Suspend Your Disbelief

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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"On behalf of the American people, we simply want to know what it is you'd say you're about, in a nutshell."

The Onion must have some book-lovers on staff these days—because their literature-related headlines of late have been painfully funny. See their latest, “Miranda July Called Before Congress To Explain Exactly What Her Whole Thing Is.” You should really just read the whole thing, but—okay, here’s a little taste: Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) at one point attempted a drastically different style of questioning in which he clearly explained to July what his own whole thing is in hopes that she would reciprocate in a way that everyone could understand. “Perhaps we’re approaching this in the wrong way; Ms. July, when I […]


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How to Hatch a Novel

Most writing classes revolve around the workshop—but the workshop format, in which participants usually read 25-30 pages of a student’s work and then critique it as a group, is ill-suited to the novel form, where 30 pages may not even be a full chapter. Is there a better way to give feedback on a novel-in-progress? Grub Street, Boston’s independent writing center, aims to find out with an experimental new course dubbed the “Novel Incubator.” (Disclaimer: I have taught for Grub Street, but have not been involved in the novel course.) Billing itself as a “year-long MFA-level course, team-taught by two […]


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Robots Writing Novels?

So a monkey typing into infinity will eventually produce Shakespeare—or so the theory goes. Maybe robots would be faster? The New York Times recently discussed the phenomenon of robots writing books. After an encounter with a robo-writer called Lambert M. Surhone—literally a computer churning out titles like “Saltine Cracker” and “Pagan Kennedy” from pasted-together online text—author Pagan Kennedy (yes) was fascinated and preplexed: Could robots ever be trusted to write original novels, histories, scientific papers and sonnets? For years, artificial-intelligence experts have insisted that machines can succeed as authors. But would we humans ever want to read the robot-books? Mechanized […]


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Imposter syndrome

When I first got to college, I was pretty sure that I was an admissions mistake. My roommate was one of Glamour‘s College Women of the Year. Another girl downstairs played piano with the Philharmonic; the guy down the hall was almost sixteen. A guy on the first floor held two patents. You get the idea. Even now, I occasionally get the feeling that I am a complete fraud, and I have no idea how I managed to convince people I had anything worthwhile to say. In my worst moments I suspect I will get a phone call rescinding awards […]


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A real page-turner

Joseph Herscher reads—but his Rube-Goldberg-esque machine does all the heavy lifting. The New York Times has a schematic–but the video is much more fun: Further Reading Watching: Books cavort in a bookshop in “The Joy of Books“ Busby Berkeley meets bookshelf Book dominoes!


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Picture books for writers (and their kids)

For a while now, I’ve been concerned about raising a kid who loves to read. Evidently I am not the only one, as shown by the BabyLit series of board books featuring Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre. These books bill themselves as “counting primers”—the “Little Miss Austen” version of Pride and Prejudice includes pages like “2 rich gentlemen” and “3 houses” (that would be Longbourne, Netherfield, and Pemberly)—but they’re clearly intended to introduce at least the elements of these classics to young children. The forthcoming Little Miss Bronte: Jane Eyre features quotes from the novel, like […]


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"The writer is not the writing"

Recently, the New York Times tackled the burning question of why authors tweet. One main reason? To connect with the reader, of course: For one thing, publishers are pushing authors to hobnob with readers on Twitter and Facebook in the hope they will sell more copies. But there’s another reason: Many authors have little use for the pretension of hermetic distance and never accepted a historically specific idea of what it means to be a writer. […] Jennifer Gilmore (3,463 followers) finds hearing from readers helps her understand the influence her novels have on them: “On Twitter, I have a […]


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Moby-Dick… typed on toilet paper. (Yes, you read that right.)

Do you love paper books? How about toilet paper books? Enterprising eBay seller the_heppcat offers a copy of Moby-Dick typed on 6 rolls of (clean!) Cottonelle. Says the item description: There are four full rolls, one roll (epilogue) is about 1/5 of a roll and one half-roll All of the rolls of TP came out of a brand new — clean — package of 2-ply Cottonelle. They’ve been handled very gingerly and infrequently. As you’ll see in the following photos, one or two rolls have a tear at the beginning. This is where i was trying to pull the paper […]


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826 Michigan's "How to Write Like I Do Series"—This Weekend!

Not a kid, but wish you could go to 826’s amazing writing programs? Now, thanks to 826 Michigan‘s How To Write Like I Do workshops, you can—and you don’t have to put your hair in pigtails and pretend to know about Bakugan. Inspired by a similar series at 826 Seattle, the How To Write Like I Do workshops for adults are held 5-6 times per year, led by writers like Daniel Alarcon and Peter Ho Davies. Novelist and UM MFA faculty member V.V. Ganeshananthan leads the next session February 4, 2012 (that’s tomorrow!) titled “The Reported Imagination: Journalism Techniques for […]


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"Masturbate frequently."

We hear a lot about how writers find their inspiration. But how about other creative artists? The Guardian surveyed contemporary musicians, dancers, directors, and architects to find out where they got their creative inspiration. Much of their advice is unexpected, yet would be useful to writers as well. Here’s a sampler: Guy Garvey, musician: Spending time in your own head is important. When I was a boy, I had to go to church every Sunday; the priest had an incomprehensible Irish accent, so I’d tune out for the whole hour, just spending time in my own thoughts. I still do […]