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

Shop Talk |

Lit Wall Decor

by Celeste Ng

Am I the only one that does spring cleaning in the fall?  Maybe it’s the cold, rainy weather that makes me want to brighten up my house and settle down with a good book and a cup of tea. Should you, too, find yourself simultaneously wishing to spruce up your digs and get some reading done, here are some options for incorporating literature into your wall decor. First, Spineless offers posters made out of the full text of classic novels. That’s right–whip out your magnifying glass, and you could read The Wizard of Oz (right) from start to finish. Says […]


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A note on paraphrasing

by Celeste Ng

The worlds of monument-building and writing don’t overlap much–but recently, the unveiling of the Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial on the national mall offered an important lesson on why every word matters. Perhaps you heard about it? In 1968, shortly before his assasination, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a speech titled “The Drum Major Instinct.” In discussing what he called “the desire to be up front… the desire to be first,” he concluded: Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum […]


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Heathrow's writer-in-residence

by Celeste Ng

Does the above photo–of London’s Heathrow Airport–inspire you to write? English novelist Tony Parsons is hoping it will inspire him. Earlier this summer, Parsons spent a week in Heathrow as the airport’s writer-in-residence, working on a collection due out this month. Reports the airport’s press release: Departures: Seven Stories from Heathrow will be Parsons’ 13th book and his first collection of short stories. Inspired by Airport, the 1960’s bestselling novel about a large metropolitan airport and the personalities of the people who use and rely on its operation, Parsons wants to revive this genre of airport fiction made famous by […]


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Writing without reading?

by Celeste Ng

Some frustrated soul on Facebook has started an “I Hate Reading” page. Even though–in keeping with the “I hate reading” theme–there’s nothing actually on the page, over 475,000 people “like” it. AbeBooks issued the following video, entitled “Long Live the Book,” in response: Okay, so some people hate to read. Some people aren’t book people. But some writers apparently also hate to read. On the New Yorker‘s Book Bench, Macy Halford writes: [William Giraldi] teaches writing at Boston University, and has been amazed at how many of the kids possess a passionate urge to write without also possessing an urge […]


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Is there space for "GAY" in "YA"?

by Celeste Ng

What if an agent agreed to represent your book–IF you changed the main character from gay to straight? That’s what happened to writers Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown and their YA novel, Stranger, according to a post they wrote in Publisher’s Weekly: Our novel, Stranger, has five viewpoint characters; one, Yuki Nakamura, is gay and has a boyfriend. Yuki’s romance, like the heterosexual ones in the novel, involves nothing more explicit than kissing. An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us. The agent offered to sign […]


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Write Place, Write Time

by Celeste Ng

Write Place, Write Time offers a peek into different writers’ workspaces. Above, the writing spot of novelist Heidi Durrow. Here’s the ridiculously cool workspace of writer Alan Heathcock (seriously, I can’t believe this exists–read the whole post; I promise it’s worth it): Heathcock writes: My writing studio is a 1967 Roadrunner travel trailer that for most of its life was an Idaho State Police surveillance vehicle, and is now packed with books and trophies and random oddities. Inside, there’s old beautiful wood paneling, which smells like woods and feels like wood and feels cozy and connects me with reality. […] […]


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The Slow Cookers

by Celeste Ng

I’m now in year 5 of working on my (first) novel, which seems like a long time to me. But according to everyone I’ve heard, 5-7 years is average for a first novel. For some, though, novelists just work Too Damn Slow. At least, that’s what Dwight Garner suggested in a recent essay in the New York Times: There have always been prolific writers as well as slow-moving, blocked, gin-addled or silent ones. It’s worth suggesting, though, that something more meaningful may be going on here; these long spans between books may indicate a desalinating tidal change in the place […]


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Where's Alice Bliss?

by Celeste Ng

Earlier this summer, we looked at BookCrossing, a website that allows users to “catch” and “release” books around the world and track where their books have gone. Now author Laura Harrington is using BookCrossing in an unusual promotion for her novel, Alice Bliss. Writes Harrington: Where’s Alice Bliss? is a campaign to send copies of the novel Alice Bliss to as many countries and U.S. states as possible. Through bookcrossing.com, copies of Alice Bliss will be registered and tracked as they travel around the world, passing from one reader to the next. […] We want to send Alice to four […]


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Help save the St. Mark's Bookshop!

by Celeste Ng

New Yorkers know and love the St. Mark’s Bookshop, a stalwart on the Lower East Side. But lately, the bookstore has been struggling to pay the market rent asked by its landlord, Cooper Union. The NY Daily News reports: The co-owners of the book shop, Terry McCoy and Bob Contant, are set to meet with the school’s officials Wednesday to discuss a rent reduction. The last time the two sides met, in early 2010, Cooper Union was unwilling to budge on the rent, which has increased to $20,000 a month. And the New York Times covers the deep sacrifices the […]


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Morris Lessmore

by Celeste Ng

We’ve talked a lot about how technology can bring books to life in new and exciting ways, but I hadn’t seen an example of an ebook that got me really excited until someone pointed me to this one. The brainchild of William Joyce, The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore is a wonderful amalgalm of movie, book, and game. A story about a book-loving man who stumbles into a world inhabited by books, it’s at once a dramatization of the power of words and a meta-commentary on literature. Joyce was previously a designer for Pixar, and it shows in the […]




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