Suspend Your Disbelief

Contributor Types

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

Shop Talk |

Why buy the cow?

by Lee Thomas

The Los Angeles Times Book Section reported back in May that the top 10 e-books on Kindle are all free. Not surprisingly, Steig Larsson now holds the top three slots with his Millennium Trilogy, which range between $7.15 and $9.99. That still leaves plenty of free books in the top tier. The current top of the free e-book list is a debut novel, The Heir by Paul Robertson (Bethany House). It’s a page-turner, the kind of book I’ve torn through at the beach or on cold winter evenings, when it’s pitch black outside by 4 p.m. Robertson has come out […]


Shop Talk |

A writer walks into a bar …

by Lee Thomas

There are few venues where a fiction reader might witness Steve Almond read student evaluations of his teaching (youth can be so cruel), Samantha Hunt perform a poem – backwards, or Ben Greenman‘s utter faith in humanity as he recites his credit card and pin numbers aloud to a packed bar. In fact, the only place I can think of off the top of my head is the Happy Ending Music & Reading Series. Started in 2003 by Amanda Stern, the series brings together emerging and established writers to read and take an onstage risk of the kind mentioned above, […]


Interviews |

Honest Travelers: An Interview with Marie Mutsuki Mockett

by Lee Thomas

As a young girl, Marie Mutsuki Mockett accompanied her father to antiques fairs and art galleries, observing lively debates over Japanese lacquer and porcelain. Her talent for zeroing in on the telling detail, as well as a connoisseur’s appreciation of the aesthetic tradition of Japan, both blossom in her debut novel Picking Bones From Ash. Lee Thomas sits down for a conversation with Mockett that spans child prodigies, the downside of unlimited freedom, the upside of nonprofit publishers, and the nature of travel.


Shop Talk |

Win a Copy of Short People, by Joshua Furst

by Lee Thomas

We all had one. It’s one of those universals of human experience, more constant than love or rage or betrayal or grace. I’m talking about a childhood. Still, it’s impressively difficult to capture on the page, pitch the right tone, allow the perfect amount of insight and innocence, or describe the overblown drama of what it feels like to be a kid. From the opening story of his collection, Short People, Joshua Furst nails it. That first story, “The Age of Exploration,” follows the ramblings of Jason and Billy, best friends, both age six. Most of us can remember things […]


Shop Talk |

Short Stories Out Loud

by Lee Thomas

I frequently happen upon Selected Shorts on NPR midway through a story and go through a predictable course of thinking: I’ve missed the first part of the story. I should just download the podcast and hear it from the top. Wow, that sentence was brilliant. What the heck is going on here? And then I end up listening to the conclusion of the story and enjoying it immensely. Now that I’m in New York, I hope to make it to one of the live stage performances of Selected Shorts. If you’re lucky enough to already have a ticket, on May […]


Reviews |

Sima's Undergarments for Women, by Ilana Stanger-Ross

by Lee Thomas

In her moving debut novel, Sima’s Undergarments for Women (Overlook, 2009), Ilana Stanger-Ross renders her title character so startlingly real, and with such empathy, that we cannot help but root for her. In the Jewish neighborhood of Boro Park, Brooklyn, Sima and her husband, Lev–both in shuffling middle age–have long accepted (but are forever marked by) the disappointment of not being able to have children. Sima has withdrawn into the world of her shop, away from the shroud of tragedy cast over her marriage. The story begins when a vivacious young Israeli woman, Timna, enters Sima’s shop and changes everything. The story begins when a vivacious young Israeli woman, Timna, enters Sima’s shop and changes everything.


Reviews |

We Are the Friction: Illustration vs. Short Fiction (edited by Sing Statistics)

by Lee Thomas

Even the idea itself is intriguing: pair twelve international illustrators and short fiction writers, press go, see what happens. The slim, wonderfully designed collection We Are the Friction sets the stage for unexpected relationships. Following their 2008 collaboration, I Am the Friction, the masterminds behind the concept are designer Jez Burrows and illustrator Lizzy Stewart, who together form Sing Statistics. Both Burrows and Stewart are based in Edinburgh, but the two-dozen writers and illustrators in this anthology reside across the globe – from Toronto to Kansas City to Barcelona. The cover promises a veritable garden of earthly delights: “5 Giant Animals, 63 Expletives, 6 Instances of the Ocean,” and “1 Sentient Muffin” among them. Let’s begin with that muffin.


Reviews |

Asta in the Wings, by Jan Elizabeth Watson

by Lee Thomas

In her debut novel, Asta in the Wings (Tin House, 2009), Jan Elizabeth Watson captures the peculiar insightfulness of childhood through her seven-year-old narrator, Asta. Forbidden – ever – to leave the house and left alone during the day, Asta and her brother, Orion, fear a plague that their troubled mother has convinced them lurks outside their locked door and tar-papered windows. As Orion recounts: “The plague started some years ago … in a faraway land … not long after our father died from walking straight into the ocean.” These dark allusions underpin the children’s day as it unfolds in whimsical games amid stark circumstance. Yet when the children are forced to enter the outside world, we become even more fearful for their safety.


Interviews |

Know Then Thyself: A Conversation with Jeffrey Rotter

by Lee Thomas

Lee Thomas talks to debut novelist Jeffrey Rotter about the social risks of homemade clothing, museums as metaphors, the parallels between As I Lay Dying and reality T.V., and the ways in which imagination can change the world – for good and evil. The title of Rotter’s novel, The Unknown Knowns, alludes to that Donald Rumsfeld speech of linguistic loop-de-loops that would have driven George Orwell crazy; the book, which looks askance at our modern take on “Us vs. Them,” tackles the ontological questions presented by our vague and shadowy paranoia, but ups the ante considerably beyond the present moment in history to the personal crises that drive all good stories.




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