Suspend Your Disbelief

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Celeste Ng

Editor at Large

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.


Articles

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Rock of Authors

by Celeste Ng

At first blush, few people are less like rock stars than writers. Generally speaking, we avoid the spotlight. We don’t have cool outfits, we don’t have groupies, and our tours are waaaay less flashy–and lucrative–than musicians’. But deep down there’s some connection between writing and rock. Lots of authors have compiled playlists for their books, most noteably on David Gutowski’s Largehearted Boy’s “Book Notes” section. It sounds like a recent trend, but it’s been going on for a while, according to Salon: Since 2005, in the site’s recurring Book Notes column, authors including Bret Easton Ellis, Sloane Crosley, Karen Russell, […]


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Is literary monogamy overrated?

by Celeste Ng

The Millions has a wonderful essay by Jeffrey Eugenides on his process of writing his latest novel, The Marriage Plot. It began with what he called “an act of literary adultery”: In the late 90s, during an impasse in the writing of Middlesex, I put the manuscript aside. (I hadn’t fallen out of love, exactly, but I wasn’t sure where the relationship was headed.) Over the following weeks I began flirting with another novel, not a comic epic like Middlesex but a more traditional story about a wealthy family throwing a debutante party. At first, the new novel seemed to […]


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Fahrenheit 451–2011 edition?

by Celeste Ng

Is there anything more disrespectful to a book–and its authors and would-be readers–than burning? Book burnings are inevitably associated with censorship and repressive ideology, from the Third Reich to the more recent Quran-burning controversy. Even without those connotations, burning any book–for any reason–sends a shiver down my spine. But can book-burning sometimes be justified? On Cracked, S. Peter Davis writes about book-burnings that are occurring now, all over many countries–and why: For the past year or so, part of my job has been to walk through library warehouses and destroy tens of thousands of often old and irreplaceable books. […] […]


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How to read a book–without reading

by Celeste Ng

Back in high school, I had a book called How to Become Ridiculously Well-Read in One Evening, which described itself as “A Collection of Literary Encapsulations” and contained classic works of literature in short, usually silly poems. For example, The Great Gatsby began thusly: Nick Carraway and Gatsby (Jay) Are next-door neighbors; every day The enigmatic Gatsby gazes Towards a distant green light (Daisy’s). Cute, right? But it seems some people took the book at face value, expecting to catch up on the Western canon in just a few hours. Says one review of the book on Goodreads: I had […]


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Is the typewriter dead, or just… retiring?

by Celeste Ng

My sister’s favorite joke in college was this: Two penguins are in the bathtub, and one of them says, “Could you please pass the soap?” The other replies, “What do I look like, a typewriter?” Get it? Neither do I (even with Wikipedia’s help)–though it does make me laugh now, because it made her laugh so hard. Anyway, typewriters are, as they say, having a moment. When Anthropologie offers a USB typewriter that works with your iPad, you know something is afoot. But even more fascinating than the reemergence of physical typewriters themselves is the coverage typewriters–and the art of […]


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First comes (book-related) love, then comes (book-related) marriage, then comes…

by Celeste Ng

Here on the FWR blog, we’ve discussed how literature can find you love–through online dating sites for book-lovers or in person through speed-dating in libraries. (Hey, even the New York Times picked up on it!) But what do you do AFTER you’ve found love? Well, boys and girls: 1. Sometimes when two bookworms love each other very much, they decide to get married. If they’re really book-lovers, the proposal happens IN the library, as with this couple, who got engaged thanks to a very special book: Stephanie of Read In a Single Sitting tells the story of her proposal, which […]


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Why old books smell so good

by Celeste Ng

You know how you go into a rare books library, or maybe an old used bookstore, and you step between the shelves and take a deep breath and there it is: that incredible old-book smell. To me, it always smells like leather and caramel and dust and sunlight, all blended together. Turns out, there’s a scientific answer (as well as a teleoogical one) for just why old books smell so damn good: This sign might be on to something. Smell is the scent most strongly tied to memory, and in my dreams (the real, I’m-asleep ones) I’m often combing the […]


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Milk + Bookies

by Celeste Ng

In addition to possibly having the best name for a literary charity ever, Milk and Bookies has a worthwhile mission: to bring children books AND to teach children about giving. Says the organization’s site: At Milk + BookiesTM events, boys and girls are provided the opportunity to select, purchase and inscribe books that are then donated to their peers who do not have access to books of their own. The fun-filled events feature music, story time and, of course, milk and cookies. […] Milk + BookiesTM combines two essential and worthwhile efforts: literacy promotion and service learning. While the book […]


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Your newest ally for NaNoWriMo? Google Docs.

by Celeste Ng

It’s November 1, and that means–yup! NaNoWriMo is upon us. We’ve posted here before about various tools that can help you in your mad writing binge–see below–but this year, we wanted to share a techie tip for distraction-free writing that’s easy and free. Did you know that Google Docs can provide a clean, tool-and-menu-free writing environment? That’s right–nothing to buy, download, or install. Power Tips for Google Docs tells you how: If you are a big fan of WriteRoom on the mac, or the Windows clone, you’ll be happy to know that you can achieve a similar distraction free experience […]


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Halloween lit

by Celeste Ng

We don’t usually think of Halloween as a “reading” kind of day, but I can think of at least a couple of Halloween-related stories. In Lorrie Moore’s classic short story “You’re Ugly, Too,” a history professor escapes her life by visiting her sister over Halloween weekend–to attend what may be the most painfully awkward Halloween party in literature: Zoe put on her bonehead. […] When Earl arrived, he was dressed as a naked woman, steel wool glued stretegically to a body stocking, and large rubber breasts protruding like hams. “Zoe, this is Earl,” said Evan. “Good to meet you,” said […]




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