Suspend Your Disbelief

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Lee Thomas

Editor at Large

Lee Thomas is a fiction writer. She was the Managing Editor of FWR from 2010-2013. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Charlotte Observer, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is finishing a story collection.


Articles

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Writer, Sell Thyself

by Lee Thomas

On the NYTimes‘ Opinionator blog this weekend, Dick Cavett reflects on the role of author as salesman in “I Wrote It, Must I Also Hustle It?” Cavett writes: I just did 12 — or was it 14? — back-to-back radio interviews from New York to Seattle and, so it seemed after five of them, all points in between. Somewhere around number eight you begin to lapse into a kind of dream state, wondering if what you just said was something you had said to the same person 10 minutes ago; or was that said to the previous host? Maybe he […]


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Further Thoughts on Translation

by Lee Thomas

Over at MelvilleHouse Publishing there’s an interesting blog post, In Support of Translation, along with responses, about the Best Translated Book Award being funded by Amazon. Editor Dennis Loy Johnson writes: As the winner of the most recent Best Translated Book (BTB) prize for fiction — for our book, The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail Hareven — we here at Melville House were particularly proud to win an award that had been voted upon by a judging panel made up of representatives from some of the country’s best independent booksellers, not to mention some great indie bloggers and critics. […]


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Old Friends

by Lee Thomas

Over on the Huffington Post, Cynthia Ellis has a lovely homage to The Woman in White, the 1859 classic of madness, mystery, romance and juicy hints at the supernatural by Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White was first published in serial form, and the reader feels it. The 600+ pages race by with a kind of terminal velocity from the first haunting scene. Ellis brought the book on her Hawaiian vacation, an experience she describes thus: If you are in Kauai, trapped underwater in a small metal cage being dangled in front of sharks, trying not to stick out your […]


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What's your Governor reading?

by Lee Thomas

Just in time for the election yesterday, David Kipen went on The Madeleine Brand show on KPCC with a list of what he though would be good required reading for the new California Governor. His list included theory, biography and classics of political writing – and some fiction. Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, and The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice by Czech playwright, essayist and former President Václav Havel are just a few of the books Kipen selected. You can find his full list here. So now that the […]


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The new look of MQR

by Lee Thomas

Sometimes a fresh coat of paint and general sprucing up is all that’s needed to reinvigorate a literary journal’s true offering: knockout writing. Michigan Quarterly Review (MQR) has done just that with their website – redesigned as a clean, sleek affair in easy-on-the-eyes serifs and shades of charcoal and leafy green. Check out their new aesthetic here: michiganquarterlyreview.com Last year Jonathan Freedman assumed the role of Editor, taking over for Larry Goldstein, who ran MQR for more than three decades. In addition to welcoming on several Associate Editors – Michael Byers, who is on sabbatical this year, as well as […]


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Brief is beautiful

by Lee Thomas

Over on the Wall Street Journal’s newly-launched Book Review, Alexander McCall Smith laments the pitfalls of overwriting in “Block that Adjective!” Smith writes: Concise prose knows what it wants to say, and says it. It does not embellish, except occasionally, and then for dramatic effect. It is sparing in its use of metaphor. And it is certainly careful in its use of adjectives. Look at the King James Bible, that magnificent repository of English at the height of its beauty. The language used to describe the creation of the world is so simple, so direct. “Let there be light, and […]


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Terrifying Tweets

by Lee Thomas

Thanks to Anne for alerting me to this, it sounds like just the diversion for a drizzly October morning. Today is the last day of the challenge, so if you’re feeling inspired for some Halloween creepy tweeting, get typing! Bestselling author and former Booker Prize judge Frank Delaney is hosting a Halloween Writing Challenge on Twitter. From Monday, October 25 to Wednesday, October 27, he’s challenging people to introduce the creepiest character possible in 140 creepy characters. Please enter! (Don’t forget to include the hash tag #FDcreepy in your tweet.) You just might win a secret creepy prize picked by […]


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Book covers in your mailbox

by Lee Thomas

For better or worse, I’m one of those people who the postal service could charge $2 to send a simple letter and I’d still ante-up. With more of us sending email, especially in a work setting (I’m all for the environmental benefits of this), municipal mail service around the world has suffered. But there’s still something thrilling about receiving a handwritten letter – and they’re rare enough these days that a note from a friend in the mailbox can make my week. Enter: the perfect intersection of my admiration for the handwritten note and a love of cover design. Penguin […]


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The Story of Dzanc

by Lee Thomas

Here at Fiction Writers Review, we’re big fans of the work that nonprofit publisher Dzanc Books has done in the past four years to publish, promote and generally champion writers who “don’t fit neatly into the marketing niches of for-profit presses.” FWR’s own Jeremiah Chamberlin has a terrific piece on Poets & Writers website about the origins of Dzanc, and the Emerging Writers Network, started by Dzanc co-founder Dan Wickett: [The Emerging Writers Network’s] mission, like the goal of those very first reviews, was—and still is—to help develop a larger audience for emerging writers and established writers deserving wider recognition. […]


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Who owns the library?

by Lee Thomas

In an article about the growing trend of private takeovers of public library systems, David Streitfeld of the New York Times poses the question: Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then? With vigorous debate on both sides of the issue, and many towns – and some states – on the brink of bankruptcy, what are your thoughts on the issue? For library systems that do go private, who decides which books are added to collections? […]




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