Suspend Your Disbelief

Contributor Types

Anne Stameshkin

Founding Editor

Anne Stameshkin lives in Brooklyn. Her fiction has been published in the Chattahoochee Review andNimrod, and her book reviews have appeared inEnfuse magazine. Anne holds an MFA (fiction) from the University of Michigan. She pays the bills as a freelance editor, writer, and writing teacher, most recently at Connecticut College. While in-house at McGraw-Hill, Anne edited a number of literature and composition texts and two craft books—Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola and The Sincerest Form: Writing Fiction by Imitation by Nicholas Delbanco, among other projects. She is currently at work on a novel. Some recently published collections she recommends include If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black, The Theory of Light and Matter by Andrew Porter, and Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle.


Articles

Shop Talk |

while we're talking book clubs…

by Anne Stameshkin

Politico.com is calling Obama “the next Oprah.” The president’s widely circulated summer reading list seems to have given every book on it a huge bump in sales, as indicated by these Amazon rankings (stats are via Politico) BEFORE = on Monday, before Obama’s list was released / AFTER = as of Wednesday): – The Way Home by George Pelecanos — BEFORE: no. 33,349 / AFTER: no. 328 – Lush Life, by Richard Price — BEFORE: no. 74,289 / AFTER: no. 10,295 – Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman — BEFORE: no. 231 / AFTER: no. 41 – John Adams […]


Shop Talk |

[rumors] Might Say You're One of Them be the next Oprah pick?

by Anne Stameshkin

This is strictly gossip at this point, but another FWR contributor whispered in my virtual ear that the debut collection by our friend and former classmate Uwem Akpan has a shot at being the next Oprah’s Book Club selection. Others across the blogosphere are also betting on Say You’re One of Them as a strong possibility: Thom Geier at Entertainment Weekly (who named the debut collection the top fiction title of 2008), Gwen Dawson at Literary License, and Ron Hogan at Media Bistro, who points out that Oprah has never picked a short story collection before. (On Twitter, Oprah’s clues […]


Shop Talk |

co-muse-ing: We Are the Friction

by Anne Stameshkin

Lee just sent me this link (from DesignSponge) about We Are the Friction, a new book featuring stories by twenty-four authors and illustrations by twenty-four artists. But this is no typical collection: its contributors were paired up specifically to inspire work from each other…to illustrate a writer’s story or put words to an artist’s illustration. This is the second book project from UK-based Sing Statistics‘ co-editors (and contributors) Jez Burrows and Lizzy Stewart, who describe We Are the Friction as “an erratic, eclectic collection of work that takes in space travel, Japanese deities, monster husbandry, and the Marx Brothers. We […]


Shop Talk |

when writers stop drinking (or start taking meds, or start reading Peter Kramer)

by Anne Stameshkin

While doing research for his debut novel, In the Rooms (about a literary agent named Patrick Miller who feigns, in the tradition of Dexter and Fight Club, an addiction as a means to an end…in this case, signing a literary legend), Tom Shone studied the effects of sobering up (or not) on some famous writers, as well as their widely differing attitudes toward recovery, rehab, and programs like AA. Here are some of his findings in this essay for Intelligent Life magazine. A couple of, er, tastes: Cheever emerged from rehab a different man, 20 pounds lighter, feeling 20 years […]


Shop Talk |

Writing Regimen from the Southeast Review

by Anne Stameshkin

The Southeast Review‘s Writing Regimen is a 30-day writing project for poets, essayists, and fiction writers who crave some motivation and structure for a concentrated period of time. Another session (for adults) starts on October 1. (If you’re interested in the Young Writers’ Regimen, the next one begins August 31.) For $15, writers will get the following: daily writing prompts; a daily reading-writing exercise; a “riff word” of the day; a podcast of the day from an editor or writer; a quote of the day from a famous writer; weekly craft talks from established writers; a free copy of the […]


Shop Talk |

introducing Cerise Press, a new lit journal

by Anne Stameshkin

Cerise Press has just launched their debut issue, which features artwork and photography as well as poetry, prose, translations, interviews, and reviews by writers such as Tess Gallagher, Ray Gonzalez, Laura Kasischke, Robert Kelly, Pura López-Colomé (translated by Forrest Gander), and Hai Zi (translated by Ye Chun). Click here for a full list of contributors and here for the Table of Contents by genre. This new online journal is a collaborative effort between three French and American editors (writer-translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain [Greta Aart] in Paris, poet Sally Molini in Nebraska, and poet Karen Rigby in Arizona) who aim to (per […]


Shop Talk |

hey, you've got to hide your work away

by Anne Stameshkin

Kathryn just sent me this article by Joseph Epstein (for In Character). From the first few paragraphs of “Blood, Sweat, and Words,” I thought the piece might explore how much of the effort behind an author’s work shows in the work itself (and what impact this has on said work’s overall effect); instead, it focuses more on how writers choose to talk, outside of actually making art, about the work that goes into doing so. As a writer yourself, how do you feel about authors who, when they talk about the craft of writing or their personal process, make it […]


Shop Talk |

Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival

by Anne Stameshkin

On Saturday, August 22 at 3 PM, come to the monument in Fort Greene Park (Brooklyn, NY) for the (FREE) fifth annual Summer Literary Festival; the event is presented by the New York Writers Coalition (NYWC), Akashic Books, GTHQ, the Fort Greene Park Conservancy, and the Walt Whitman Project. Brooklyn-based authors Colson Whitehead, Toure, and Stacey Ann Chin will share the reading podium with young writers (ages 7-17) from the NYWC’s free creative writing workshops in the park. Visit the NYWC’s website for more details. Sadly I just moved away from Fort Greene, but I highly recommend a visit to […]


Shop Talk |

In a world where fifteen minutes is a "commitment"…

by Anne Stameshkin

Please read that subject line in Dramatic Male Movie Preview Voice. Today, Bookfox synthesizes some insightful comments on Seth Fisher’s piece “More Crappy News for Short Story Writers” (on The Rumpus), addressing the whole “why don’t people read more short stories if they have less time?” question. Thoughts? Comments? Revolutionary notions? I plan to discuss this question in depth when I (finally) review Lauren Groff’s wonderful collection, Delicate Edible Birds, this fall, and I’d love to hear what others think about it. Does a short story require a more focused kind of attention than most readers are able to muster? […]


Shop Talk |

NPR's "Three-Minute Fiction" contest

by Anne Stameshkin

The flash-fiction / short-short-short trend continues… For Round II of this contest, NPR invites writers to submit an original work that begins with this sentence: “The nurse left work at five o’clock.” Instructions, via the site: One entry per person, and no more than 600 words, please. Stories must be received by 11:59 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Aug. 25. We’ll post a favorite story weekly until the New Yorker‘s James Wood picks our winner and reads his or her story on the air. The winner will also receive a signed copy of Wood’s book, How Fiction Works. (And if you […]




Literary Partners