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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Making a book, 1947 and now

by Celeste Ng

Print book aficionados, here’s a little treat: a video on how a book was made in 1947. (My favorite part? How the author is “finished” writing his story as soon as the last page leaves the typewriter—and the book has a publisher immediately. Ah, if only…) Via. More interested in all the stuff that comes before printing—and how that works today? Mediabistro has released a four-minute video that outlines the process of finding an agent, finding a publisher, and getting publicity:


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"When you have only a sentence or two, there’s nowhere to hide."

by Celeste Ng

Twitter turned five this week—an event celebrated by some and bemoaned by others. Is the (very) short form killing or helping our communication? Writer and teacher Andy Selsberg argues that learning to write short can make you a better writer: I don’t expect all my graduates to go on to Twitter-based careers, but learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in tune with most students’ daily chatter, as well as the world’s conversation. […] So a few years ago, I started slipping my classes short writing assignments […]


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Feed your head—and your stomach—at La Pizzateca

by Celeste Ng

A new shop in Madrid, La Pizzateca, serves up tasty combos of books and pizza. Reports Springwise: The brainchild of Spanish publisher ES Ediciones, La Pizzateca offers a wide range of artisanal pizzas and calzones made from natural ingredients for enjoyment in-house or to go. It’s also a bookstore, however, and it even offers specials to encourage both pursuits. One, for example — dubbed the “menú de las letras” — includes a slice of pizza and a book for just EUR 5. Sounds like a clever new way to market books—and I love the idea of pairing pizzas with literature, […]


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"Atlas Shrugged" + "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" 4-Ever

by Celeste Ng

Clearly there’s some connection between literature and romance. We know that fiction makes you more empathetic, and thus, possibly, more dateable. Writing and love are a lot alike. And a literary misalignment can even break a budding romance. Recently we’ve heard about how a shared love of books can act as a matchmaker. Now the San Francisco Public Library has taken that a step further, organizing a speed-dating session in the library itself: Participants were asked to bring a favorite book, so he clutched a copy of “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell and “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. In […]


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Thursday Morning Candy: Authors On Tour – Live!

by Celeste Ng

Welcome to Thursday Morning Candy, where we highlight an online journal or resource that’s a treat for writers and readers. Love author readings, but find you can’t get to them as often as you’d like? Or maybe you live in an area where author readings are infrequent. Authors on Tour – Live! is at your service. The website brings you podcasts of live author readings, including plenty of fiction, much of it by emerging writers—all for free. Recent podcasts include Siobhan Fallon reading from and discussing her debut collection You Know When the Men Are Gone, Chris Cleave on his […]


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Marginalia and the e-reader

by Celeste Ng

Partway through his essay on marginalia, Sam Anderson tells the story of lending a friend his copy of Infinite Jest—complete with his own annotations—then borrowing it back partway through: The fresh one, she told me afterward, felt a little lonely by comparison: she missed the meta-conversation running in the margins, the sense of another consciousness co-filtering D.F.W.’s words, the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes. On our wedding day, my husband received a copy of Infinite Jest from his childhood friend as a wedding gift, complete with dogeared pages and scrawled marginal notes. “This book,” said […]


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Lit and video games: a forbidden love story?

by Celeste Ng

Why aren’t more novelists writing video games? That’s what the Guardian asked recently: Part of the problem is clearly to do with priorities. As the game writer and former critic Rhianna Pratchett says in the film: “Story is often the last thing thought about and the first thing pulled apart.” So much effort goes into making spectacular worlds, tackling the technical logistics and ensuring the playing experience is enjoyable that decent plot and dialogue fall by the wayside. Yet there are trickier issues involved. As a few people say in the film, gaming presents a unique challenge in terms of […]


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Dzanc Day Approacheth

by Celeste Ng

Dzanc Books‘s second annual National Workshop Day—also known as Dzanc Day—is coming up on April 9, 2011. Says the event’s site: Consisting of dozens of creative writing workshops in almost as many cities, Dzanc Day provides local, affordable two-to-four hour sessions led by professional writers, authors, and editors, all open to attendance by the public for a very affordable fee. Sessions are conducted in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, and are generally suitable for writers of all levels. Dzanc day helps writers in more ways than one, too: it helps fund Dzanc Books’s charitable endeavors, including the prestigious Dzanc Prize and […]


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New Yorkers: Slow down and… read the novel pages.

by Celeste Ng

New Yorkers are not known for slowing down and looking around. But a stunt by an anonymous novelist may be getting them to do just that. Someone has been pasting pages of his (or her) novel, “Holy Crap,” to lampposts around the East Village, transforming the streets into a kind of choose-your-own-adventure—or literary Burma Shave ad. Reports Yahoo!: Pages began mysteriously appearing on lightpoles in the city’s East Village neighborhood. As of yet, nobody has come forward to claim the work. So far, eight pages in total have made their way to the public. […] At the bottom of that […]


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When to kill a novel? Before it kills you.

by Celeste Ng

In the New York Times, Dan Kois takes a peek into the abandoned novels of famous writers. Evelyn Waugh, Nicolai Gogol, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, and many more all scrapped novels. So if there’s a novel slowly decaying under your bed, take heart. You’re in good company—and possibly wise: “A book itself threatens to kill its author repeatedly during its composition,” Michael Chabon writes in the margins of his unfinished novel “Fountain City” — a novel, he adds, that he could feel “erasing me, breaking me down, burying me alive, drowning me, kicking me down the stairs.” And so Chabon […]




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