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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Map Your Reading

by Celeste Ng

Google Lit Trips uses Google Earth to show readers important locations in works of literature. For example, if you’re reading The Grapes of Wrath, you can follow the Joads’ travel along Route 66, or while reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, you can track the kid from Texas to Mexico and beyond. The site’s main focus is on children’s and YA lit, with maps for classics such as Make Way for Ducklings, The Slave Dancer, and Paddle-to-the-Sea. But there are a growing number of “trips” for adult literary fiction as well, including The Road by Cormac McCarthy, A Portrait of […]


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Sweet and sociable lit mag, 5 years old, seeks loving home.

by Celeste Ng

Literary magazines: is there a source of greater guilt for writers? We submit to them. We cross our fingers, make a small-animal sacrifice, and hope they’ll publish our work. But do we really read them? The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) has launched a new program to encourage creative writing students to read literary magazines. From the program announcement: The Lit Mag Adoption Program for Creative Writing Students allows undergraduate and graduate creative writing professors to include literary magazines in their courses. Students receive discounted, 1-year subscriptions for selected literary magazines (professors receive a free “desk-copy” subscription). Each […]


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The World's First (Really) Commercial Novel

by Celeste Ng

Ever wonder what would happen if the plotline of a novel were up for sale? Commercial Novel aims to find out. By commenting on the site—and making a donation to the site via PayPal—you can influence what happens in the next chapter of the novel. The comment with the highest donation shapes the next segment of the book. It’s sort of a three-way cross between an improv show, an exquisite corpse, and a charity auction. The site’s authors explain the motivation behind the project: We are fictional writers who lost our fictional middle-class lifestyle with the onset of the recession.* […]


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Janet Fitch's Rules for Writers

by Celeste Ng

We’re writers! We’re creative souls! We love original thought! But for some reason, we also love lists of rules—especially rules that tell us how to write (and how not to write). Call it one of life’s great paradoxes. The most widely disseminated list is probably Elmore Leonard’s rather prescriptive catalogue of things to avoid (“Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue”). Many authors, before and since Leonard, have tried to boil their advice down into neat bullet points, with varying success. But Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander, has posted her own “10 Rules for Writers,” and […]


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The (U.K.'s) Best Underground Lit Mags

by Celeste Ng

The UK’s Independent highlights their favorite new underground literary magazines “stemming from the edgiest enclaves of the book-loving universe”: Indeed, the editors of these fledgling organs claim that low budgets spur inventiveness. While Five Dials’ inaugural issue contained an 1852 letter from Flaubert to Louise Colet, the first in a series of “exemplar letters”, in more recent times it has juxtaposed articles on gangster rap with more high-brow fare. “It’s good to try to challenge the more established magazines,” says [Craig Taylor, author and editor of Five Dials]. “They don’t always deserve to be there. You need newer titles with […]


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B-Movie Sparks Rick Moody's New Novel

by Celeste Ng

Adaptations usually go from novel to film (okay, unless you’re Dave Eggers, in which case all bets are off). But later this month, Rick Moody will publish The Four Fingers of Death—a 700-page novel involving a (fictional) novelization on the B-movie The Crawling Hand. io9 takes a closer look at the novel: It’s the year 2025, and the NAFTA bloc has fallen into such a perilous decline that we barely have an economy or a functioning society any longer, and we’re at the mercy of the much more powerful Sino-Indian economic bloc. A failed writer, Montese Crandall, wins the rights […]


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If you were reading this on paper, you'd be finished by now.

by Celeste Ng

Perhaps our recent posts on e-books have you jonesing for an iPad or a Kindle. Or maybe they’ve made you nostalgic for a good old print hardback. Either way, here’s something else to consider: reading on paper is faster than reading on a screen. The Nielsen Norman group (no, that Nielsen) found that reading in electronic format was up to 10.7% slower than reading a paper book. Reports Macworld: Nielsen’s findings were based on the performance of 24 users who “like reading and frequently read books.” The subjects each read different short stories by Ernest Hemingway on all four platforms, […]


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Why Buy the Cow: Part II

by Celeste Ng

Last week, FWR’s own Lee Thomas examined the economics of giving away e-books for free, pointing out: Free buys word of mouth, which may create the buzz needed to sustain a book long enough to find its audience. […] Many authors and publishing houses now regularly post a story from a new collection or a free first chapter as a way to entice while still protecting both profit and the value of the art. Author Jim Hanas is taking this model a step further by giving away copies of his e-book until Labor Day—directly. The One Story blog reports: In […]


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Gatsby: The Video Game

by Celeste Ng

We’ve talked about video games and their relation to narrative before. But how about fiction as video game? Enter I-Play’s video game Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. According to the game description, you can “Find the hidden items on your list triggering character dialogue and progressing the story,” “Recreate Fitzgerald’s famous prose, assemble your own library and earn trophies to share with friends on Facebook,” and “Complete unique mini-games: test your memory, put yourself in the author’s seat, or solve portrait puzzles.” Here’s a screenshot, complete with some landmarks from the novel: I-Play offers […]


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The Book Trailer Goes Mainstream?

by Celeste Ng

You know a phenomenon has reached critical mass when it appears in the New York Times. And recently, the New York Times discussed the growing necessity—and, more often than not, awkwardness— of the book trailer: But in the streaming video era, with the publishing industry under relentless threat, the trailer is fast becoming an essential component of online marketing. Asked to draw on often nonexistent acting skills, authors are holding forth for anything from 30 seconds to 6 minutes, frequently to the tune of stock guitar strumming, soulful violin or klezmer music. And now, those who once worried about no […]




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