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.
FWR’s first “You’ve Got to Re-Read This” is up on our Reviews page. Charlotte Boulay tells us why the Moomin books, including Moominsummer Madness, fascinated her as a kid and why we should read them today. Writer-readers: Submissions (blog posts, essays, reviews, what-have-you) for this series remain open; send queries to fictionwritersreview@gmail.com.
I’d already planned to curl up with Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and get into the mood. And things, it appears, are getting better all the time. The author’s 9-city video tour concluded on October 9, and now, as I read, I can go here to watch and listen to Gaiman — in a fetching leather jacket, no less — read the entire book to me. To learn more about the much-acclaimed The Graveyard Book, listen to this episode of All Things Considered. The NPR page also features a review by Laurel Maury, some of the book’s haunting artwork, an […]
Over the past year, Grove/Atlantic editor (and friend of FWR) Jofie Ferrari-Adler has been conducting a series of wonderful, in-depth interviews for Poets & Writers magazine with prominent agents and editors. Jofie’s latest feature is a conversation with Chuck Adams of Algonquin, the estimable editor behind Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants and more than 100 other bestsellers; he has seen Cher’s living room and edited Joseph Heller’s prose. Previous interviews in the P&W series highlight the careers of editor Janet Silver and agents Lynn Nesbit, Molly Friedrich, and Nat Sobel.
At FWR, we plan to experiment with different ways to conduct discussion, or conversational, reviews about books. For Lush Life, we tried the immediate (and often overlapping) method of a real-time IM conversation; for our December selection, How Fiction Works, we’re going to try a series of posts by various participants over the course of a week or two. Eventually I’d be interested in offering podcast discussions (like Slate‘s) or creating a message board format that treats all of the site’s readers as equal participants (as Book Balloon does). In the meantime, please enjoy this sampling of ensemble reviews from […]
The White Tiger is 33-year-old Adiga’s first book, and one judge praised it as “the perfect novel.” Plot summary from BBC: “…a tale of two Indias…the story of Balram, the son of a rickshaw puller in the heartlands, one of the ‘faceless’ poor left behind by the country’s recent economic boom. It charts his journey from working in a teashop to entrepreneurial success.” You can read a sample chapter here and an interview with the author on the Booker Prize website. Congratulations to Aravind Adiga, and to the shortlisted runner-ups: Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture), Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies), […]
Winners will be announced on November 19th. Here are the finalists in fiction: Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country Marilynne Robinson, Home Salvatore Scibona, The End
Hey, fiction writers! What are you doing on Saturday, November 15th? If you spend the day writing, you can help raise money for Dzanc, a unique non-profit independent press established (in their own words) “to not only publish great books, but to work nationally in set communities to provide writing workshops and year round programs for students and adults alike.” Read more about the Dzanc Writer in Residency Programs (DWIRPS) and The Dzanc Prize, two of many ways this press connects writing and publishing with community service and educational outreach. Want to read more about the event itself? Go here. […]
Apostrophe Cast, a bi-weekly online reading series, currently features work by FWR contributor Celeste Ng. Listen to Celeste read one of her fantastic short stories, “We Are Not Strangers.” Then read an off-beat interview with the author to find out why this one-time Best Easter Bonnet champion avoids hairless cats and wishes you’d call her Ish.
Agent Jessica Faust from BookEnds breaks down in this post how she reads each of the following: query letters, proposals, requested manuscripts, revised manuscripts from clients, and books for pleasure. This is helpful reading for anyone preparing agent submissions: Often when reading proposals I’m distracted. I’m reading at home, at night, and dinner is on, or the TV is on, or there is just chaos. A good three chapters is going to make that chaos disappear. Like most readers I don’t have the opportunity for a peaceful few hours to sit quietly and read. Instead I’m counting on the book […]
Andrea Walker shares choice tidbits from Munro’s session at the New Yorker Festival earlier this month: ‘Things you may not know about Alice Munro’: She sees her stories visually before they become words. She often starts with an image of some incident and the people involved—a sense of some action, or some effect that the characters have created on each other. She doesn’t know at that stage exactly what’s happened to them or what they’re saying to each other, only that these people somehow belong in the story together. Now brace yourself: “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories” was […]
