Suspend Your Disbelief

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Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: The Terror of Living, by Urban Waite

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each week we give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Erika Dreifus’s story collection Quiet Americans, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Steve Woodward, Marianna Taylor, and NancyKay Shapiro. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed copy of this new collection. This week we’re featuring Urban Waite’s The Terror of Living. Waite grew up in Seattle and studied writing at Western Washington University and Emerson College. His short fiction has appeared in such places as The Best of the West Anthology, The Southern Review, Gulf […]


Shop Talk |

Better Book Titles

by Celeste Ng

Titles are many a writer’s Achilles heel. Even the greats had trouble—F. Scott Fitzgerald, for one, originally considered several alternative titles for The Great Gatsby, including Trimalchio in West Egg and The High-Bouncing Lover. (Yikes.) Each weekday, Dan Wilbur’s blog Better Book Titles features one book, retitled more honestly—and hilariously. Some of my favorites: Cynical? A little, but many of the Better Book Titles strike right to the heart of a book’s theme. Like this one: Visit the blog here, and don’t miss the archive.


Interviews |

The Art of the Chase: An Interview with Urban Waite

by Cam Terwilliger

Debut novelist Urban Waite enjoys a character-driven thriller, which is exactly what he delivers with The Terror of Living. In conversation with Cam Terwilliger, Waite reveals how the selfish characters of Graham Greene shaped his idea of the perfect book, how an editor who understands the writer’s vision can only help a book, and how flexibility can be the novelist’s best friend.


Shop Talk |

Don't just Bitch, join the conversation

by Charlotte Boulay

Recently Bitch Magazine published a list, “100 Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader,” and it includes a lot of great titles I was happy to be reminded of, including classics like A Wrinkle in Time, Harriet the Spy, and The Golden Compass, as well as novels by Ursula LeGuin, Judy Blume, Cynthia Voigt, and other very contemporary selections like The Hunger Games and Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies. I was surprised by the number of books on the list I hadn’t read, including three titles (Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce, Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan, and Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth […]


Shop Talk |

Dispatch from AWP 2011: An Intern-Eye View, Part II

The following post was written by Josie Keenan, Emily VanDusen, and Drake Misek, all interns at Fiction Writers Review through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) at the University of Michigan. Emily, on the pros and cons of the transmedia: To start off our second, and regrettably final, day of the conference, the three of us attended the panel discussion “From the Page to the Small Screen: What the Information Age Means for Us.” Although the panelists were all involved with poetry, the main goal of the discussion was to make sense of the transition from printed literary journals and […]


Shop Talk |

Dispatch from AWP 2011: An Intern-Eye View

The following post was written by Josie Keenan, Emily VanDusen, and Drake Misek, all interns at Fiction Writers Review through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) at the University of Michigan. Josie, on the keynote speech: After arriving in DC Thursday evening for the 2011 AWP Conference and adjusting to the big-city lights, we three interns trekked over to attend the conference’s keynote address by Pulitzer prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri delivered her first-ever keynote with all the quiet confidence and deep thoughtfulness that emanates from her stories. In it, she explored the question: Did she always want to be […]


Shop Talk |

So you're NOT in DC right now…

by Celeste Ng

Maybe the holidays left you broke. Maybe you couldn’t take vacation days off work. Or maybe you got stranded by the SnOMG! XVIII that snarled flights from the Midwest to the east coast. Whatever the reason, you’re not at AWP this weekend. What to do instead? Well, if you’re in Brooklyn, there’s always the first annual Fake AWP. Slice Magazine has the scoop: To provide a haven for those either too broke, too busy, or too disillusioned (with the fact that really it ought to be AWWP, jeez) to attend the massive four-day conference in Washington, D.C., an assortment of […]


Reviews |

How to Hold a Woman, by Billy Lombardo

by Alison Espach

When The Unthinkable happens, how does a person – let alone a writer – deal with it? Billy Lombardo answers that sticky question with How to Hold a Woman, a novel-in-stories about a family dealing with the loss of their eldest child, Isabel. In this review, Alison Espach explores how “the stories become not solely about the pain the family experiences, but more about when and how they feel happiness in light of the tragedy.”


Shop Talk |

Thursday morning candy: The Drum

by Celeste Ng

Those who take public transportation get to read during their commutes every day. But what about those who have to drive? Here’s one solution: The Drum, an online audio literary magazine, which bills itself as “a literary magazine for your ears.” Issues feature short stories, essays, and novel excerpts, all available to stream or to download to the device of your choice. Most content is free access; individual pieces are available for purchase after they’ve been on the site for three months. Recently, The Drum also formed a partnership with audio publisher Iambik: Being in the business of audio literature, […]


Shop Talk |

FWR at AWP

by Lee Thomas

It’s here – AWP 2011! If you’ll be in D.C. for the conference, please come see Fiction Writers Review at Table B-18 in the bookfair. Quick reminder: our Editor, Jeremiah Chamberlin will be moderating a panel on criticism, we’ll have two book signings at our table, and a number of our contributors are featured speakers this year. Here again, are some highlights: Friday, February 4 9 am:“The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com” Panelists: Jeremiah Chamberlin, moderator; Charles Baxter; Stacey D’Erasmo; Gemma Sieff; Keith Taylor. This panel examines how criticism is changing in a literary […]




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