Suspend Your Disbelief

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Shop Talk |

Give a kid your favorite book

by Lee Thomas

First, thanks to Jeffrey Rotter for bringing this to FWR’s attention. This Saturday, ReadThis hosts Book Drives for NYC Kids and Teens in three locations around New York. Have a book that changed your life when you were 8? I always think of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful flights of imagination, A Wrinkle In Time gave me the craziest dreams as a kid, and made the woods seem full of mystery and magic. Give that experience to a kid in our community: What: Book Drives to collect gently used (or new) books for NYC kids in need When: Saturday, December 4, 2010 […]


Shop Talk |

Dzanc eBook Club

by Lee Thomas

Addicted to browsing the shelves of used bookstores for that $3 copy of Chekhov’s stories? Sad you can’t do the same with your e-reader? Well, Dzanc’s eBook Club comes close, letting you gather an armful of fiction at a fraction of the retail price. Here’s how it works: Dzanc Books is excited to announce the launching of the Dzanc Books eBook Club. Sign up now and get eleven books for $50! With the proliferation of eReading devices and increased interest in reading books on kindle, Sony e-Reader, Nook, etc., Dzanc Books is making it both easier, and less expensive for […]


Shop Talk |

Leftovers

by Lee Thomas

So, every once in a while a friend will toss out a great anecdote, or character, or fully formed story, with the caveat, “Go ahead and use this, because for X reason, I never will.” That’s one kind of leftover I really love, the wisp of an idea with which you can play around, experiment, test out your own bits and pieces and see if they play nice. One big type of literary leftover are posthumously published works by departed writers. The manuscript in the drawer, partially finished, with enough flesh on the bones to be provocative, evocative, worth reading. […]


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Thankful for NaNoWriMo, and you

by Lee Thomas

Fiction Writers Review would not be here without you, our readers. We’re thankful for your insightful comments, engagement with the site and participation with this great community of writers and readers. As we sit down to hearty meals today, or maybe just another Thursday dinner if you’re in India or England, I’ve also got the NaNoWriMo champs on my mind. One week to go! Think of all the ground you’ve covered in the past 25 days, the dedication and discipline that’s been required, the problems you’ve worked out on the fly. Last week, Michael turned me on to GalleyCat’s inspired […]


Interviews |

Interesting Characters: An Interview with Brad Watson

by Lydia Fitzpatrick

Watson was born and raised in Meridian, Mississippi. And the Mississippi of today, and of the not-too-distant past, is the setting of much of his fiction. In Airships, Barry Hannah wrote that “In Mississippi, it’s hard to achieve a vista,” but Brad Watson does just that in this new collection. Not only is there a breathtaking sense of the Gulf Coast and the Delta in his writing, that geography is given depth—a hardscrabble social landscape inseparable from the place itself.


Shop Talk |

Dear Franny,

by Lee Thomas

I know, sweetheart. I know how you feel. I left school because I was surrounded by people who failed to recognize their potential as human beings. They nattered on and on about the most insubstantial things, and they could not see past the end of their egotistical noses, and more than once I felt queasy when I stared down at a chicken sandwich, inane prattle ringing in my ears. But I promise you that there are still people who are bright and good and kind. The above is an excerpt from a letter to Franny, you know the one, of […]


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week Giveaway: Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, by Brad Watson

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 Picking Bones From Ash, by Marie Mutsuki Mockett, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Lucy Biederman, Thea Burgess, and Brian Boyle. Congratulations! Each will receive a copy of the book, signed by the author. This week we’re featuring Brad Watson’s Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. Stories in this collection have appeared in such places as The New Yorker, Granta, The Idaho Review, The Greensboro Review, Ecotone, and The Oxford American. In the […]


Shop Talk |

Defending the un-Status quo

by Lee Thomas

In The Faster Times, Chloé Cooper Jones holds a discussion with her former fiction professor, Deb Olin Unferth, and Unferth’s former professor, George Saunders. The results: a rational, practical and, in the end, laudatory discussion of MFA programs – a counterpoint to the voices raised against the model. The piece, You Are Not the Only One Writing About Moldavian Zookeepers: George Saunders and Deb Olin Unferth Discuss the State of the Creative Writing Degree, left me feeling hopeful and refreshed – mostly because, as good writers can, Saunders and Unferth reminded me that the world is not made up of […]


Reviews |

Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, by Brad Watson

by Tom Bennitt

There are no zombies or vampires in Brad Watson’s new collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (W.W. Norton, 2010), but there are plenty of folks who act like they’re either dead or from another planet. And, yes, many of Watson’s characters are “aliens”—not green creatures with large heads, but alienated, isolated. They are people who wander through life without an anchor, who don’t feel the pull of gravity.


Shop Talk |

Fiction on the big screen

by Lee Thomas

The announcement that Carey Mulligan has been cast as Daisy Buchanan, Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, and Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway in Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of The Great Gastby has gotten me thinking about film adaptations in general. I’m of two minds. Sometimes the director or actors chosen are enough to entice me. When Joel and Ethan Coen signed up to make No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy’s searing Western/manhunt, I knew I would see it. They did not disappoint. But by the same token, I have resisted seeing another McCarthy novel, The Road, because I didn’t […]




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