Suspend Your Disbelief

Author Archive

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Haiti: Remembering Her Stories

by Lee Thomas

Jaunary 12, 2011 marked the 1-year anniversary of the 7.0 earthquake that rocked Haiti. The news this past week has been filled with scenes of the temporary camps set up to house the one million Haitians left homeless by the quake – largely unchanged a year later. Just yesterday, police arrested Jean-Claude Duvalier – the controversial Haitian politician who fled Haiti in 1986 – from a Port-Au-Prince hotel. Duvalier has lived in self-imposed exile for nearly a quarter century, after a popular uprising overthrew his regime. Haitian Literature Is a Living Art: Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour and Thomas […]


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Book of the Week: Flowing in the Gossamer Fold, by Ben Spivey

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each week we give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Charles Baxter’s Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Jen Michaels, Rob Schmitt, and Matt Bell. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed, first-edition of this new novel. This week we’re featuring Ben Spivey’s novel Flowing in the Gossamer Fold. Spivey is the co-founder with David Peak of Blue Square Press. In fact, this book is the Press’s first publication. In his October review of the book for The Collagist, J.A. […]


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Selected

by Travis Holland

How often does it happen? Once or twice, maybe? You’re in a bookstore, you’re at the library, drifting among the stacks, your eye glazed over not with boredom but indecision, because you simply cannot decide what it is you want to read next. Reading something next, that’s the easy part, particularly if you’re one of those readers for whom the prospect of not reading something, anything, is just, well, unthinkable. You read one book or one story, and when you’ve finished that, you read another. It’s like breathing in a way, one breath and then another, and another. But on […]


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Introducing: Flipbooks

by Lee Thomas

We’re always on the lookout for new ways to inspire, encourage, and challenge our fellow readers and writers. During the past two and a half years, we’ve featured more than 50 interviews with authors established and emerging. And they’ve had such valuable insights into the writing life – from thoughts on process and craft to ideas about community and influence – that we wanted to find a way to further these conversations within our writing community. So we’re pleased to announce the Fiction Writers Review “Flipbook.” Flipbooks debut today on the FWR Facebook page. Every few weeks we’ll post a […]


Interviews |

He Was Just There For Me: An Interview with Lily King

by Joshua Bodwell

Lily King’s three novels stand as testaments to the power and endless variation of familial relationships. King’s latest novel, Father of the Rain, tells the story of a daughter’s life-long, primal loyalty to her charming and manipulative father. Interviewer Joshua Bodwell discusses longhand, autobiographical influence, puppies, and how to depict realistic sex, with a writer whose work remains “a beacon of tenderness and sincerity.”


Shop Talk |

Let's get digital

by Lee Thomas

This post stems from a conversation with my brother – who recently moved to Chile – about what he’d loaded onto his Kindle. As a recent college grad, with limited disposable income, he was pretty stringent in choosing the books he bought. But he’s a voracious reader. His solution: he loaded up his e-reader with a clutch of classics that have entered the public domain. Let them read (old) books! Though beautiful books draw my eye, the trump card for me will always be the words on the page. I love books for the story, which means I keep reading […]


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Thursday morning candy: Wigleaf

by Lee Thomas

There’s something to be said for simplicity. An afternoon spent at the park. Only what you can fit in your pocket. A bowl of fresh apricots straight from the tree (sorry, New York has me dreaming of summer already). Every time I visit Wigleaf, their clean design aesthetic, wide margins and punchy, brief stories of under 1,000 words feel like a cool drink of water on a hot day (even when I am looking at several inches of snow outside the window). Wigleaf started in 2008, and we have Scott Garson to thank for the design and main editing on […]


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The Difference between the Lightning Bug and the Lightning

New South Books, an Alabama publisher, plans to release a version of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn wherein the n-word is replaced by the word “slave.” 219 times. The professor who originally approached the publisher with the idea did so because he himself felt uncomfortable using the word in class. I, of course, feel uncomfortable even writing it out. And if I were teaching Huck Finn, I wouldn’t utter it either, though its presence certainly wouldn’t keep me from teaching the book in the classroom and discussing this discomfort with my students. Needless to say, the release of this […]


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: Gryphon, by Charles Baxter

Each week we give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Damon Galgut’s novel In a Strange Room, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Alex Boyles, Kara Candito, and Joanne Wong. Congratulations! Each will receive a copy of this new novel. This week we’re featuring Charles Baxter’s Gryphon: New and Selected Stories. Baxter is the author of more than a dozen books, including four previous collections of stories, five novels, and several books of nonfiction. His novel The Feast of Love was nominated for the […]




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