Suspend Your Disbelief

Recent Posts

Shop Talk |

Further Thoughts on Translation

by Lee Thomas

Over at MelvilleHouse Publishing there’s an interesting blog post, In Support of Translation, along with responses, about the Best Translated Book Award being funded by Amazon. Editor Dennis Loy Johnson writes: As the winner of the most recent Best Translated Book (BTB) prize for fiction — for our book, The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail Hareven — we here at Melville House were particularly proud to win an award that had been voted upon by a judging panel made up of representatives from some of the country’s best independent booksellers, not to mention some great indie bloggers and critics. […]


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Reviews from the Younger Set

by Celeste Ng

Here at Fiction Writers Review, many of our contributors are emerging writers, so we love sites that encourage those early in their writing careers. Recently I heard of a few sites that encourage those really early in their writing careers: kids and young adults. On The Huffington Post, Monica Edinger, a teacher at New York’s prestigious Dalton School, writes about an afterschool book blogging club she and several other instructors founded: Every week these literary enthusiasts come to my room; sift through my books and advance reader copies; choose to read whatever catches their fancy; and, after reading them, write […]


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Celebrating 1,000 Fans on Facebook

by Michael Rudin

A little over a week ago, we announced that the Fiction Writers Review Facebook Page was closing in on the 1,000 Fan Milestone. First and foremost, we’d like to thank you for your support. The response to our weekly Book of the Week giveaway has been excellent. Not only are we thrilled to have the opportunity to publicize books we love, and to put them in the hands of our readers, but it’s also been great to have so many of you–writers, editors, publishers, booksellers, agents, and fellow readers–come together to help us spread the word. After all, the more […]


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week Giveaway: Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, by Ethan Gilsdorf

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

At the end of August, Fiction Writers Review launched a Fan Page on Facebook. The goal is threefold: to introduce new readers to FWR, to create an informal place for conversations about writing, and to give away lots of free books. Each week we’ll give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. All you have to do to be eligible for our weekly drawing is to be a fan of our Facebook page. No catch, no gimmicks. And once you’re a fan, you’ll be automatically entered in each subsequent drawing. […]


Shop Talk |

Old Friends

by Lee Thomas

Over on the Huffington Post, Cynthia Ellis has a lovely homage to The Woman in White, the 1859 classic of madness, mystery, romance and juicy hints at the supernatural by Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White was first published in serial form, and the reader feels it. The 600+ pages race by with a kind of terminal velocity from the first haunting scene. Ellis brought the book on her Hawaiian vacation, an experience she describes thus: If you are in Kauai, trapped underwater in a small metal cage being dangled in front of sharks, trying not to stick out your […]


Reviews |

Call It What You Want, by Keith Lee Morris

by J.T. Bushnell

In these thirteen stories, which move from gritty realism in the first half to magical realism in the second, characters are constantly engaged in the act of narrative construction. Again and again Morris structures his stories to obscure actual events, thereby forcing the characters to remember, speculate, or fantasize them into being, much like writers do. Only these characters are not writers—they are a meth addict, a car salesman, a bartender stranded on a desert island.


Shop Talk |

Famous People: Can They Write?

by Celeste Ng

For some reason, I don’t think of celebrity authors as emerging writers. After all, they’ve got well-established careers of their own acting, directing, or being beautiful/audacious/infamous. It’s hard to think of someone like James Franco—who seems to be everywhere this year—as an “emerging” anything. But Franco recently published his first collection of short stories, Palo Alto, which officially makes him an emerging writer. He seems to be taking it seriously: according to Wikipedia, Franco “simultaneously attend[ed] graduate school at Columbia University’s MFA writing program, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking, and Brooklyn College for fiction writing, […]


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…and when reality becomes fiction

by Celeste Ng

On the flip side of our earlier post on fiction becoming reality, reality is apparently becoming fiction just as fast. Classic pregnancy handbook What to Expect When You’re Expecting will soon be adapted into—yup, you guessed it—a romantic comedy. Entertainment Weekly reports: Jon-HammLionsgate has confirmed that they will adapt the bestselling pregnancy bible What To Expect When You’re Expecting and intend to give it the Love Actually and Valentine’s Day treatment. In other words, we’ll see a series of intertwining vingnettes with enough star wattage to blind most any moviegoer. For those of you looking to spin the straw of […]


Shop Talk |

When Fiction Becomes Reality

by Celeste Ng

Is it just me, or have the lines between the real world and fiction been even more blurred lately? According to the New York Times‘s ArtsBeat, Grove/Atlantic will publish Sterling’s Gold: The Wit & Wisdom of an Ad Man—a fictional memoir written by the fictional Roger Sterling of AMC’s Mad Men: In a deeply facetious news release Grove Press said a box containing the book “has been found in the basement of the home he once shared with his wife, Jane.” The release continues, “Though it has been out of print for many years, Sterling’s groundbreaking book gave readers a […]


Interviews |

Among Strangers: An Interview with Ruiyan Xu

by Brian Selfon

“Writers can almost be defined as professional outsiders. It’s part of the job. You often have to step outside of a situation to observe it—to choose the right details—to reshape a mess of events into a narrative.”




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