Suspend Your Disbelief

Recent Posts

Shop Talk |

Payment vs. Good Karma

by Celeste Ng

At the Coachella Review, Steve Almond makes a case—through his email exchange with an agent—against contributing to an anthology for free: Mark – I may be willing to do this, but I’d really like to know: who IS getting paid, if not the contributors? I contribute to a lot of anthologies, and almost without exception, they offer to pay contributors based on the advance, or a small percentage of the royalties. The idea is a great one, and the contributors are top-notch, so this book could make real money. Why wouldn’t the people who provided the material for the book […]


Interviews |

Literary Mentors & Friends: An Interview with Charles Johnson

by Zachary Watterson

Charles Johnson taught creative writing at the University of Washington from 1976 to 2009. He is the author of numerous books, including the National Book Award-winning Middle Passage. Zachary Watterson, one of Johnson’s former students, talks with his mentor about the literary friendships that have influenced the author’s more than forty-year writing career.


Shop Talk |

The Hypothetical Library

by Celeste Ng

The subtitle of the blog The Hypothetical Library is “Imaginary Book Covers. Designed for Real Authors.” And that sums up this interesting little project nicely. Book designer Charlie Orr collaborates with real authors like Colum McCann, David Lehman, and Thomas Kelly to design covers for books that the authors have not written—and never will write. I ask each writer to provide flap copy for a book that they haven’t, won’t, but in theory could, write, and then I design a cover for it. I am not a writer. I have tried over the years, but it is simply something I […]


Shop Talk |

FWR @ AWP: Panels, Panels, Panels!

by Anne Stameshkin

Several of our fabulous contributors are participating in panels and readings at AWP. In addition to our panel on online journals and lit sites in 2010 (Saturday from noon to 1:15, featuring Jeremiah Chamberlin), don’t miss the following sessions: Thursday, April 8 10:30 – 11:45 a.m. Rooms 102, 104 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level R124. Bollywood, Bullets, and Beyond: The Poetry of South Asian America. (Featuring: Summi Kaipa, Pireeni Sundaralingam, Ravi Shankar, Bhanu Kapil, Subhashini Kaligotla and Monica Ferrell) What do a sestina, 9/11, and Amitabh Bachchan have in common? Popular, political, and poetic themes all appear in Indivisible (University […]


Shop Talk |

More on the DIY Book Tour

by Celeste Ng

Jeremy recently posted about Allison Amend’s tips for a do-it-yourself book tour. Author-arranged promotions are becoming more and more common as publishers cut back on marketing and publicity, and the L.A. Times has some firsthand accounts of what such a book tour can be like: A cat peeing in an author’s bag? A writer waking up to discover that a complete stranger has left him four jars of delicious homemade preserves? Such things are not traditionally part of book promotion. But they happened to Bill Cotter and Annie La Ganga, an Austin, Texas-based couple who celebrated the simultaneous release of […]


Essays |

The Age of Binary Bookmaking

by Michael Rudin

Today’s technological delights are well on their way to becoming tomorrow’s demands, entrenching themselves in ways that will do more than force bookbinding as a business model to adapt, but allow writing, as an art form, to expand and thrive. These are good things. Welcome to the age of Binary Bookmaking.


Shop Talk |

Reviewlet: An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell

by Tyler McMahon

An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell Unbridled Books, April 2010 256 pp Concert violist Suzanne Sullivan is preparing dinner when she hears on the radio that her long-term lover Alex—a well-known conductor—has perished in a plane crash. Living with her husband (a composer), her best friend Pertra (a concert violinist) and Petra’s deaf daughter Adele, Suzanne is forced to grieve in secret. With one foot in a dysfunctional marriage and one hand in the rearing of a child not her own, she comes to realize that it was during her stolen moments with Alex that she felt most whole. But […]


Shop Talk |

FWR @ AWP 2010

by Anne Stameshkin

AWP 2010 in Denver is just days away, and Fiction Writers Review will be there. Stop by our table at the bookfair, sign up for our mailing list, win loot from the FWR store, and check out our panel with the editors of Waccamaw, The Emerging Writers Network/Dzanc, and storySouth on Saturday from noon to 1:15 (Granite Room: Hyatt Regency, 3rd Floor): S163. Evolution of the New Media: Online Literary Journals and Websites in 2010. (Dan Albergotti, Dan Wickett, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Terry Kennedy) This panel examines the evolution of online publishing and literary promotion via digital media in the 21st […]


Shop Talk |

Literature of the Workplace

by Celeste Ng

In The New York Times, Book Review editor Jennifer Schuessler discusses the evolution of office-lit and why working the double shift might actually be shaping contemporary novels: Enough with the cozy stay-at-home dramas and urban picaresques featuring young slackers with no identifiable paycheck! The literary novel needs more tinkers and tailors, the argument goes. (The best-seller list seems to take care of the soldiers and spies.) In a video introduction to the latest issue of Granta, dedicated to the theme of “Work,” John Freeman, the magazine’s editor, lamented the literary “invisibility” of daily toil. The essayist Alain de Botton, writing […]




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