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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On Choosing A Font

by Celeste Ng

My sister, a engineering professor, is writing a book about how to encourage women to pursue engineering. She plans to self-publish the book through Lulu, since the print on demand strategy makes perfect sense for the specialized audience for such a book. And because I’ve worked in publishing, she asks me a lot of questions about layout and format and marketing—topics that are, sadly, way out of my field of expertise. In self-publishing, everything is up to the author: the size of the book, binding type, even the font. That can make for a bewildering self-publishing experience, and the best […]


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Psst! I'll give you print books for that Kindle.

by Celeste Ng

Having post-holiday Kindle regret? Microcosm Publishing, of Portland, OR, will trade $189 worth of paper books for your used Kindle. (Via.) Says the publisher’s website: Beginning RIGHT NOW you can bring in your Christmas Kindle to the Microcosm store in Portland (636 SE 11th) and trade it in for its worth in new or used books and zines! That’s right! Why let fad technology kill print when you can take a stand and fill up your shelves in the process. (Don’t worry, we won’t tell your parents.) And make sure to bring a friend to help you carry all your […]


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Thursday Morning Candy: Fresh Pressed

by Celeste Ng

This week, we bring you not a traditional journal but Fresh Pressed, the biannual newsletter from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. CLMP is an organization dedicated to serving independent literary publishers, offering a biweekly e-newsletter, a literary journal circulation database template to help lit mags manage their records, workshops and roundtables, various online resources, and several publications. The current edition (February 2011) of Fresh Pressed contains audio versions of panels and workshops from AWP 2011 and CLMP’s Fall 2010 LWC}NYC (Literary Writers Conference in New York City). Topics include: “Editor as Mentor: Literary Magazines and Emerging Writers” (a […]


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Happy Read Across America Day!

by Celeste Ng

Today, March 2, is Read Across America Day, in honor of Dr. Seuss‘s birthday. (Really—here’s the official presidential proclamation.) Funded by the NEA Foundation for the Improvement of Education, the event’s goal is simple: to motivate children to read. Says the event’s website: The First Lady and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel welcome a star-studded lineup of readers and 400 local schoolchildren to the Library of Congress today for the national kickoff of NEA’s Read Across America. Who’s grabbed a hat to read with the Cat? Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Jessica Alba, Superbowl champion Donald Driver, Top Chef host […]


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Doodles of Famous Authors

by Celeste Ng

Perhaps it’s pure nostalgia, but here on the blog we’ve been keeping a running list of things we lose when a book moves from physical object to digital file: the dedications and notes on the flyleaf, the deckle edges, careful typesetting, artistic covers. Here’s something else to add to the loss column: marginal doodles. Flavorwire has compiled a gallery of the idle squiggles of famous writers, offering an amusing and fascinating glimpse into the authors’ minds. For instance, Sylvia Plath depicted a nightmare of being chased by a hot dog and a marshmallow (this just cries out for Freudian interpretation), […]


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A bad time for writers? Not if you're a "debutant."

by Celeste Ng

True or false: It’s harder now to get published than ever. Answer: It depends. In the Financial Times, Adrian Turpin argues that the picture for debut novelists isn’t as bleak as you’d think: For most literary authors, the not-so-brave new world of publishing by numbers is terrible news. But there is one type of writer exempt from its strictures: the first novelist. Unsullied by inconvenient sales figures, the debutant exists uniquely in a state of prelapsarian grace, a blank canvas on which publishers can dream. […] Even recession has failed to dent the perennial desire for the new. While the […]


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The (semi-)mobile workspace

by Celeste Ng

Most writers have special workspaces in their homes, but how many can shift their space to suit their moods? Liu Ming, a feng shui teacher in Oakland, CA, has outfitted his loft apartment with a mobile, 8-foot cube that functions as a mediation area, study, and sleeping area. The New York Times reports: “In feng shui, we talk about the harmony in the place that you live in,” Mr. Liu says. “The cube evolved out of wanting cozy with the option of keeping a big, open space at the same time. And we added wheels for feng shui purposes. Now […]


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U.K. vs. U.S. covers

by Celeste Ng

When British books are published in the United States, and vice versa, publishers don’t generally change the text to cater to their audiences across the pond. Okay, they often adjust the spelling of a few words, like “realise”/”realize” and “practise”/”practice.” And some small punctuation changes occur—British writers tend to put their periods and commas outside quotation marks, Americans within. But these changes are quite minor. There’s one major thing that changes when a book crosses the Atlantic, though: the cover. The Millions has an interesting analysis of the UK and US covers of the books involved in the 2011 Tournament […]


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Critics on Criticism

by Celeste Ng

Criticism has never been an easy field, but now there’s a new risk: legal action. New York University law professor Joseph Weiler is being sued for running an negative book review. Writes Weiler: Last week, for the first time I found myself in the dock, as a criminal defendant. The French Republic v Weiler on a charge of Criminal Defamation. […] As Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law and its associated Book Reviewing website, I commissioned and then published a review of a book on the International Criminal Court. It was not a particularly favorable review. You may […]


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Harder than walking and chewing gum at the same time…

by Celeste Ng

Serious bookworms don’t read just on the train. They read anytime they have a minute—sometimes at their peril. The father of a certain Fiction-Writers-Review-editor-who-shall-not-be-named has been known to read the newspaper while driving. And in high school, I knew a girl who read books while walking: down the hallway AND down the sidewalk. I was never quite able to master this skill. As usual, technology has come to the rescue. Inkstone Software has added the “Walk N’ Read HUD (Heads-Up Display)” feature to their e-reader MegaReader—and it does just what it says on the box. Explains the company’s press release: […]




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