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 Upside (?) of Melancholy

by Celeste Ng

We’ve discussed the links between depression and creativity on this blog before—from a report that some schools on Nantucket were banning “depressing” literature in response to high rates of teen suicides to Anne’s reflections on “When Writers Stop Drinking (or Start Taking Meds, or Start Reading Peter Kramer).” Jonah Lehrer’s recent essay in The New York Times Magazine investigates this question from a different angle: whether depression has an evolutionary purpose. For some unknown reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness and, as we’ve now come to think, needs drugs to rescue itself. The alternative, of course, is […]


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50 Book People to Follow on Twitter

by Celeste Ng

The Huffington Post recently published a list of “The 50 Best Book People to Follow on Twitter.” Those on the list include everyone from veteran authors Margaret Atwood and Anne Rice to up-and-comers like Colson Whitehead. There are plenty of agents, editors, and book bloggers, too, as well as book sites like GalleyCat and Guardian Books. These bookish Twitterers offer thoughts on current events and life in general and favorite writing-related links you might never find otherwise. A representative smattering: from Mokoto Rich, New York Times book editor: Looking at questions asked and not asked about latest incident of flawed […]


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Book Design Nerdery, Part I: Designing a Cover

by Celeste Ng

Have you ever wondered how book covers get designed? This video shows how Orbit Books’ Creative Designer Lauren Panepinto designed the cover for an upcoming novel. The whole process took over 6 hours, but the video condenses that into just under two minutes: On Orbit’s webpage, Panepito explains: Trust me, no one wants to watch it in real-time…and even then I left out the not-as-riveting-onscreen stages of my cover design process, such as reading the manuscript, sifting through Alexia photoshoot outtakes, background photo research, etc. And since this is a series look that has already been established for Soulless and […]


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I have an MFA in Fiction and a Master's in Vampire Studies

by Celeste Ng

How do you know when vampire lit has reached critical mass? When it gets an academic conference. Vampire literature is now receiving some scholarly attention with a conference at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. Despite the smirk factor, the conference—”Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture”— has some serious intellectual heft: The aim of the conference is to relate the undead in literature, art, and other media to questions concerning gender, technology, consumption, and social change. […] The irony of creatures with no reflection becoming such a pervasive reflection of modern culture pleases in […]


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YA Authors Fight Bullying

by Celeste Ng

Here in Massachusetts, the story of Phoebe Prince has been big news for a while. Prince was a fifteen-year-old high school freshman in South Hadley, MA, who committed suicide after being repeatedly bullied at school. Now, as some of the teens who allegedly bullied Prince are charged in connection with her death, the story has gotten news coverage across the country. And it’s also sparking action from an unlikely group: YA authors. GalleyCat reports: To help combat the problem of bullying, YA authors Carrie Jones and Megan Kelley Hall have founded a new group–Young Adult Authors Against Bullying. Since the […]


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Payment vs. Good Karma

by Celeste Ng

At the Coachella Review, Steve Almond makes a case—through his email exchange with an agent—against contributing to an anthology for free: Mark – I may be willing to do this, but I’d really like to know: who IS getting paid, if not the contributors? I contribute to a lot of anthologies, and almost without exception, they offer to pay contributors based on the advance, or a small percentage of the royalties. The idea is a great one, and the contributors are top-notch, so this book could make real money. Why wouldn’t the people who provided the material for the book […]


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The Hypothetical Library

by Celeste Ng

The subtitle of the blog The Hypothetical Library is “Imaginary Book Covers. Designed for Real Authors.” And that sums up this interesting little project nicely. Book designer Charlie Orr collaborates with real authors like Colum McCann, David Lehman, and Thomas Kelly to design covers for books that the authors have not written—and never will write. I ask each writer to provide flap copy for a book that they haven’t, won’t, but in theory could, write, and then I design a cover for it. I am not a writer. I have tried over the years, but it is simply something I […]


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More on the DIY Book Tour

by Celeste Ng

Jeremy recently posted about Allison Amend’s tips for a do-it-yourself book tour. Author-arranged promotions are becoming more and more common as publishers cut back on marketing and publicity, and the L.A. Times has some firsthand accounts of what such a book tour can be like: A cat peeing in an author’s bag? A writer waking up to discover that a complete stranger has left him four jars of delicious homemade preserves? Such things are not traditionally part of book promotion. But they happened to Bill Cotter and Annie La Ganga, an Austin, Texas-based couple who celebrated the simultaneous release of […]


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Literature of the Workplace

by Celeste Ng

In The New York Times, Book Review editor Jennifer Schuessler discusses the evolution of office-lit and why working the double shift might actually be shaping contemporary novels: Enough with the cozy stay-at-home dramas and urban picaresques featuring young slackers with no identifiable paycheck! The literary novel needs more tinkers and tailors, the argument goes. (The best-seller list seems to take care of the soldiers and spies.) In a video introduction to the latest issue of Granta, dedicated to the theme of “Work,” John Freeman, the magazine’s editor, lamented the literary “invisibility” of daily toil. The essayist Alain de Botton, writing […]




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