Suspend Your Disbelief

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What this book needs is more whiskey.

by Celeste Ng

Are you looking for more ways to combine drinking with your reading life? (Hey—it’s summer.) This past week, the internet has overflowed with suggestions: First, from Jezebel, there’s “Drink ‘Til He’s Witty: The Reader’s Drinking Game.” Some suggested rules, depending on which author you’re reading: David Foster Wallace: Drink every time a sentence has three or more conjunctions. Jane Austen: Drink every time someone plays whist, goes riding, or gets married. Gabriel García Márquez: Drink every time someone’s name is “Aureliano.” (Note: this only works for A Hundred Years of Solitude) Or, if you prefer to drink while mourning the […]


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FWR on "Living Writers": The Podcast

by Anne Stameshkin

Did you miss FWR Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin on the “Living Writers” show on Wednesday? No worries. You can now stream the podcast on iTunes preview—mouse over the August 11th episode and click play, or click “View in iTunes” to download. The interview starts at about 15:30. “Living Writers” airs every Wednesday at 4:30pm on WCBN-FM Ann Arbor. Each week, host T Hetzel talks with writers who read from their work and talk about their passions and preoccupations. Recent guests include poet Dean Young, author and comedian John Hodgman, fiction writer Yiyun Li, and Granta Editor John Freeman. You can listen […]


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Help during "The Long Haul"

by Celeste Ng

So maybe Tuesday’s post on the 10-year novel got you down. Here’s some encouragement: lit site The Rumpus is introducing a new occasional column, “The Long Haul,” featuring writers reflecting on the (long-term) writing life. Or, as the editors put it: Whether you’re a literary wunderkind whose first book was a bestseller, or one of the thousands of writers who have to claw their way to a sustainable career, the writing life requires patience and resilience, a commitment to faithfully staying the course though the course sometimes offers little encouragement or reward. And yet we do it; we pass up […]


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FWR on WCBN-FM Wednesday at 4:30pm

by Anne Stameshkin

We’re excited to announce that FWR Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin will be this week’s guest on “Living Writers”, hosted by T. Hetzel. “Living Writers” airs every Wednesday at 4:30pm on WCBN-FM Ann Arbor. Tune in to hear him discuss Fiction Writers Review, his own writing, the Inside Indie Bookstore series he publishes in Poets & Writers magazine, and other topics on writing. You can listen to the show at 88.3FM in Ann Arbor, or hear it streamed live at wcbn.org. Recent guests include poet Dean Young, author and comedian John Hodgman, fiction writer Yiyun Li, and Granta Editor John Freeman. Archives […]


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A decade in the making…

by Celeste Ng

On Slate.com, Susanna Daniels reflects on the process of writing her first novel—which she describes as “the quiet hell of 10 years of novel writing”: During my should-be-writing years, I thought about my novel all the time. Increasingly, these were not happy or satisfying thoughts. My “novel” (which had started to wear its own air quotes in my head) became something closer to enemy than lover. A person and his creative work exist in a relationship very much like a marriage: When it’s good, it’s very good, and when it’s bad, it’s ugly. And when it’s been bad for a […]


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Map Your Reading

by Celeste Ng

Google Lit Trips uses Google Earth to show readers important locations in works of literature. For example, if you’re reading The Grapes of Wrath, you can follow the Joads’ travel along Route 66, or while reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, you can track the kid from Texas to Mexico and beyond. The site’s main focus is on children’s and YA lit, with maps for classics such as Make Way for Ducklings, The Slave Dancer, and Paddle-to-the-Sea. But there are a growing number of “trips” for adult literary fiction as well, including The Road by Cormac McCarthy, A Portrait of […]


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Sweet and sociable lit mag, 5 years old, seeks loving home.

by Celeste Ng

Literary magazines: is there a source of greater guilt for writers? We submit to them. We cross our fingers, make a small-animal sacrifice, and hope they’ll publish our work. But do we really read them? The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) has launched a new program to encourage creative writing students to read literary magazines. From the program announcement: The Lit Mag Adoption Program for Creative Writing Students allows undergraduate and graduate creative writing professors to include literary magazines in their courses. Students receive discounted, 1-year subscriptions for selected literary magazines (professors receive a free “desk-copy” subscription). Each […]


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The World's First (Really) Commercial Novel

by Celeste Ng

Ever wonder what would happen if the plotline of a novel were up for sale? Commercial Novel aims to find out. By commenting on the site—and making a donation to the site via PayPal—you can influence what happens in the next chapter of the novel. The comment with the highest donation shapes the next segment of the book. It’s sort of a three-way cross between an improv show, an exquisite corpse, and a charity auction. The site’s authors explain the motivation behind the project: We are fictional writers who lost our fictional middle-class lifestyle with the onset of the recession.* […]


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Janet Fitch's Rules for Writers

by Celeste Ng

We’re writers! We’re creative souls! We love original thought! But for some reason, we also love lists of rules—especially rules that tell us how to write (and how not to write). Call it one of life’s great paradoxes. The most widely disseminated list is probably Elmore Leonard’s rather prescriptive catalogue of things to avoid (“Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue”). Many authors, before and since Leonard, have tried to boil their advice down into neat bullet points, with varying success. But Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander, has posted her own “10 Rules for Writers,” and […]




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