celeste Ng

Welcome to Thursday Morning Candy, where we highlight some of our favorite online journals and writer resources. This week’s treat from our blogroll: DailyLit, which sends you literature in bite-sized installments via RSS or email—for free! Says the site’s FAQ: Why read books by email? Because if you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don’t find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read. You can choose from nearly a thousand titles, and DailyLit breaks the book or story […]


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The child as writing aid

by Celeste Ng

I used to say that in order to get any writing done, I should hire someone to stand behind me with a stick and hit me on the head anytime I wasn’t working. I imagined someone along the lines of The Rock, or at least Queen Latifah, who embodied just such a character (more or less) in Stranger Than Fiction—a sweet movie despite its amazingly unrealistic portrayal of the writing life. “Motivator” might have been a good job title. Well, now I have a Motivator, but he doesn’t look anything like I expected. Trying to write while taking care of […]


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Book of the Week winners: Volt

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each week Fiction Writers Review gives away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Alan Heathcock’s debut collection Volt (Graywolf, 2011), and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Melissa Buker Parcel, Kelly Smith, and Brad Green. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed copy of this collection. If you’d like to be eligible for future drawings, please visit our Facebook Page and “like” us. To everyone who’s already a fan, thanks again!




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