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 |

more (and more and more) e-reader and Kindle links

by Anne Stameshkin

In the latest The Quarterly Conversation, William Patrick Wend’s “Intro to E-Lit: How Electronic Literature Makes Printed Literature Richer” discusses N. Katherine Hayles’ book Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary and defends e-publishing. Slate‘s Farhad Manjoo loves the Kindle but fears it’s bad news for the current publishing industry. Booksquare argues that the text-to-speech verdict, supposedly a win by Authors Guild (who aggressively pursued this issue), might (ironically) benefit Amazon the most in the end. Check out her earlier post on e-book pricing. The latest Kindle news is at Kindlebuzz, and folks are talking about nothing else at KindleBoards.


Shop Talk |

writing: how much do writers like doing it?

by Anne Stameshkin

Weighing in on this question for the Guardian are authors A.L. Kennedy, Amit Chaudhuri, Hari Kunzru, John Banville, Will Self, Joyce Carol Oates, Geoff Dyer, Ronan Bennett, and Julie Myerson. I identify most with Hari Kunzru‘s take; yes to the freak-out and self-disgust but also the “spinning words like plates…”: I get great pleasure from writing, but not always, or even usually. Writing a novel is largely an exercise in psychological discipline – trying to balance your project on your chin while negotiating a minefield of depression and freak-out. Beginning is daunting; being in the middle makes you feel like […]


Shop Talk |

reading on probation

by Anne Stameshkin

For the NY Times, Leah Price takes a look at Changing Lives Through Literature, “an alternative sentencing program that allows felons and other offenders to choose between going to jail or joining a book club. […] [C]riminals who have been granted probation in exchange for attending, and doing the homework for, six twice-monthly seminars on literature.”


Shop Talk |

DFW's unfinished novel

by Anne Stameshkin

This week’s New Yorker has an excellent piece on David Foster Wallace, on his struggles with depression and with writing The Pale King, the unfinished novel he left behind. Wallace’s wife found several thousand pages of the work in progress in their garage after his death. The book (a partial manuscript) will be published posthumously by Little, Brown next year; D.T. Max (writer of the New Yorker piece) describes it as about “a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work.” Here are some manuscript pages from […]


Shop Talk |

Andrew's Book Club: March picks

by Anne Stameshkin

For March, Andrew recommends three collections: 1. from a university press (University Press of Kentucky): Jim Tomlinson’s Nothing Like an Ocean: Eleven stories about life in the rural Kentucky town of Spivey; Tomlinson’s first collection, Things Kept, Things Left Behind, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. 2. from an independent press (Autumn House): Samuel Ligon’s Drift and Swerve: From the author of the novel Safe in Heaven Dead, this story collection won the 2008 Autumn House Fiction Prize. 3. from a big house (Pantheon): Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry. Gaitskill’s first collection in more than a decade is highly anticipated. Here’s […]


Shop Talk |

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist / call for reviews

by Anne Stameshkin

This £10,000 prize will be awarded in May by Arts Council England (with Champagne Tattinger). Here, as listed on The Bookseller, are the longlisted books, whose English translations each published in the UK in 2008. The shortlist will be announced on April 1, 2009. My Father’s Wives by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn from the Portuguese (Arcadia) The Director by Alexander Ahndoril, translated by Sarah Death from the Swedish (Portobello) Voice Over by Celine Curiol, translated by Sam Richard from the French (Faber) The White King by Gyorgy Dragoman, translated by Paul Olchvary from the Hungarian (Doubleday) Night […]


Shop Talk |

recommended reading: Jofie Ferrari-Adler's Q&A with four young editors

by Anne Stameshkin

As previously mentioned, I adore Jofie’s P&W “Agents & Editors” features, and this latest installment should especially interest FWR readers: Jofie (himself an editor at Grove/Atlantic) talks to editors Richard Nash (who, sadly, just resigned from Soft Skull Press), Lee Boudreaux (Ecco), Alexis Gargagliano (Scribner), and Eric Chinski (FSG) about falling in love with books for a living, choosing authors and manuscripts, surviving the future of publishing, and more.


Shop Talk |

Netherland awarded PEN/Faulkner

by Anne Stameshkin

Congratulations to Joseph O’Neill, whose novel Netherland has won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. If you want to read more about the book, Natalie Bakopoulos wrote an in-depth review of Netherland and its reviews for FWR last year. The PEN/Faulkner finalists were: Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, A Person of Interest by Susan Choi, Lush Life by Richard Price (see FWR’s discussion review), and Serena by Ron Rash.


Shop Talk |

bestsellers or bust?

by Anne Stameshkin

In this rather depressing Haaretz article (found via the Practicing Writer), Super-Agent Binky Urban remains “optimistic” about the future of publishing but expresses concern about the fate of “mid-list authors”: Urban: “So fewer books will be published, and those whom we call midlist writers will no longer get published. The major writers will keep publishing, debut books will always be published, and the ones in the middle will have a problem.” So you won’t be able to nurture writers. Urban: “That’s exactly the point. When I met Richard Ford for the first time, he already had published three novels, which […]


Shop Talk |

lit and tech linkage

by Anne Stameshkin

Can Twitter help publishers and stores sell books? Check out Ann Kingman’s findings on the Booksellers Blog. David Pogue hearts the new Kindle and answers concerns about the end of print publishing with three words: “Don’t be silly.” But Tim O’Reilly offers this “bold prediction”: “Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years. […] Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins.” Launching in March, Kachingle is a new online service that will encourage people to donate to newspapers, […]




Literary Partners