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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The Writer Who Forgot How to Read

by Celeste Ng

What happens to a writer who can no longer read? NPR’s Morning Edition presents this fascinating (true) story of Canadian novelist Howard Engel, who forgot how to read—literally—after suffering a stroke. Engel managed to teach himself to read again and shared his story with neuroscientist Oliver Sacks. When he looked at the front page — it was the Toronto Globe and Mail, an English-language journal — the print on the page was unlike anything he had seen before. It looked vaguely “Serbo-Croatian or Korean,” or some language he didn’t know. Wondering if this was some kind of joke, he went […]


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More on the "Young" Writer

by Celeste Ng

The publication of the New Yorker‘s “20 Under 40” list caused quite a stir in the literary world recently. Partly, this was because such a list, issued with such authority from such an authority, raises particular expectations. But it was also partly because of the emphasis on “young” writers. In fact, as we previously mentioned, one blog, Ward Six, was so fed up with the “Under 40” list that it offered its own list of writers over 80. But in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus takes a different perspective, pointing out that “the emphasis on futurity […]


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How to Cope with the Writing Life

by Celeste Ng

Author Hannah Moskovitz has a sweet little post on coping with the ins and outs of a daily writing life: Here’s what I’ve found keeps you from getting gnawed down to nothing with the jealousy, fear, and guilt that seems to go hand in hand with writing. Tell someone who isn’t a writer. When I was querying in high school, I had a few people ask me why the fuck I kept running to the computers like an addict between every class. So I explained querying to them, with a flow-chart. All paths lead to rejection–query, partial, full–except this one […]


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20 Under 40, 10 Over 80, and 20 More Under 40 (40 Years Ago)

by Celeste Ng

Time for age-based writer lists! First up: The New Yorker names its list of “20 under 40” list of fiction writers worth watching. The last such list was compiled in 1999 and included Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, and David Foster Wallace; the current list includes Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Joshua Ferris, Salvatore Scibona, and Wells Tower, among many others. Yes, all of them were born in 1970 or later. If that bothers you, move on to list #2: Ward Six counters the New Yorker list with a list of “10 Great Writers Over 80,” praising John Barth, Beverly Cleary, Harper Lee, […]


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Twitter-ary Analysis

by Celeste Ng

Still not convinced that “Twitterature” is an actual art form? TIME magazine’s James Poniewozik has put together the most compelling analysis of Twitterfiction I’ve seen yet: Like any other kind of literature, Twitter lit — or Twitterature, to borrow the title of a recent book that condensed literary classics into tweet form — has its strengths, rules and tropes. Twitter is pure voice, an exercise in implying character through detail and tone. Halpern’s inaugural @shitmydadsays tweet is so economical that it should be taught in writing workshops: “‘I didn’t live to be 73 years old so I could eat kale. […]


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The Library of America's Story of the Week

by Celeste Ng

Each week, The nonprofit Library of America offers a free short story, readable online in PDF form. The current “Story of the Week” is “The Charmed Life”< by Katherine Anne Porter. Other recent features include “Charles” by Shirley Jackson (who—yes!—wrote more than just “The Lottery”), the early story “The Cut-Glass Bowl” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Wives of the Dead” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Each story is also accompanied by some commentary that helps set the story in context. This seems like a great—and free—way to discover some lesser-known pieces by well-known American writers. See the current story and all […]


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"This Book Made Me Want to Die"

by Celeste Ng

Here’s a great blog post from FWR favorite Aryn Kyle, on writing “happy literature”: “You should write something happy,” people tell me, and I don’t understand. Happy like Anna Karenina? Happy like The Grapes of Wrath? Happy like Lolita or Catch-22 or Revolutionary Road? Happy like Hamlet? What, I’d like to ask people, are these “happy books” you speak of, and who is writing them? I was an English Literature major, for sobbing out loud! I’ve never read a happy book in my whole life! Unless you count Jane Austen, who could usually be depended on to wrap things up […]


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Is it better to burn out, or fade away?

by Celeste Ng

Would you rather have one smash hit, or a long series of good—if not mind-blowing—little hits? Robert McCrum asks that very question in The Observer: Original work is, by definition, exceptional. Often, it seems to come out of nowhere in a explosive flurry of excitement. Anglo-American and European literature is notable for its sprinters as well as its long-distance runners. There are so many brilliant one-offs, especially at the more popular end of the business: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, or Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, for example. Rosamond Lehmann had a long career, but most readers know […]


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Literary Tees from Out-of-Print Clothing

by Celeste Ng

We’ve talked about literary T-shirts on the blog before, but here’s another combination of bookishness and fashion—plus a dose of do-goodery. Out of Print Clothing has a twofold mission: 1. Provide awesome T-shirts based on iconic book covers. 2. Help those with little or no access to literature by donating books to Africa: one book per T-shirt sold. Says the company’s website: For each shirt we sell, one book is donated to a community in need through our partner Books For Africa. How we read is changing as we move further into the digital age. It’s unclear what the role […]


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Big Think: Lionel Shriver on the "Unwholesome" Side of MFA Programs

by Celeste Ng

Should you get an MFA? On Big Think, novelist Lionel Shriver discusses the downsides of attending an MFA program: [It] does have a kind of indulgent, middle-class gestalt. The grim truth is that most people who get MFAs will not go on to be professional writers and therefore when I’ve been on the other side of it and occasionally taught creative writing, I felt a little bit guilty because so many of the people that you should be encouraging, because there’s no point to it if you’re not encouraging, are not going to make it. And I think that’s true […]




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