Celeste Ng is the author of the novels Everything I Never Told You (2014) and Little Fires Everywhere (2017). She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
From the Archives: Unlike the memoirist, who promises to tell the truth, the fiction writer says, “I am going to tell you a lie, but at the end you will feel it is true.” He or she is a kind of magician who makes sure you know the flames are only an illusion before letting you burn your fingers.
From the Archives: Celeste Ng offers compelling proof that storytellers aren’t so different from scientists: both explore the same very large, very dark, very crowded room, poking and prodding and tirelessly asking, what if?
“I definitely find myself drawn to stories. Short stories have such an impact and I love that this can result from one deftly delivered blow or from creating a cacophony”: Celeste Ng chats with Hasanthika Sirisena about her debut collection, The Other One.
Do you remember a while back when goat cheese became a Huge Culinary Thing? And it started appearing everywhere—on pizzas, in salads, in ice cream, even in cheesecakes. Everyone I knew loved it. “Try it,” they kept telling me. “It’s so delicious.” But when I did, I couldn’t stand it. “Try it again,” they’d say, the next dinner out. “You know, it takes 10 times before your taste buds really decide if they like something.” They were so excited about it, and loved it so much, that I really, really, really wanted to like goat cheese. But I just didn’t. […]
“It’s a story about how pain lives with us, and the ways we strive to make up for the past”: Celeste Ng on fear and quiet revelations in Frederick Busch’s “Ralph the Duck.”
“Worst of all, this is a story where we already know the ending”: Celeste Ng counts the sins and ultimate successes of Angela Carter’s story “The Fall River Axe Murders.”
Scientific American: Novelist Ariel Djanikian talks with Celeste Ng about her vision of dystopia in The Office of Mercy.
Between the hurricane and the election, perhaps you missed it–but the winners of the Whiting writing awards were recently announced, and we’re delighted to note that two writers we’ve covered here at FWR, Alan Heathcock and Hanna Pylväinen, were among the winners! Congratulations, Al and Hanna! Further Reading: Read our review of Alan Heathcock’s collection Volt, in which reviewer Tyler McMahon notes, The prose moves like an old flatbed down a one-lane road: with confidence, with wisdom, and with a trail of meaning drifting skyward in the mind’s rear-view mirror. It is the poetry of bowling balls through shop windows—of […]
It is probably ridiculous to even put “J.K. Rowling” and the word “emerging” in the same thought. (Excerpts from the Wikipedia article about her: “best-selling book series in history,” “net worth US$1 billion,” “forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007,” and “Most Influential Woman in Britain”—and that’s only in the introduction.) But I’m tempted to look at Rowling’s first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, in the same light as a more traditional debut novel. I know, it’s NOT not her first novel. But even “debut” authors usually have a few books under their belts, even if those novels have never […]
Author and teacher Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich says YES—and in fact, she hopes more people will say it. Writes Marzano-Lesnevich: [W]orkshop students tend to forget that they’re required to be there. I don’t mean in attendance, sitting around a large table, but rather in the page—in the world of the story. They’re required to read. They’re even required to finish the piece. This simple requirement changes everything about their relationship to what’s on the page. I’ve come to think that this gap is at least partially responsible for stories that do well in workshop sometimes floundering out there in the real world. […]
