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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Famous People: Can They Write?

by Celeste Ng

For some reason, I don’t think of celebrity authors as emerging writers. After all, they’ve got well-established careers of their own acting, directing, or being beautiful/audacious/infamous. It’s hard to think of someone like James Franco—who seems to be everywhere this year—as an “emerging” anything. But Franco recently published his first collection of short stories, Palo Alto, which officially makes him an emerging writer. He seems to be taking it seriously: according to Wikipedia, Franco “simultaneously attend[ed] graduate school at Columbia University’s MFA writing program, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking, and Brooklyn College for fiction writing, […]


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…and when reality becomes fiction

by Celeste Ng

On the flip side of our earlier post on fiction becoming reality, reality is apparently becoming fiction just as fast. Classic pregnancy handbook What to Expect When You’re Expecting will soon be adapted into—yup, you guessed it—a romantic comedy. Entertainment Weekly reports: Jon-HammLionsgate has confirmed that they will adapt the bestselling pregnancy bible What To Expect When You’re Expecting and intend to give it the Love Actually and Valentine’s Day treatment. In other words, we’ll see a series of intertwining vingnettes with enough star wattage to blind most any moviegoer. For those of you looking to spin the straw of […]


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When Fiction Becomes Reality

by Celeste Ng

Is it just me, or have the lines between the real world and fiction been even more blurred lately? According to the New York Times‘s ArtsBeat, Grove/Atlantic will publish Sterling’s Gold: The Wit & Wisdom of an Ad Man—a fictional memoir written by the fictional Roger Sterling of AMC’s Mad Men: In a deeply facetious news release Grove Press said a box containing the book “has been found in the basement of the home he once shared with his wife, Jane.” The release continues, “Though it has been out of print for many years, Sterling’s groundbreaking book gave readers a […]


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Robot Assistants: 2010 Edition

by Celeste Ng

Much has been said about what technology is doing to literature from the reading side. But what can technology do for those on the writing side? Several programs have recently been released to make the writer’s difficult task easier—or at least more manageable. Here’s a roundup, just in time for the start of NaNoWriMo: First, to help remove distractions, FocusWriter gives writers with a pared-down word processor that fills the entire screen, theoretically minimizing the temptation to waste time on the internet instead of writing. Unlike other stripped-down word processors, though, FocusWriter still provides basic features like word, paragraph, and […]


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Literary Halloween Costumes

by Celeste Ng

With just a few days left before Halloween, have you figured out your costume yet? The internets have some suggestions. On Flickr, the “Literary Halloween Costumes” group provides inspiration, from a classic Alice in Wonderland getup to Friar Tuck and Edgar Allen Poe to the obligatory Harry Potter. Need step-by-step instructions? Check out these tutorials to dress up as Heathcliff, Elizabeth Bennett, John Galt, or Jean Valjean and Cosette. For the kids, Apparently Not Deranged has suggestions, including Little Women, Peter Rabbit, and Waldo. (Via.) And for the do-it-yourselfer, there’s this colossally awesome Max costume, from Beau Baby: What’s your […]


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Where to Write? Anywhere.

by Celeste Ng

I admit I’m a bit of a prima donna when it comes to writing: I like particular spaces and particular environments. Being at my desk, with everything I need just where I want it, helps me focus. And I’m clearly not alone. But there are benefits to being more flexible, and this essay by Jessica Francis Kane on The Millions points out some of the best reasons to make do when it comes to workspaces: I began to suspect I was too susceptible to the idea of the “writer’s desk” and decided it might be better to do without one. […]


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NaNo___Mo

by Celeste Ng

For those of you keeping count, there are 2 more weeks until the start of NaNoWriMo. But why stop at just writing a novel in November? Writer Ian Healy has some ideas for other NaNo-type events that—as he puts it—might just save the publishing industry. Here’s one of them: NaNoBuyMo Acquiring editors for publishers don’t get let off easy. They have to acquire ten books between November 1 and November 30. That means they don’t have a lot of time to think things through. If they kind of like something, better to take a chance on it. Sure, maybe they […]


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The Universal Activity

by Celeste Ng

You may not know photographer Steve McCurry by name, but you probably know his famous photo “Afghan Girl.” (In fact, McCurry is so respected in the photography world that he was given the very last roll of Kodachrome ever produced.) On his blog, McCurry offers a photo essay of readers from around the world, from shoe sellers to Buddhist monks: Everywhere I go in the world, I see young and old, rich and poor, reading books. Whether readers are engaged in the sacred or the secular, they are, for a time, transported to another world. It’s not clear from the […]


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The dangers of book recommendations

by Celeste Ng

Since I’m a writer, friends often ask me for book recommendations. It’s incredibly difficult to predict what people will like based on other things they’ve liked. Netflix offered a million dollars, literally, to anyone who could improve their predictions on what viewers would enjoy based on other movies they’d enjoyed. It’s marginally easier to make predictions if you know the person—but it’s infinitely more risky. Suddenly your knowledge of literature AND your knowledge of your friend are tested. Ross loved Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You, so would he like Aimee Bender? David Foster Wallace? Wells Tower? […]


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Make Your Own Hardback Books

by Celeste Ng

Got old paperbacks? Prefer hardcovers? Feeling crafty? Home design site Ohdeedoh provides this quick tutorial on how to turn paperbacks into custom hardcover books, using just an inkjet printer, cardboard, fabric, and a gluestick. This might be a great way to breathe new life into those tattered softcovers you’ve been hoarding.




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