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

Shop Talk |

Boston Book Festival – This Weekend!

by Celeste Ng

Boston-area FWR readers, check out the Boston Book Festival THIS Saturday, October 24, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm at Copley Square. The festival features readings, lectures, and discussions such as: Keynote speaker Orhan Pamuk “Ties That Bind”: novelists Richard Russo, Michael Thomas, and Elinor Lipman on the family in fiction John Hodgman interviewed by Tom Perrotta “Book Worms and Net Crawlers”: thoughts on “the ubiquitous internet and the explosion of social media” by authors Ben Mezrich and Ethan Gilsdorf and New York Times technology columnist David Pogue. (Read the FWR review of Ethan’s book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, here.) […]


Shop Talk |

McSweeney's 33: Litmag Meets News

by Celeste Ng

McSweeney’s next issue will be packaged in the form of an old-fashioned newspaper. The New York Times‘s ArtsBeat reports: McSweeney’s No. 33 is to be in the form of a daily broadsheet — a big, old-fashioned broadsheet. The pages will measure 22 by 15 inches. (Pages of The New York Times, by comparison, are 22 by 11 1/2 inches.) Called San Francisco Panorama, the editors say it is, in large part, homage to an institution that they feel, contrary to conventional wisdom, still has a lot of life in it. Their experience in publishing literary fiction is something of a […]


Shop Talk |

I Can't Go On, I'll Go On

by Celeste Ng

Junot Diaz has a powerful and inspiring essay in O Magazine about writing his Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Though the piece is titled “Becoming a Writer,” it’s really an account of almost giving up on writing and, inexorably, being drawn back to it: Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn’t been pretty damn cool. But they were cool, showed a lot of promise. Would also have been fine if I could have just jumped to something else. But […]


Interviews |

Unexpected Connections: A Conversation with Allison Amend

by Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng talks with Allison Amend about the author’s debut short story collection, Things That Pass for Love, as well as “likeable” characters, unfaithful dogs, the future of short fiction, Allison’s current projects, and those unexpected moments we share with strangers.


Shop Talk |

Furnishings of a literary life

by Celeste Ng

How often do we think about our books as physical objects, part of the essential furniture of our homes? The Elegant Variation has a lovely little post about the joy of setting up one’s library again after a move: So now the arduous task of refilling the books begins. First, we need to douse the whole collection to protect against silverfish (also at Mrs. TEV’s insistence). Then I need to incorporate new additions to my library into the boxes packed more than a year ago, and figure out exactly how to order the whole thing. (The previous arrangement could politely […]


Shop Talk |

National Book Award Finalists Announced

by Celeste Ng

The National Book Foundation has announced the 2009 National Book Award Finalists. Here are the contenders in fiction: Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press) Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House) Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W. W. Norton & Co.) Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf) Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) The complete list, as well as other fun stats and figures, can be found here. Winners will be announced on November 18 at the 60th National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony in New York. […]


Shop Talk |

Win A Critique From Nathan Bransford

by Celeste Ng

Over at his eponymous blog, literary agent Nathan Bransford (of Curtis Brown Ltd. in San Francisco) is running his “3rd Sort-of-Annual Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph Challenge.” Post the first paragraph of your work-in-progress on the contest page, and Bransford will select those he deems strongest as finalists. Readers of his blog will then vote to determine the contest winner. Finalists get query critiques, and the winner will receive: “(1) Their choice of a partial critique, query critique, or phone consultation; (2) A very-sought-after galley of THE SECRET YEAR by Jennifer Hubbard, which will be published by Viking in January; (3) […]


Shop Talk |

Ralph Nader: Activist. Perennial presidential candidate/spoiler. Novelist?

by Celeste Ng

Seven Stories Press has just released Nader’s novel, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, in which Yoko Ono, Warren Buffet, Ted Turner, Bill-Cosby, Paul Newman, and other influential figures meet, Justice-League style, to defeat bad guys Lancelot Lobo, Brover Dortquist, and corporate CEOs. In an author’s note, Nader himself writes: This book is not a novel. Nor is it nonfiction. In the literary world, it might be described as “a practical utopia.” I call it a fictional vision that could become a new reality. Some known and not-well-known people appear in fictional roles. I invite your imaginative engagement. If that […]


Shop Talk |

How to Get a Book Deal Using the Internet

by Celeste Ng

First came blog-based books like Julie and Julia. Then came books based on Internet memes like LOLcats. Recently we’ve seen a spate of Twitter-based books, ranging from Matt Stewart’s novel The French Revolution to TwitterWit to Justin Halpern’s Shit My Dad Says. How far will the trend go? Now, even your Facebook status can land you a book deal–at least in the world of The Onion. Via.


Shop Talk |

Print sales of Symbol not so lost

by Celeste Ng

Worried that ebooks will be the death of paper books? Sales of Dan Brown’s latest, The Lost Symbol, don’t back that up. At first, it looked like more people bought the book for Kindle than in hardcover. But, reports the L.A.Times: By the time the week was out, with more than 2 million copies sold in the U.S., Britain and Canada — breaking the publisher’s previous one-week record set by Bill Clinton with “My Life” — hardcover sales had easily eclipsed sales of the ebook. Of the 2 million copies sold, only 100,000, or 5%, were electronic versions. Which means, […]




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