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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Literary Gifts #4: Lit Mag Subscriptions

by Celeste Ng

I love giving magazine subscriptions as presents: it’s like a new gift every month. If there’s a reader–or a write–on your holiday gift list, how about a subscription to your favorite literary magazine? Most subscriptions run under $40, a bargain for a present that provides a fresh infusion of stories, poems, and essays over the course of a year. And you’ll provide much-needed support to literary journals and the writers they publish. Old standbys like The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review put out beautiful, hefty issues 4 times a year. Want your stories more frequently? […]


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New Lit Site: The Nervous Breakdown

by Celeste Ng

Have you met The Nervous Breakdown yet? Founded by author Brad Listi, this new website is intended as a new space for authors to promote their work. The fiction section’s aim, as explained in an open letter, is not only akin to that of all good literary magazines–to showcase some of the most vibrant writers working today–but also to help provide these writers with a vehicle to market their books. This is why we provide links to authors’ websites and sales pages: to help directly connect the writers we love with their audience–TNB’s large, loyal and growing readership. But don’t […]


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Literary Gifts #3: MotherReader's 105 Ways to Give a Book

by Celeste Ng

Books always make great presents, but just wrapping it up and handing it over is a little… blah. MotherReader offers a list of 105 books paired with complementary gifts. Ideas are grouped by recipient’s age range; many are aimed at kids and could be great ways to encourage budding readers. Here’s a sampling of my favorites: 3. Give a book with a movie theater gift card to see the upcoming film. 10. Give an interesting, insightful book with a restaurant gift card and a date to discuss the book together over a meal. 44. Everyone needs Mo Willems’ book Don’t […]


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Bread Loaf Lectures and Readings Available on iTunes

by Celeste Ng

Didn’t make it to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference this summer? You can now download many of the lectures and readings from the 2009 session for free on iTunes. A partial list is available now; more will be added soon. Lectures include Ellen Bryant Voigt on irony, Charles Baxter on lush styles in prose, and Thomas Mallon on the letters of presidents . And there’s a wide selection of fiction readings, including faculty members Maud Casey, Thomas Mallon, and Luis Alberto Urrea; special guest Lorrie Moore; and fiction fellows Lauren Groff, Aryn Kyle, Skip Horack, and many more–plus readings by […]


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Literary Gifts #2: Novel-T Tees

by Celeste Ng

Here’s a clever gift idea for the bookishly AND sportishly inclined. Novel-T offers a complete lineup of literary T-shirts–literally. Designed to resemble baseball jerseys, each offers “an opportunity to express your support for the all-stars of literature” and bears the name of a literary figure-cum-position player. Appropriately enough, the “expansive” poet Whitman plays center field, quick-witted Huck Finn plays shortstop, Bartleby is out in left field (where else?), and Ahab is both pitcher and–heh–captain. The front of the shirt bears an appropriate logo, from Hester Prynne’s A to Poe’s raven. Even many of the players’ numbers have been carefully chosen: […]


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Real Life: Novel or Memoir?

by Celeste Ng

The latest installment of the L.A. Times’s Off the Shelf series features an essay by writer Maud Newton on why she’s writing a novel instead of a memoir. Newton describes how, as an adolescent, she always thought she’d write a tell-all True Story: Pre-teen novels were my frame of reference. I envisaged a story in the downbeat, questioning vein of “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret” or “My Darling, My Hamburger.” But unlike those books, mine would be true, and, because I could not see beyond the sphere of my own unhappiness, it would be called, “And You Think […]


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The 2009 Bad Sex Awards (NSFW)

by Celeste Ng

It’s the end of fall, and you know what that means. Okay, yes, NaNoWriMo is over–but I’m talking about the Literary Review‘s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. It’s a shame the Literary Review doesn’t select runners-up, as each of their selections was capital-B Bad in its own special way. So here are my votes for superlatives. Check to be sure your boss isn’t around and get ready to cringe. Most Explicit Play-by-Play: from Philip Roth’s The Humbling First Pegeen stepped into the contraption, adjusted and secured the leather straps, and affixed the dildo so that it jutted straight out. […]


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Gawker auctions signed Palin memoir for charity

by Celeste Ng

War makes strange bedfellows, but what about charity? Gawker attended the National Book Awards and asked attending writers to sign a copy of Sarah Palin’s ghostwritten memoir Going Rogue. The signed book is now up for auction on eBay, with proceeds going to Save the Children. Actually, the combination of Palin + literary stars makes total sense. The Gawker folk explain: At 2009’s National Book Awards we honored Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue as 2010’s frontrunner for the NBA Fiction Prize by getting it signed by the gathered literary luminaries. And now, it can be the best charitable, tax-deductible present ever. […]


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Economics of a NYT Bestseller

by Celeste Ng

You may have heard about author Lynn Viehl’s post about how much–or rather, how little–she earned on her New York Times mass market bestseller Twilight Fall. Viehl analyzed her royalty statement and came to a sobering conclusion: My income per book always reminds me of how tough it is to make at living at this gig, especially for writers who only produce one book per year. If I did the same, and my one book performed as well as TF, and my family of four were solely dependent on my income, my net would be only around $2500.00 over the […]


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The End of Oprah

by Celeste Ng

Oprah gave book publicists a collective fit of the vapors when she announced her show—and its high-profile book club—would be ending in 2011. Many fretted over the effects on publishing, calling it “a blow”: “Other than a book being turned into a popular movie nothing brings readers to a book like Oprah,” said Dawn Davis, editorial director of the Amistad imprint of News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers. […] “She brings a variety of readers to a variety of books. Her impact is immeasurable.” Another publicist mourned, “If it is the end of her daily talk show,we probably won’t see something else […]




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