Liner Notes: An Interview with Marie-Helene Bertino
by Jesse Hassenger
Bertino talks about the stories (and drafts) behind her Iowa Award-winning debut collection, Safe As Houses, mix-tape style. Also Bob Dylan.
Bertino talks about the stories (and drafts) behind her Iowa Award-winning debut collection, Safe As Houses, mix-tape style. Also Bob Dylan.
Peter Stamm’s collected stories in translation contain brutal—and beautiful—truths.
Fritz Swanson has graciously donated time, talent and materials to create a gorgeous, one-of-a-kind edition of Charles Baxter’s poem “Please Marry Me” for The Great Write Off and The State of the Book. The top five FWR fundraisers for The Great Write Off will get one of only 100 copies of the poem handmade with care by Fritz.
Here at Fiction Writers Review, we run this website as volunteers, in our spare time and out of our own pockets. We think we’ve got a great site with great content—and since you’re here, reading this blog, we hope you agree! This fall, we’re running our first-ever fundraiser, and it’s your chance to help FWR just by doing what you do normally: writing. On October 3-5, Fiction Writers Review will compete in The Great Write Off, a three-day write-a-thon. (Think walk-a-thon, but with writing.) It’s a friendly fundraising competition involving six Michigan lit organizations—each fielding its own team of writers. […]
Author and teacher Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich says YES—and in fact, she hopes more people will say it. Writes Marzano-Lesnevich: [W]orkshop students tend to forget that they’re required to be there. I don’t mean in attendance, sitting around a large table, but rather in the page—in the world of the story. They’re required to read. They’re even required to finish the piece. This simple requirement changes everything about their relationship to what’s on the page. I’ve come to think that this gap is at least partially responsible for stories that do well in workshop sometimes floundering out there in the real world. […]
The author of the 2011 collection, God Bless America, Almond discusses the author-editor relationship, the death of the American Dream, and Jane Austen. And that’s just for starters.
As we’ve seen of late, sometimes professional book reviewers (or, rather, less-than-professional ones) forget that Authors Are People, Too. Well, so do book-reviewing students. Behold this exchange, in which a student turned to Yahoo! Answers to help write his book report on DC Pierson‘s The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To… and the author responded. Pierson posted the kid’s question and his response on his Tumblr feed, giving the kid some reasons he might actually want to read the book and suggesting strategies for doing it. Here’s an excerpt: I’m not going to sit here and act like […]
Brown’s sophomore collection reveals trespasses big and bold in an upscale Connecticut town.
