Suspend Your Disbelief

Recent Posts

Shop Talk |

Stories We Love: "Incarnations of Burned Children"

by Lee Thomas

When I first read William Faulkner, in high school, it felt less like reading a book and more like an archeological find—unearthing something long dormant that I’d always known. His cadence, and that humid, repetitious, biblical world of the South, tapped into something in my bones. The first time I read David Foster Wallace’s “Incarnations of Burned Children,” at my brother’s strenuous recommendation, it struck me the same way—whole cloth, True in the capital-letter sense of the word, so perfect I didn’t want to deconstruct it as a writer, lest I drain a bit of its magic. A writing teacher […]


Shop Talk |

This Week in Shorts

by Celeste Ng

For the last weekend of Fiction Writers Review’s Short Story Month celebration, here’s one more helping of short-story-related news (and some gratuitous shorts-related photos&#151you know you enjoy them): READ: Ninth Letter shares a story by Rachel Cantor, “Zanzibar, Bereft,” to read online. At The Millions, Paul Vidich reflects on the livelihood of the short story: “Is today’s short fiction not as good? Hardly. Why aren’t readers holding up their part of the bargain? The answer, let me suggest, is related to how readers are given the opportunity to read – distribution, in commercial terms.” Still not enough short stories for […]


Interviews |

Never the Cool Kid: An Interview with Jeff Kass

Pioneer High School students Carlina Duan and Allison Kennedy sit down with famed Ann Arbor writing teacher and teen center director Jeff Kass to discuss his recent story collection, Knuckleheads. Kass discusses knuckleheadedness as a state of being, why being an outsider is important, the influence of Springsteen on his fiction, and the reason he wrote this book—in part—for his students. Bonus Track: an original off-the-top-of-the-dome list poem by Kass on “happiness.”


Shop Talk |

Stories We Love to Teach: "Tiny, Smiling Daddy"

by Christina McCarroll

I use “Tiny, Smiling Daddy,” from Mary Gaitskill’s collection Because They Wanted To, to help fiction students understand the value of stories that lack epiphanies, or any clear transformation in their characters. In Gaitskill’s story, a father who has long struggled with his only child’s sexuality finds that his daughter has published an essay about their difficult relationship, one in which she articulates the limitations of her father’s love. The father, aptly named Stew, is insulted, embarrassed, and rocketed back to moments in the past, gaps in understanding that have left him feeling assaulted and alone. In large part, his […]


Shop Talk |

Knockout Punches: a guest post by Stacie M. Williams

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our ongoing Short Story Month Celebration, we are delighted to present the following guest post by Stacie M. Williams of Boswell Book Company. A fellow bookseller, when inclined to discuss my fiction reading habits, described my taste simply and accurately as “dark and twisty.” This, fortunately or unfortunately, is all too true, and when you are a reader of things that are dark in nature, violent in content, lustfully raw, and stormy in mood, it’s sometimes best to take it in small, brief doses. This post honors that taste, with a nod to new favorite […]


Interviews |

Fundamentalism and Compassion: An Interview with Jess Row

by Charlotte Boulay

Jess Row’s second collection of stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, is an examination of some of our most intense impulses, and the debates, quandaries, and mysteries in these seven stories will stay with you. Charlotte Boulay talks to Jess Row about the intersection between compassion and extremism.


Shop Talk |

Stories We Love: Self-Help

by Casey Dembowski

It may have been written before I was born, but Lorrie Moore’s debut collection Self-Help holds a special place on my bookshelf. Maybe it’s because it was Moore’s MFA thesis from Cornell, or maybe it’s her complete disregard for standard writing rules, but the collection brought me into a world I didn’t want to leave. Her jab at the lucrative but clichéd self-help genre offer often jaded advice on how to be. As a near-graduate of an MFA program, the idea of my thesis becoming a published work is an intriguing yet frightening idea. Living a life of letters and […]


Shop Talk |

Stories We Love: The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story

by Shawn Andrew Mitchell

In her pithy introduction to the recent Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, Anne Enright waltzes around the question that all anthology editors seem obligated to address: what makes a short story a short story? And, in the case of this anthology, what makes the Irish short story exceptional? Enright considers, rejects, and modifies many possibilities. She draws on that old master of the form, Frank O’Connor: the story is dictated by its needs alone; the story is always about human loneliness; the story thrives among “submerged population groups.” She quotes Sean Ó Faoláin’s demand that a story be […]


Shop Talk |

Journal of the Week: American Short Fiction

by Michael Rudin

In the end, I don’t have many literary magazines because I give most away. Leaving them at coffee shops and airports, with friends and family, I pay my journals forward, margin notes and all. But I kept American Short Fiction Volume 13, Issue 47. My experience with #47 began with its second-to-last-story—a sin the editors must forgive me, for I had not yet learned of the careful strategy with which they assemble every issue’s order. I started there because the story, “Walker, Wallace, Warren” had been written by Matt Bell, and his was the first name I recognized in the […]


Shop Talk |

Flipbook: "Short Stories"

by Celeste Ng

Every few weeks, we launch a new Fiction Writers Review “Flipbook.” During the past two and a half years, we’ve featured more than 50 interviews with authors established and emerging. They’ve had such valuable insights into the writing life—from thoughts on process and craft to ideas about community and influence—that we wanted to find a way to further these conversations within our community. Each Flipbook highlights some of the very best of the conversations on our site, centered around a particular topic. Our latest Flipbook is now up on the FWR Facebook page, with an exclusive slide right here on […]




Literary Partners