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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Journal of the Week subscription winners: Flyway

by Celeste Ng

We’re delighted to announce the winners of our Flyway Journal of the Week giveaway, chosen at random from our Twitter followers. Congratulations to: Tom Ryan (@crossroadskcmo) Diane Cook (@TheDMC) Jason Renshaw (@englishraven) You’ll each receive a complimentary one-year subscription to Flyway! Please email us at winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com with your contact information, and we’ll coordinate the rest. If you missed the profile of Flyway and the exclusive interview with Managing Editor Brenna Dixon and Fiction Editor Genevieve DuBois, you can read the whole thing in our blog archives. And remember: if you’d like to be eligible for future journal giveaways, […]


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"Jersey Shore" Gone Wilde!

by Celeste Ng

That’s the title of a hilarious video series by the cast of “The Importance of Being Earnest” on Broadway at Roundabout Theatre Company. They ask an important question: What if the characters of Broadway’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” traveled through a time warp and woke up on the beach with Snooki, The Situation and the rest of the gang of MTV’s “Jersey Shore”? In an exclusive video series created for Playbill by “Earnest” stars Santino Fontana and David Furr, the Roundabout Theatre Company cast puts “Jersey” in the mouths of Oscar Wilde’s famed Britons. Think of it as a […]


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More powerful than a locomotive…

by Celeste Ng

Not a poet? Perhaps you are. David Brooks points out that we all use metaphors in our daily speech, all the time, without even knowing it: When talking about relationships, we often use health metaphors. A friend might be involved in a sick relationship. Another might have a healthy marriage. When talking about argument, we use war metaphors. When talking about time, we often use money metaphors. But when talking about money, we rely on liquid metaphors. We dip into savings, sponge off friends or skim funds off the top. Even the job title stockbroker derives from the French word […]


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"The Call of the Domestic" and other Less Interesting Books

by Celeste Ng

For the past few weeks, book-loving Twitterers have been amusing themselves by coming up with Less Interesting Books. Here are a few of my favorites: The Devil Wears Hush Puppies (@TheJaneChannel) To Give a Mockingbird a Stern Talking To (@andrewvanorden) A Farewell to Arms: Coping with Amputation (@waltonky) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Glendale Galleria (@peteFweiss) The At-Times-Slightly-Unpleasant-But-Altogether-Perfectly-Manageable Lightness of Being (@mattmclowry) A Couple of Years of Solitude (@joefi) The great thing about hashtags like this is people keep coming up with more. Search for the #lessinterestingbooks tag on Twitter for more, and tell us yours in the comments. Via. […]


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Blurb translation guide

by Celeste Ng

We all know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But now, with Ward Six’s handy Literary Blurb Translation Guide, you can judge it quickly and easily by the blurbs on that cover. Some examples: “luminous prose” = too many goddam words “unflinching artistry” = lots of boobs and stabbing “taut” = limited vocabulary “incredible range and breadth” = all over the place “trenchant satire” = poop jokes The commenters on the original post have added more, as have the folks at MetaFilter. Got more to contribute? Tell us in the comments.


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When is it fiction… and when is it just a lie?

by Celeste Ng

Last week, news sources everywhere reported that the popular blog “Gay Girl in Damascus” was not, in fact, written by a Syrian lesbian named Amina Arraf. Nor, as the blog claimed recently, had Amina been arrested by Syrian police. In fact, the blog was written by a 40-year-old American grad student, Tom MacMaster, who is living in Scotland. Amina does not exist. According to NPR, in his apology post on the blog, MacMaster defends himself by claiming he was writing fiction: I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs […]


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Elevator Repair Service @ NYPL

by Celeste Ng

A while back, we wrote about Elevator Repair Service’s performance of Gatz, in which The Great Gatsby is read in its entirety onstage. Recently, Elevator Repair Service took on a different lit-meets-theatre project, which they called “Shuffle”: to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the New York Public Library, the group performed three great works of literature—The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, and The Sound and the Fury—simultaneously. According to the New York Times, the library was temporarily transformed into a piece of performance art. Visitors wandered in and out, some fascinated, others apparently dumbfounded. No, they couldn’t get the […]


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Joyce, Twitter. Twitter, Joyce.

by Celeste Ng

In honor of Bloomsday, the literary project Ulysses Meets Twitter is conducting an online reading of Joyce’s masterpiece today (@11ysses). Says the project’s website: This is not an attempt to tweet mindlessly the entire contents of Ulysses, word-for-word, 140 characters at a time. That would be dull and impossible. What is proposed here is a recasting or a reimagining of the reading experience of this novel, start to finish, within the confines of a day-long series of tweets from a global volunteer army of Joyce-sodden tweeps. Can you imagine such a thing? Would it be horrific, a train wreck? Or […]


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On Dog Ears

by Celeste Ng

No, not that kind. For her book Dog Ear, photographer Erica Baum has photographed mass-market paperbacks with their pages folded down so that the text on different pages aligns. (Via.) The results are a kind of mash-up between found poems and origami. The Seattle PI has several of Baum’s images online—take a look!


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Shakespeare was a neuroscientist?

by Celeste Ng

Neurolinguist Philip Davis is studying the effects of Shakespeare on the brain. Big Think has more info: In all of his plays, sonnets and narrative poems, Shakespeare used 17,677 words. Of these, he invented approximately 1,700, or nearly 10 percent. Shakespeare did this by changing the part of speech of words, adding prefixes and suffixes, connecting words together, borrowing from a foreign language, or by simply inventing them, the way a rapper like Snoop Dogg has today. […] [Davis] is studying what he calls “functional shifts” that demonstrate how Shakespeare’s creative mistakes “shift mental pathways and open possibilities” for what […]




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