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

Shop Talk |

Tomorrow! Free stories on the NYC subway!

by Celeste Ng

In one of the coolest promotions ever, One Story will be handing out free issues—each containing a complete short story—tomorrow at Brooklyn subway stations. Says the magazine’s blog: From 7:30-9 am on Wednesday, September 8th, volunteers will be handing out free copies of One Story at subway stations throughout Brooklyn, as part of the “One Story, One Borough” campaign, in our ongoing effort to save the short story. Each issue will include an invite to a One Story reading by Brooklyn OS authors James Hannaham, Reif Larsen and Caedra Scott-Flaherty at noon at The Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, September […]


Shop Talk |

How Many Indie Bookstores Is Too Many?

by Celeste Ng

Here at FWR, we’re all for indie bookstores. We love their support of authors and readings, their knowledge of the books they sell, and their ties to the community. But is there such a thing as too many indie bookstores? In Westhampton Beach, NY, the answer might be yes. Newcomer indie bookstore Books & Books, which opened in July, is giving established indie bookstore The Open Book some competition, and not everyone is happy. The New York Times reports: Terry Lucas, a librarian and the owner of the Open Book, which she founded in 1999, said Books & Books is […]


Shop Talk |

The 3-Day Novel

by Celeste Ng

Last week we told you about Dzanc’s Write-a-Thon, which runs September 2-5 and helps raise money for Dzanc’s Writer-in-Residence Program and the Dzanc Prize. If that got your creative juices flowing, here’s another write-a-thon-type opportunity: the International 3-Day Novel Contest. Yes, you read that right: the goal of the contest is to write a novel in just 3 days. (Nanowrimo ? Ha! We laugh at your extra 27 days!) At The Millions, Sean Di Lizio explains: The 3-Day Novel Contest is held annually in early September on the Canadian Labor Day long weekend. In 1977, a writer’s group in Vancouver […]


Shop Talk |

Reality and imagination: two sides of the same coin?

by Celeste Ng

In an essay for the New York Times, professor of logic Timothy Williamson examines the connections between imagination and reality—and comes to some counterintuitive conclusions: On further reflection, imagining turns out to be much more reality-directed than the stereotype implies. If a child imagines the life of a slave in ancient Rome as mainly spent watching sports on TV, with occasional household chores, they are imagining it wrong. That is not what it was like to be a slave. The imagination is not just a random idea generator. The test is how close you can come to imagining the life […]


Shop Talk |

Choose Your Own E-venture

by Celeste Ng

If you decide to follow the tunnel, turn to page 151. If you decide to cross the bridge, turn to page 12. Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books? Now you can enjoy the series in ebook format with the new iPhone app U-Ventures. The app was created by Edward Packard, one of the authors of the original Choose Your Own Adventure series and creator of U-Ventures. In an interview with NPR host Neal Conan, Packard comments on some of the narrative changes made possible by the new digital format. First there are the obvious bells and whistles that ebooks […]


Shop Talk |

Sharpie's new liquid pencil

by Celeste Ng

So say you’ve decided to unplug for a while. That doesn’t mean you have to go completely low-tech. The new liquid pencil from Sharpie, for example, seems like an ingenious new invention. Wait, you may be saying. A pencil from Sharpie? Aren’t those polar opposites? As it turns out, no. The pencil’s “ink,” made from liquid graphite, can be erased like an ordinary pencil—for three days. After that, the ink becomes permanent. I’ve always liked writing in pencil, and to me, this sounds like it might offer all the benefits (erasability, flexibility of expression) without the downsides (smudging and ineveitable […]


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"The Kids Are All Bright": Elizabeth Ames Staudt on childhood and writing

by Celeste Ng

Friend of FWR (and very talented writer) Elizabeth Ames Staudt reflects in the Kenyon Review on writing about children and one’s children becoming writers: Do writers want their babies to be writers? I feel like, in the way-too–many-celebrity-profiles I’ve read, most famous people hope their progeny will not head Hollywood-wards, but are quick to add that they will support them unflaggingly should they ultimately choose that dangerously glittery path. Except Britney Spears. I’m pretty sure she was quoted saying that she’d lock her sons in a room until they changed their minds. Okay, she really said she would lock them […]


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In Defense of MFA Programs

by Celeste Ng

The more MFA programs spring up, the more people seem to look down on them—as if some kind of MFA-inflation and devaluation were taking place. Novelist Lev Raphael, however, recently wrote about why he found his MFA program valuable: I was at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst MFA program for two and a half years back when it was rated in the top ten, for whatever that’s worth. The workshops kept me writing and turning in stories, even when I wasn’t in the mood, a good lesson to learn for a writer like me who later ended up doing […]


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How old is too old for YA*?

by Celeste Ng

That’s what Pamela Paul wants to know in her recent New York Times essay. Observes Paul: But big type and short, plot-driven chapters aside, the erosion of age-­determined book categories, initiated by Harry Potter, has been hastened along by an influx of crossover authors like Stephenie Meyer and interlopers like Sherman Alexie, James Patterson, Francine Prose, Carl Hiaasen and John Grisham, to name just a few stars from across the spectrum of adult fiction who have turned to writing Y.A. According to surveys by the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry, 47 percent of 18- to 24-year-old women […]


Shop Talk |

On the Benefits of Disconnecting

by Celeste Ng

Author Elizabeth Benedict, editor of the recent anthology Mentors, Muses, & Monsters, discusses her experience being forced to unplug: Finding this blank book already so full of hope and history — from Hemingway’s to my beloved sister-in-law’s — was a bit like encountering a bear in the woods: it was just the two of us, and it was up to me to save my skin. I couldn’t hide, couldn’t escape to the computer or connect anywhere but in its cream-colored pages. I began by rereading the manuscript pages from the novel — and I winced two dozen times. It was […]




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