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 |

Rock Bottom to be adapted as musical

by Celeste Ng

FWR Contributor Michael Shilling‘s debut novel, Rock Bottom, will be adapted into a stage musical by the Landless Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.! The novel—and the new show—tells the story of the Blood Orphans, a once-great rock band, in Amsterdam on the last day of their final tour. The musical is a collaboration between Shilling, playwright/composer Andrew Lloyd Baughman, and songwriter/vocalist Talia Segal. It runs July 15th-August 7th at the D.C. Arts Center. And, as befits a show about a rock band, it contains explicit language, graphic adult situations, and nudity—so what are you waiting for? For more information, including […]


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Supreme Court justices: secret fiction lovers

by Celeste Ng

We seldom think of judges as writers, but as any lawyer will tell you, written decisions are the bulk of the court’s work. Recently, the Scribes Journal of Legal Writing published interviews with the SCOTUS justices (as they’re known in legal circles), and surprise: many of them appreciate reading, especially fiction, as the basis of good writing. NPR reports: “The only good way to learn about writing is to read good writing,” says Chief Justice John Roberts. That sentiment is echoed by Breyer, who points to Proust, Stendhal and Montesquieu as his inspirations. Justice Anthony Kennedy loves Hemingway, Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, […]


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Ann Patchett to open bookstore

by Celeste Ng

Disappointed by the lack of bookstores in her hometown of Nashville, writer Ann Patchett is taking matters into her own hands—and opening one. Reports the Christian Science Monitor: As Patchett’s been recounting in interviews on her book tour, a frame shop where she has been a customer since high school asked her if they should stock [her latest novel] “State of Wonder.” They made the offer because, sadly, Nashville’s bookstores – from big-box chains to the 30-year-old Davis-Kidd bookstore – have been shutting down. “It’s very weird to have a book coming out without a bookstore,” Patchett told The Tennessean. […]


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A Portrait of the Artist as His (or Her) Own Words

by Celeste Ng

Artist and author John Sokol creates portraits of artists out of lines from their own works. Here’s another of his stunning “word portraits”—this is William Faulkner as The Sound and The Fury: Visit Sokol’s Facebook page to see more of his portraits, and should you wish to buy one to inspire you at your writing desk, they’re for sale on his website. (Via Flavorwire.)


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Big Fiction Magazine

by Celeste Ng

We spent all of May talking about short stories, and of course novels get plenty of love all year round. But what about that neglected misfit of the fiction world, the long story or novella? Big Fiction Magazine is a new literary journal dedicated to the long story. From their website: Big Fiction was created with the goal of providing a beautiful home for long fiction that otherwise would not find a place in traditional literary magazines. We are a new journal for literature at leisure—stories to curl up with for an afternoon (or pack along on your next journey), […]


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Open a book, become someone else

by Celeste Ng

A Lithuanian bookstore has created a gorgeous campaign called “Become Someone Else” (“Pabū kuo nors kitu”) showing the transformative power of books. The Love Agency, the advertising firm that created the campaign, has all of the images up online. (Via GalleyCat.) And there’s evidence that books have literal (ha ha) transformative powers as well. A study in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine finds “each increasing quartile of print media use was associated with a 50% decrease in the odds of having MDD,” or major depressive disorder. In other words, the more teens read, the less likey they were […]


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A Kindle for Dickens

by Celeste Ng

If Charles Dickens had had a Kindle, what would it have looked like? That’s the question art student Rachel Walsh tried to answer for her design class, which asked her to explain something modern to someone who died before 1900. Walsh’s explanation involved creating a visual metaphor: Since a 19th-century author wouldn’t have had any concept of downloads, e-readers, or the Internet, Walsh had to create a metaphor for the device that would resonate with Dickens. Realizing that a Kindle is just a lot of books inside a big book, she created an old-school version consisting of literal little books […]


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One book review? That'll be $99.00, please.

by Celeste Ng

What’s wrong with these two sentences? We will keep the book in our stacks for another two weeks. If you decide to order a review after that time, we will ask you to send another copy. That’s from an email Chad Post of Three Percent received recently from ForeWord Reviews. Yes, you read that right: “if you decide to order a review.” ForeWord Digital Reviews, as the email explained, charges authors to have their books reviewed: Digital Reviews is our new review service for books that meet our standards for worthy books, but which we can’t cover in our print […]




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