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 Best Sentences, One Tweet at a Time

by Celeste Ng

New York Magazine book critic Sam Anderson is running a literary Twitter experiment — and no, this isn’t a Twitter novel. In fact, it’s almost the exact opposite. Anderson tweets the best sentence he reads each day, and as he points out, “‘Best,’ in this context, can mean almost anything: funny, beautiful, enlightening, stylistically amazing.” A few of his selections: “Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.” (philip larkin, ‘absences’) I think that at least a third to half of all MFA seats should be reserved for people with families. (junot diaz, panorama interv. w eggers) “But according […]


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Steve Almond on Self-publishing

by Celeste Ng

On The Rumpus, author Steve Almond explains why he recently decided to self-publish a book of short stories and essays, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey–and it’s probably not for the reasons you’d think: If this were a traditional publishing endeavor, the next question would be how to get the book a “bigger platform,” meaning a place in the great Barnes-&-Noble-Amazon-Kindle-i-Pad-clusterfuckosphere. But because this is something much more personal, I decided – nah. I was cool with Harvard Bookstore selling it. But other than that, Minute, Honey is available only at readings. My reasoning is pretty simple: I want […]


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Recommended Reading: Aryn Kyle story in Five Chapters

by Celeste Ng

I am not a patient person. People who do slow, meticulous things like needlepoint and whittling amaze and bewilder me. This impatience applies to my reading habits, too: when immersed in a book I love, I can’t stop myself from reading faster and faster, eager to see the whole picture, to wolf the whole story into my head. Luckily, though, Five Chapters exists to remind me that patience is a virtue. Five Chapters publishes one story each week, with one section of the story posted each day. It’s an old-fashioned exercise in delayed gratification, and as this week’s story is […]


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2010 Asian American Short Story Contest

by Celeste Ng

Entries are now being accepted for the 2010 Asian American Short Story Contest–the only national, pan-Asian American writing competition of its kind. The contest’s sponsors are two of the leading promoters of Asian American literary arts: Hyphen magazine is a non-profit news and culture magazine and blog that focuses on exploring Asian American identity, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) is the most prominent organization in the country dedicated to exceptional literature by writers of Asian descent. Fiction Writers Review is proud to be a media partner for the 2010 contest. This year’s judges are Alexander Chee and Jaed […]


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Boston Public Library's Children's Writer in Residence Fellowship

by Celeste Ng

The Boston Public Library is now accepting applications for its Children’s Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, a little-known but wonderful opportunity for children’s and YA writers. The fellowship, offered to one writer per year, is intended to “provide an emerging children’s writer with the financial and administrative support needed to complete one literary work” and offers a workspace in the library and a $20,000 stipend. Recipients’ projects may be fiction, nonfiction, poetry, illustration combined with any of the former, or a script; last year’s recipient, Kelly Hourihan, is working on a YA novel. There is no application fee, and to apply, you must […]


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Love Letter to the Deckle Edge

by Celeste Ng

If all the recent talk about the iPad and the Amazon/Macmillan ebook pricing catfight has you longing for a simpler time, look no further than this ode to the deckle edge on The Millions: Opening a book can already feel like opening a gift. Armed with a knife and freeing the pages and the story hidden beneath the folds, it becomes something more, “a penetration of its secrets” and an act of discovery, shot through with a suggestion of violence and danger or of the painful gestation of the words themselves. This act of cutting open pages to read a […]


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Single-serve Short Stories on Kindle

by Celeste Ng

Most of the talk about e-readers centers on full-length books. But The Atlantic has recently worked out a deal to publish a series of Kindle-only short stories, each retailing for $3.99. It’s the literary equivalent of a pop single. Six stories have been published so far, by authors such as Jennifer Haigh, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Paul Theroux. Here’s a description of Patricia Engel’s story “The Bridge”: Available exclusive to the Kindle, “The Bridge,” by Patricia Engel, is the story of Carlito and Reina, a brother and sister from Miami. When he was a boy, Carlito was thrown from a bridge […]


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"Rules" of Writing

by Celeste Ng

Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, the Guardian recently asked several contemporary authors for their own rules of writing. Writers such as Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx, Jonathan Franzen, Philip Pullman, Zadie Smith, and many others answered the call ((Here’s Part One; and here’s Part Two). You may have noticed that at Fiction Writers Review, we take our rules with a pinch of skepticism. (Steven Wingate’s Quotes & Notes series has investigated some of the “rules” embodied in writing-related quotes.) But writing is a hard job, and we all long for the magic formula that will help us get […]


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Are Books Recession-Proof?

by Celeste Ng

A recent poll of 3,000 people made a surprising find: books are an indulgence many people can’t live without. Three-quarters of adults questioned in an online poll said they would sacrifice holidays, dining out, going to the movies and even shopping sprees but they could not resist buying books. Dining out came in a far second with only 11 percent of Americans naming it their top indulgence, followed by shopping at 7 percent, vacations at four and movies, which was chosen by only 3 percent of Americans. “The recession highlighted the downside of greed, indulgence and giving in to temptation, […]


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Writing for the Long Haul

by Celeste Ng

In the L.A. Times, author Dani Shapiro reflects on the challenges of a writing career–the lost days of “writing in the cold” for years while building a reputation, the recent “blockbuster or bust” mentality, and how emerging writers can persevere in spite of all of this: I recently had the honor of acting as guest editor for the anthology “Best New American Voices 2010,” the latest volume in a long-running annual series that contains some of the finest writing culled from students in graduate programs and conferences. Joshua Ferris, Nam Le, Julie Orringer and Maile Meloy are just a few […]




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