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 |

More on book trailers…

by Celeste Ng

Okay, so “vook” may not enter the common parlance–but the combination of video plus books may be here to stay. Faced with little official promotion, writer Kelly Corrigan whipped up a trailer for her memoir The Middle Place, using her home computer and iMovie, and posted a video of herself reading one of her essays on YouTube. A recent profile of Corrigan in the Washington Post describes the results: A year later, the book has sold about 80,000 copies in hardcover and another 260,000 in paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan data. It sat on the New York Times bestseller list […]


Shop Talk |

Meet the Vook

by Celeste Ng

Simon & Schuster’s Atria imprint is teaming up with a multimedia partner to produce “vooks,” a book-video hybrid in which video segments are interspersed with printed text. Today’s release includes two how-to books and two novels (a romance and a thriller). The New York Times ArtsBeat blog reports: The initial “vooks” are “The 90-Second Fitness Solution” by Pete Cerqua, a diet and exercise book aimed at women; “Return to Beauty: Old World Wisdom and Recipes for Great Skin” by Narine Nikogosian, a guide for using fruits, vegetables and other kitchen staples to make skincare products; “Promises,” a romantic novella by […]


Shop Talk |

Banned Books Week = An Act of Censorship? Say what?

by Celeste Ng

It’s currently Banned Books Week, an event sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA), the American Booksellers Association, and other book- and writing-related organizations. The purpose, according to the ALA website, is “highlighting the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.” To celebrate Banned Books Week, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece by Mitchell Muncy entitled “Finding Censorship Where There Is None,” which asserts that Banned Books Week is, basically, a time for overzealous First-Amendment freaks to […]


Shop Talk |

TriQuarterly to be Shut Down after 45 Years

by Celeste Ng

Some sad news: recently, we heard that venerable literary journal TriQuarterly was transitioning to an online-only format. It’s sad enough to think that one of the oldest and most respected literary mags would no longer be in print, but there’s more to the story, as shown in this email from Ian Morris, TriQuarterly‘s associate editor: I just wanted you all know that as of spring 2010 after forty-five years TriQuarterly magazine will cease to exist. Susan Hahn and myself were notified of this fact yesterday just hours before the press release announcing the decision was sent out. After terminating TriQuarterly’s […]


Shop Talk |

Graphic Classics

by Celeste Ng

Vernerable publisher Penguin has quietly been putting out a series of “Graphic Classics”–classic novels such as Moby Dick and The Three Musketeers with snazzy covers by prominent graphic artists. Over at his blog, illustrator Michael Cho discusses designing the cover for the recent reissue of Don Delillo’s White Noise: The first thing I did, of course, was read the book again. It had been over 10 years since I last read it, so I needed to re-familiarize myself with it. After reading it though this time, I skimmed it again but with an eye toward the major concepts and images. […]


Shop Talk |

why the genius grants are, well, ingenious

by Celeste Ng

Yesterday the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the 20 recipients for the 2009 Fellowships–popularly known as the “Genius” Grants. Each of the fellows learned in a single phone call that they will receive $500,000 with no strings attached. This year’s crop includes two fiction writers, novelist Edwidge Danticat and short story writer Deborah Eisenberg. Two things about this: First, the program’s stated mission is “to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society.” So as a fiction writer, I find it empowering that the MacArthur Foundation believes writers can benefit society […]


Shop Talk |

HuffPo Books!

by Celeste Ng

It was selected as one of Time magazine’s Top 25 Blogs of 2009. The Observer (UK) went one step further and named it the most powerful blog in the world. According to Technorati, it’s the most linked-to blog on the Internet. And its founder, Arianna Huffington, came in at #12 in Forbes ‘ 2009 list of the most influential women in the media. Now the Huffington Post is starting–drumroll please!–a book section. Last Tuesday the New York Observer announced that HuffPo’s new book section would launch October 5th under the editorship of Amy Hertz, an editor-at-large for Penguin’s Dutton division. […]


Shop Talk |

Dispatch From Bread Loaf #4: What I Learned from Ann Hood

by Celeste Ng

With all the posts on lectures and readings, you may be surprised to hear that we had any time to workshop at the conference at all. I was very lucky to be in Ann Hood’s workshop, as Ann offered specific concrete approaches to thinking about plot, theme, tension, and all of those nebulous concepts fiction writers have to deal with. We had a lot of novel excerpts in the class, so much of the workshop discussion focused on issues of the novel rather than the short story—a change from the norm. Fellow Bread Loafer Eugene Cross has written an account […]


Shop Talk |

Dispatch from Bread Loaf #3: Maud Casey on Historical Fiction

by Celeste Ng

Toward the end of the conference, I was seriously overstimulated and running on an average of 5 hours of sleep per night. But the title alone of Maud Casey’s lecture, “The Secret History: The Power of Imagined Figures in Historical Fiction,” lured me out of bed that very last morning. Although I haven’t yet written any historical fiction myself, I’m especially interested in the space where the fictional meets the real, and how writers balance the responsibilities they have toward historical fact with the responsibilities they have toward emotional and aesthetic truths. Casey’s lecture was more than worth the lack […]


Shop Talk |

Dispatch from Bread Loaf #2: On Lushness, Irony, and Honesty

by Celeste Ng

At Bread Loaf, the first thing people asked–after “What’s your name?”–was often “What genre do you write?” There wasn’t any great divide between poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers, but somehow it seemed important to know. Maybe this is because we tend to think of our genres as very different forms with very different concerns and goals. I can’t count how many times I heard fiction writers say, “But I don’t know anything about poetry…” and poets say, “Well, I don’t get plot.” But actually, I think that poets and fiction writers have more overlap than they often believe. A […]




Literary Partners