Suspend Your Disbelief

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How Many Indie Bookstores Is Too Many?

by Celeste Ng

Here at FWR, we’re all for indie bookstores. We love their support of authors and readings, their knowledge of the books they sell, and their ties to the community. But is there such a thing as too many indie bookstores? In Westhampton Beach, NY, the answer might be yes. Newcomer indie bookstore Books & Books, which opened in July, is giving established indie bookstore The Open Book some competition, and not everyone is happy. The New York Times reports: Terry Lucas, a librarian and the owner of the Open Book, which she founded in 1999, said Books & Books is […]


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Dzanc Books Write-a-Thon

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

How is it September already? Summer seems to have suddenly vanished–school is starting, college football is underway, and it was fifty degrees here in Ann Arbor yesterday. Fall is on the horizon. Likewise, the 3rd annual Dzanc Books Write-a-Thon is nearly complete. But you still have until the end of today to join in! Just send an email to info@dzancbooks.org saying that you’d like to be included in this year’s event. However, even if you’re not participating you can still help support the cause by donating on behalf of one of the writers involved. No amount is too small–$5, $10, […]


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Recently on FWR…

by Anne Stameshkin

Here’s a recap of the features that rounded out August on Fiction Writers Review: Tyler McMahon interviews Tatjana Soli, author of The Lotus Eaters. Says Soli: I traveled in Asia briefly with my husband years before I thought of writing the book. Once I was deep into the research, I planned a trip to Vietnam that had to be cancelled due to a family emergency. But then a strange thing happened once I had the first draft down—I had this particular place so strong in my head, it was literally feeding the story. I was afraid that if I went […]


Shop Talk |

The 3-Day Novel

by Celeste Ng

Last week we told you about Dzanc’s Write-a-Thon, which runs September 2-5 and helps raise money for Dzanc’s Writer-in-Residence Program and the Dzanc Prize. If that got your creative juices flowing, here’s another write-a-thon-type opportunity: the International 3-Day Novel Contest. Yes, you read that right: the goal of the contest is to write a novel in just 3 days. (Nanowrimo ? Ha! We laugh at your extra 27 days!) At The Millions, Sean Di Lizio explains: The 3-Day Novel Contest is held annually in early September on the Canadian Labor Day long weekend. In 1977, a writer’s group in Vancouver […]


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Our Job

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Since the death of The Virginia Quarterly Review’s Managing Editor, Kevin Morrissey, at the end of July, there has been much discussion in the literary, academic, and publishing communities about what led up to this tragedy. Some of the reporting has been sensational, some praised as investigative journalism. Frequently, both have been said of the same article. Needless to say, the dialogue at times has been vitriolic. Particularly in the sprawling comment threads that have followed so many of the essays published online in such places as The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Hook. Eventually the story grew so […]


Reviews |

Nothing Happened and Then It Did, by Jake Silverstein

by Jonathan Liebson

In what he dubs a “Chronicle in Fact and Fiction,” Silverstein’s book takes aim at the figurative and often porous boundary between memoir and the novel. The author’s real life misadventures inspire their fictional counterpart, and the fiction in turn dovetails with the next stage of his itinerary. As he hops from Texas to Louisiana to Mexico, Silverstein is like a recurring protagonist in a collection of linked stories.


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Free Books for A Small Price: The Future of E-Reading?

by Michael Rudin

While Apple and Amazon wage price wars over hardware and e-books, the new Spanish-based firm 24Symbols aims to use their gadgets’ own Wi-Fi connections against them. Using the Kindle and iPad’s internet browsers, 24Symbols promises totally free e-books. Readers will be served advertisements in return for free access to a wide-ranging catalogue, from comic books to novels. Springwise.com recently highlighted the new firm by linking it to popular free ad-based serving platforms in the music world: Just as ad-supported sites like Pandora and Spotify let music lovers listen to and share their favourite music for free, so Spanish 24symbols is […]


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Reality and imagination: two sides of the same coin?

by Celeste Ng

In an essay for the New York Times, professor of logic Timothy Williamson examines the connections between imagination and reality—and comes to some counterintuitive conclusions: On further reflection, imagining turns out to be much more reality-directed than the stereotype implies. If a child imagines the life of a slave in ancient Rome as mainly spent watching sports on TV, with occasional household chores, they are imagining it wrong. That is not what it was like to be a slave. The imagination is not just a random idea generator. The test is how close you can come to imagining the life […]


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Choose Your Own E-venture

by Celeste Ng

If you decide to follow the tunnel, turn to page 151. If you decide to cross the bridge, turn to page 12. Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books? Now you can enjoy the series in ebook format with the new iPhone app U-Ventures. The app was created by Edward Packard, one of the authors of the original Choose Your Own Adventure series and creator of U-Ventures. In an interview with NPR host Neal Conan, Packard comments on some of the narrative changes made possible by the new digital format. First there are the obvious bells and whistles that ebooks […]


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Sharpie's new liquid pencil

by Celeste Ng

So say you’ve decided to unplug for a while. That doesn’t mean you have to go completely low-tech. The new liquid pencil from Sharpie, for example, seems like an ingenious new invention. Wait, you may be saying. A pencil from Sharpie? Aren’t those polar opposites? As it turns out, no. The pencil’s “ink,” made from liquid graphite, can be erased like an ordinary pencil—for three days. After that, the ink becomes permanent. I’ve always liked writing in pencil, and to me, this sounds like it might offer all the benefits (erasability, flexibility of expression) without the downsides (smudging and ineveitable […]




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