Suspend Your Disbelief

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Best. Literary Cameos. Ever.

by Celeste Ng

GalleyCat reports the mashup of two of my favorite things: literature and The Simpsons. Sometime in the upcoming season, novelist Neil Gaiman will be an animated guest star on the long-running TV show. In a blog post, Gaiman notes: I play myself. I play a very different version of myself to the me I played in Arthur, though. For a start, I do not appear in anyone’s falafel. Also, I expect I will be yellow. The Simpsons has a long history of literary references, from a rendition of Poe’s “The Raven” to a spoof of Lord of the Flies in […]


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Book of The Week: Quiet Americans, by Erika Dreifus

by Lee Thomas

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 Jacob Paul’s Sarah/Sara, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Eileen Pollack, Emma Kate Tsai, and Ana Maria Velasco. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed copy of this new novel. This week we’re featuring Erika Dreifus’s story collection Quiet Americans. Erika, a Contributing Editor at Fiction Writers Review, wrote a lovely review of last week’s Book of The Week, Sarah/Sara for the site last year, which you can find here. Her other reviews for FWR […]


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Bookworm Dating Hits the New York Times

by Celeste Ng

Last summer, FWR reported on Alikewise, a free dating site based on your taste in books. Only five months later, the New York Times has picked up the story, including Alikewise in a roundup of “niche dating sites.” Compared to some of the other sites, in the list—matchmaking sites for senior citizens, Apple lovers, virgins seeking other virgins, and mustache fetishists—finding a date based on shared literary tastes is hardly weird. Is this a sign, maybe, that literary dating is ready for the mainstream?


Reviews |

The Bigness of the World, by Lori Ostlund

by J.T. Bushnell

J.T. Bushnell considers how Lori Ostlund’s debut story collection, The Bigness of the World, filled as it is with “godless homosexuals scattered across the globe” would have likely pleased Flannery O’Connor, whose own work is “unapologetically regional and almost dogmatically Catholic.” Ostlund, who won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction last year, writes of the mystery beneath our outer trappings, an underlying truth that binds the two writers in common cause.


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Flipbook: "Research"

by Lee Thomas

Two weeks ago we launched a new feature, the 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. Our second Flipbook is now up on the FWR Facebook page, with an exclusive slide right here on the blog. Every few weeks we’ll post a Flipbook that highlights some of […]


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A Barbaric yAWP

by Lee Thomas

While nearly every writer knows the uplift that community interaction provides – not only to the words on the page, but to a career, to a new collaboration, to every aspect of the literary life – not everyone has the ability or means to travel to the AWP Conference. So what’s a community-craving writer to do? Enter Meg’s Barbaric yAWP. Founder Meg Pokrass, writer – newly minted author! – and member of the FWR community – began “A Barbaric yAWP” as an alternative, virtual way for writers and people in the biz to connect during the 3-day period of AWP. […]


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Save Harper's Magazine

by Natalie Bakopoulos

For the last several months, Harper’s staff, recently unionized, has been in conflict with the magazine’s publisher, John R. “Rick” MacArthur. The disagreements stem from various sources, which have been outlined in two recent articles in New York Magazine, here and here. In short: MacArthur is resistant to other avenues of revenue, including fund raising. Instead, having already cut the size and payroll of the editorial staff, which lost four senior editors and its web editor in 2010, MacArthur is now insisting that it’s necessary to lay off, immediately, two of the magazine’s most experienced editors, one of whom is […]


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Evolution or Devolution: Where is literature taking us?

The following guest post is by Josie Keenan, an FWR intern and second-year student at the University of Michigan. More and more these days, I find myself bemoaning the fate of books. As Lee discussed in her recent blog “Let’s get digital”, downloadable books have been available for some time now. Digitization is one aspect of the way literature is changing, but what we are reading is also changing. Where novels were once belabored, deeply considered works in which every word of every sentence was deliberately placed, today it seems a more manufacturable task. One can write a novel just […]


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Thursday morning candy: Tin House

by Lee Thomas

The founders of Tin House – magazine, book publisher, workshop destination – put their mission best, so I won’t try to improve upon it: The first issue of Tin House magazine arrived in the spring of 1999, the singular lovechild of an eclectic literary journal and a beautiful glossy magazine. Publisher Win McCormack said of the effort, “I wanted to create a literary magazine for the many passionate readers who are not necessarily literary academics or publishing professionals.” From their latest issue (pictured above), which fills me with a tinge of nostalgia (did anyone else think of Jan Brett’s wonderfully […]




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