Suspend Your Disbelief

Contributor Types

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 |

The "Nice" Review

by Celeste Ng

Are book reviews useful if they’re… well, nice? Two of the biggest names in reviewing, Janet Maslin and Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, are known for delivering smarting critiques of the titles that cross their desks. Kakutani is so infamously harsh that an essay on The Millions came up with a term for her brand of criticism: the Kakutani two-step. But some book reviewers take a different tack. Author Ben Winters explained why he gives everything five stars on sites like Goodreads: The problem isn’t that “amateurs” are doing the reviewing: the opinions of regular old readers or […]


Shop Talk |

Books in the bedroom?

by Celeste Ng

Sure, you love them. But do you want to sleep with them? Design blog Apartment Therapy recently surveyed its readers on whether bookcases belonged in the bedroom. Commenters weighed in passionately on both sides. Those opposed to books in the bedroom offered a variety of reasons, from aesthetics: I think bookcases are fine for a kid’s room — to keep their own personal books — but otherwise, books belong in a less intimate and private space. Bookcases in a a grown-up bedroom are too cluttered and distracting. to psychology: The last time I had a bookcase in my bedroom was […]


Shop Talk |

"Find it here. Buy it here."

by Celeste Ng

One of my favorite bookstores, Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, MA, has a new sign up: The sign is intended to remind patrons that buying books in indie bookstores—not just browsing there—is what keeps those stores alive. Explains the bookstore’s email newsletter: The sign is in response to a growing trend at Harvard Book Store (and indeed at bookstores around the country). Folks come in, browse our shelves, get help from booksellers, attend our free events–but then make their purchases online at Amazon. If you like our store and enjoy our services, we’d ask you to think about the power of […]


Shop Talk |

Thursday Morning Candy: Noting:books

by Celeste Ng

We’ve talked about writing notes in the margins of books quite a bit on FWR, but what if you want to keep track of those notes over the long term, or share those notes with other people? Noting:books can help you do just that. Says the site: Noting:books is a collection of microblogs (“notebooks”) — individual readers tracking the books they’ve read and noting their thoughts. You can look through any person’s notebook, or you can look at the page for any book to see everyone’s notes on it. […] To start your own notebook, all you need to do […]


Shop Talk |

How to Steal Like an Artist

by Celeste Ng

Writer Austin Kleon offers this witty, yet sincere bit of advice on the writing life: “How to Steal Like an Artist (and 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me).” An excerpt: Your job is to collect ideas. The best way to collect ideas is to read. Read, read, read, read, read. Read the newspaper. Read the weather. Read the signs on the road. Read the faces of strangers. The more you read, the more you can choose to be influenced by. Identify one writer you really love. Find everything they’ve ever written. Then find out what they read. And read all […]


Shop Talk |

Sims, meet literature. Literature, meet The Sims.

by Celeste Ng

Perhaps you’ve seen the work of Next Media Animation, which animates recent news stories into (unintentionally?) hilarious Sims-style 3-D video clips. (Seriously. If you haven’t seen these before, check them out now. Go ahead. I’ll wait right here.) Anyway, now this 3-D technology is being used for something educational. The New York Times reports that college literature classes are using 3-D animations to bring literature to life for students: Prof. Katherine Rowe’s blue-haired avatar was flying across a grassy landscape to a virtual three-dimensional re-creation of the Globe Theater, where some students from her introductory Shakespeare class at Bryn Mawr […]


Shop Talk |

Lisa Simpson's Book Club, Hamlet's iPod

by Celeste Ng

So they’re not real—but they appreciate pop culture. As a Simpsons geek, I was delighted to discover the Tumblr site Lisa Simpson’s Book Club, which is documenting all the works of literature referenced by the surprisingly literate second-grader on The Simpsons. The site features screengrabs of Lisa reading, along with quotes and comments about her reading material of choice—including both real books like Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and On the Road as well as spoofs like the How, Why, and Huh? Book of Weather and The Babysitter Twins. But then, The Simpsons has always […]


Shop Talk |

Last chance: BOMB's 2011 Fiction Contest—EXTENDED to April 25!

by Celeste Ng

Just a reminder: the deadline for BOMB Magazine‘s fifth Fiction Contest is tomorrow, April 16 deadline extended to April 25!. This year’s judge is Rivka Galchen, author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances. The winner will receive $500 and publication in First Proof, BOMB’s literary supplement. Full content details and submission instructions are here. And to learn more about the journal, check out BOMB’s website, back issues, and blog.


Shop Talk |

Motivation… for the Unmotivated

by Celeste Ng

“The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Easy for Mary Heaton Vorse to say, perhaps, but what if you need a little more help getting those two seats together? Writers, being creative people, come up with lots of creative ways to get motivated. Two friends of mine from grad school would get together for enforced writing time; if one of them didn’t write, she would be forced to donate money to a cause she loathed, like the NRA. I don’t know if either of them ever actually […]


Shop Talk |

Thursday Morning Candy: Algonquin's "Ask an Editor" Series

by Celeste Ng

Ever wanted an insider’s view on the publishing process? Algonquin Books has launched the “Ask an Editor” video series on their blog to give you just that. (Via.) Says the site: Have a question about the publishing world? Submit it in the comments section and one of our editors may very well answer it in a future episode. The first video features Executive Editor Chuck Adams answering the question “How did you acquire Water for Elephants?” Watch it below: Readers have already chimed in with questions from “What other changes should literary writers expect in publishing for the next five […]




Literary Partners