Suspend Your Disbelief

Contributor Types

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 |

Gatsby, Uncut

by Celeste Ng

We’ve seen a lot of book adaptations lately, from Where the Wild Things Are to Precious to The Lovely Bones. Screenwriters and directors cut scenes here and add scenes there to transform the book into a cohesive viewing experience. A good adaptation can be a brand-new work of art. But in the process, the book is often boiled down to its essence while the particulars–the writer’s own words–are often lost. The American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is trying to work around that. The A.R.T.’s latest production is “Gatz,” a staged reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby […]


Shop Talk |

Publishers Send Aid to Haiti

by Celeste Ng

They may be in dire financial straits, but several publishers are reaching out to Haiti anyway. GalleyCat reports that Random House is donating $100,000 to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief Fund and Partners in Health. Its parent corporation, Bertelsmann AG, is adding 100,000 euros, while Time/TIME Inc. is releasing a book on Haiti with proceeds to benefit earthquake victims. If you’re still looking for ways to donate, here are some options: SMS text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief effort; it will appear on your phone bill SMS text “YELE” to 501501 to Donate $5 […]


Shop Talk |

Eugene Cross wins 2009 Dzanc Prize

by Celeste Ng

Fiction writer and Penn State Erie lecturer Eugene Cross has won the 2009 Dzanc Prize. The $5,000 prize is based on a manuscript-in-progress as well as a proposal for a writing-related community service project. Dzanc writes: Cross was selected from more than 100 applicants for both the quality of his fiction writing, as well as his proposal to set up and run a progressive series of creative workshops for refugees from Nepal, Sudan and Bhutan, in Erie. For his community service, Cross will conduct three 4-month workshops in concurrence with an ESL class currently being taught. We at Dzanc found […]


Shop Talk |

The Books People Steal

by Celeste Ng

Abbie Hoffman would be proud. *** In Harvard Bookstore, one of my favorite local indie bookstores, there’s a small, unobtrusive sign on the fiction shelf. For books by Bukowski and Kerouac, it says, please ask at the register. I couldn’t figure out why and finally asked one of the staff. “People tend to steal them,” she explained bluntly. As a horrible goody-two-shoes, the idea of stealing a book had never occurred to me. (And really? Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac? Okay, I do live in Cambridge.) In the New York Times, novelist Margo Rabb investigates the most-stolen books at independent […]


Shop Talk |

Powell's Puddly Awards

by Celeste Ng

Powell’s wants to know: what’s the best book you read in the past decade? Voting for the 2010 Puddly Awards (and the “Golden Galoshes” trophy) is now open. Nominate your favorite read of the ’00s and you could win a $250 Powell’s gift card or one of four $50 Powell’s gift cards. Current nominees range from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Voting ends January 31.


Shop Talk |

Story Prize Finalists Announced

by Celeste Ng

This year’s finalists for The Story Prize have been announced, and the competition is, as usual, staggering: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton) Drift by Victoria Patterson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) Even more remarkable, as Story Prize director Larry Dark points out, these are all books by emerging authors: What’s particularly exciting is that all three are debuts–a first for The Story Prize. In fact, in the previous five years of the award, only 2 of 15 finalists were the authors’ first books: 2004/05 finalist The Circus […]


Shop Talk |

This is your brain on fiction

by Celeste Ng

Can neuroscience help you become a better writer? That’s what YA author Livia Blackburne, a graduate student in neuroscience at MIT, wonders on her blog Narrative and the Brain. …. the scientists used a brain scanner to see what regions lit up during the reading of a story. They watched the brains of volunteers as they read four short narrative passages. […] Motor neurons flashed when characters were grasping objects, and neurons involved in eye movement activated when characters were navigating their world. In summary then, different parts of the brain process different facets of our conscious experience, and those […]


Shop Talk |

The Perils of "Contact Me"

by Celeste Ng

One of my new year’s resolutions is to reach out to other writers more often. But in a recent New York Times essay, Ben Yagoda looks at the downside of being in touch with one’s readers: Reader-to-author e-missives come in a few, quite specific, categories. The message above is an example of the most common (for me), queries tied to an author’s area of expertise. I have written books about Will Rogers, The New Yorker and grammar, and a few times a week I get a question on one of these topics. This is flattering… […] Less welcome are the […]


Shop Talk |

Remembering DFW

by Celeste Ng

We still miss David Foster Wallace, and we’re not alone. In GQ, Deborah Treisman (head of the New Yorker‘s fiction department) discusses working with the late author: You’ve edited a lot of great writers—what was the process like with him? David was wonderful to edit because he was so involved with the minutiae of his work—he had a long explanation for every decision that he’d made, and yet, at the same time, he was willing to rethink anything that didn’t seem to be landing well for the reader. Editing him was sometimes a more painstaking process than editing most writers, […]




Literary Partners