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 |

FWR @ AWP: Panels, Panels, Panels!

by Anne Stameshkin

Several of our fabulous contributors are participating in panels and readings at AWP. In addition to our panel on online journals and lit sites in 2010 (Saturday from noon to 1:15, featuring Jeremiah Chamberlin), don’t miss the following sessions: Thursday, April 8 10:30 – 11:45 a.m. Rooms 102, 104 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level R124. Bollywood, Bullets, and Beyond: The Poetry of South Asian America. (Featuring: Summi Kaipa, Pireeni Sundaralingam, Ravi Shankar, Bhanu Kapil, Subhashini Kaligotla and Monica Ferrell) What do a sestina, 9/11, and Amitabh Bachchan have in common? Popular, political, and poetic themes all appear in Indivisible (University […]


Shop Talk |

FWR @ AWP 2010

by Anne Stameshkin

AWP 2010 in Denver is just days away, and Fiction Writers Review will be there. Stop by our table at the bookfair, sign up for our mailing list, win loot from the FWR store, and check out our panel with the editors of Waccamaw, The Emerging Writers Network/Dzanc, and storySouth on Saturday from noon to 1:15 (Granite Room: Hyatt Regency, 3rd Floor): S163. Evolution of the New Media: Online Literary Journals and Websites in 2010. (Dan Albergotti, Dan Wickett, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Terry Kennedy) This panel examines the evolution of online publishing and literary promotion via digital media in the 21st […]


Shop Talk |

FWR's Latest Features

by Anne Stameshkin

It’s been a busy few weeks at Fiction Writers Review: here’s a roundup of some of our recent features: John Madera reviews Leni Zumas’s collection Farewell Navigator: “There is a seductive element to how these narratives unfold: a slow accretion of details, together with the use of fragmentation, absence, and space, achieves a confluence of associations, connections, and even some kind of understanding.” Mary Stewart Atwell reviews Pieces for the Left Hand, by J. Robert Lennon, describing this collection of linked short-short stories as “shar[ing] with the work of [Stuart Dybek and Lydia Davis] an interest in the precise image […]


Shop Talk |

The Second Pass, and life after print

by Anne Stameshkin

Tonight I stumbled (for the first time, I’m ashamed to admit) upon The Second Pass. This fantastic lit site, edited by freelance writer and former Harper Collins editor John Williams, features a blog and an impressive range of features: essays, interviews, and reviews covering both new releases (Circulating) and backlist titles (Backlist). Another section, The Shelf, features reviewlets of recent titles, with links to and excerpts from other reviews across the bookosphere. To celebrate the site’s first year anniversary, twelve contributors (including the editor) wrote pieces on their favorite out-of-print books. Williams introduces the combined result, “Tales of the Unread,” […]


Shop Talk |

Andrew's Book Club: March 2010 Picks

by Anne Stameshkin

This month, Andrew Scott — our Oprah of story collections, long may he reign! — recommends the following books: Big House Pick: Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, by Brad Watson (Norton) “The dark and brilliant tales of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives capture the strangeness of human (and almost-human) life. In this, his first collection of stories since his celebrated, award-winning Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson takes us even deeper into the riotous, appalling, and mournful oddity of human beings. In prose so perfectly pitched as to suggest some celestial harmony, he writes about […]


Shop Talk |

Bloggers Host Authors at Greenlight Bookstore

by Anne Stameshkin

Next Monday, March 22, at 7:30 PM, Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore continues their Blogger/Author Pairings series, wherein lit bloggers host and talk with authors whose books they love, and the authors read from their work. Next up is Brooklyn’s own blogger/critic Maud Newton (of MaudNewton.com, one of the finest lit blogs, exclamation point) and award-winning author Victor LaValle, whose work has drawn comparisons to the likes of Ralph Ellison, Shirley Jackson, and Thomas Pyncheon, and whose novel (of the same title) inspired Mos Def’s The Ecstatic. LaValle will read from and discuss his new novel Big Machine, which Greenlight’s newsletter describes […]


Shop Talk |

When one book closes…

by Anne Stameshkin

After finishing a book you love, is it hard to move on? How long do you wait to open another — and how do you shake that feeling it won’t measure up to the last? On the Kenyon Review‘s KR Blog, Elizabeth Ames Staudt considers this dilemma: An insistence on finding a book that’s impossibly similar to the last will ultimately prove as disappointing as eating a falafel sandwich anywhere in Paris but at L’As du Fallafel, as will an arbitrarily ‘opposite’ selection when you’re still craving fried chickpeas. What’s an appropriate pining period when it comes to novels? How […]


Shop Talk |

Three Ways to Support Indie Bookstores

by Anne Stameshkin

1. Subscribe to Poets & Writers. The magazine is continuing their special deeply discounted subscription rate for FWR readers: only $12 a year. Anyone who orders before March 15 will receive the current issue, featuring Powell’s Books in Portland. With this deal, you’ll not only get the magazine at one-third the normal price: you’ll also be showing your support for independent bookstores and Jeremiah Chamberlin’s Inside Indie Bookstores series. In each P&W issue, he profiles an important independent bookstore around the country, featuring an interview with the owner. (In the Jan/Feb issue, that bokstore was Square Books, of Oxford, Mississippi.) […]


Essays |

A Valentine: Books We Loved in 2009

by Anne Stameshkin

Every book we feature on Fiction Writers Review has won the admiration of our reviewers. But because it’s a new year, and it’s award season, and today is the official holiday of love, we asked our contributors to tell us which books of 2009 they most adored, cherished, and crushed on. What we received often transcended mere lists; writers shared why these certain books affected them, woke them up, even made them jealous. So in addition to the “favorites” that received the most votes, we’ve also included some of these endorsements and mini-reviews. Most selections are arranged by genre (Novel, Story Collection, etc.), and then there are less conventional categories–like Book You Loved But Would Be Embarrassed to Be Caught Reading.


Shop Talk |

WGA's 2009 Nominations for Best Video Game Writing

by Anne Stameshkin

Yesterday FWR published a very exciting essay by Michael Rudin on the history, future, and literary/artistic potential of video games. While this piece was in the publishing pipeline, the Writer’s Guild of America announced its 2009 nominations for best video game writing. The “destabilizing” narrative behind Modern Warfare 2, discussed in Rudin’s essay, was officially recognized by the WGA for its outstanding storytelling, earning one of the five nominee nods–and the final game Michael worked on at Activision, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, also received a nomination. Below is an excerpt from “Writing the Great American Novel Video Game”; click here to […]




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