Suspend Your Disbelief

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Shop Talk |

Steve Almond on Self-publishing

by Celeste Ng

On The Rumpus, author Steve Almond explains why he recently decided to self-publish a book of short stories and essays, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey–and it’s probably not for the reasons you’d think: If this were a traditional publishing endeavor, the next question would be how to get the book a “bigger platform,” meaning a place in the great Barnes-&-Noble-Amazon-Kindle-i-Pad-clusterfuckosphere. But because this is something much more personal, I decided – nah. I was cool with Harvard Bookstore selling it. But other than that, Minute, Honey is available only at readings. My reasoning is pretty simple: I want […]


Shop Talk |

Recommended Reading: Aryn Kyle story in Five Chapters

by Celeste Ng

I am not a patient person. People who do slow, meticulous things like needlepoint and whittling amaze and bewilder me. This impatience applies to my reading habits, too: when immersed in a book I love, I can’t stop myself from reading faster and faster, eager to see the whole picture, to wolf the whole story into my head. Luckily, though, Five Chapters exists to remind me that patience is a virtue. Five Chapters publishes one story each week, with one section of the story posted each day. It’s an old-fashioned exercise in delayed gratification, and as this week’s story is […]


Shop Talk |

2010 Asian American Short Story Contest

by Celeste Ng

Entries are now being accepted for the 2010 Asian American Short Story Contest–the only national, pan-Asian American writing competition of its kind. The contest’s sponsors are two of the leading promoters of Asian American literary arts: Hyphen magazine is a non-profit news and culture magazine and blog that focuses on exploring Asian American identity, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) is the most prominent organization in the country dedicated to exceptional literature by writers of Asian descent. Fiction Writers Review is proud to be a media partner for the 2010 contest. This year’s judges are Alexander Chee and Jaed […]


Reviews |

A Little Bone of Crazy, or This is Your Brain On Snowbroth: Leni Zumas’s Farewell Navigator

by John Madera

Most of Leni Zumas’s stories in her exceptional (and stylistically exciting) debut, Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008), are compact studies of paralysis in the tradition of Beckett and Ioensco. Sherwood Anderson could have been describing Zumas’s characters as they, too, are “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.” In “Farewell Navigator,” one character envies a group of blind schoolchildren for having teachers “to pull them. Nobody expects them to know where to go.” And in “Leopard Arms”—a story told from the perspective of a gargoyle—a father fears “of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand.”


Shop Talk |

Boston Public Library's Children's Writer in Residence Fellowship

by Celeste Ng

The Boston Public Library is now accepting applications for its Children’s Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, a little-known but wonderful opportunity for children’s and YA writers. The fellowship, offered to one writer per year, is intended to “provide an emerging children’s writer with the financial and administrative support needed to complete one literary work” and offers a workspace in the library and a $20,000 stipend. Recipients’ projects may be fiction, nonfiction, poetry, illustration combined with any of the former, or a script; last year’s recipient, Kelly Hourihan, is working on a YA novel. There is no application fee, and to apply, you must […]


Shop Talk |

Shady Side Review Postcard Contest

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

The Shady Side Review is having a postcard contest. They’re seeking the best poetry or prose of 100 words or less. Winners will have their work published on–what else?–postcards. The submission deadline is March 17, and each entry is $1. From the Editors: What can you get for a dollar these days? A newspaper (but they don’t usually publish fiction unless you’re famous. Are you famous? Maybe your work is already in a newspaper then.) A bagel (but unless you carve your poem into the dough, your work does not appear here). Eternal fame and glory (this can be achieved […]


Shop Talk |

Love Letter to the Deckle Edge

by Celeste Ng

If all the recent talk about the iPad and the Amazon/Macmillan ebook pricing catfight has you longing for a simpler time, look no further than this ode to the deckle edge on The Millions: Opening a book can already feel like opening a gift. Armed with a knife and freeing the pages and the story hidden beneath the folds, it becomes something more, “a penetration of its secrets” and an act of discovery, shot through with a suggestion of violence and danger or of the painful gestation of the words themselves. This act of cutting open pages to read a […]


Shop Talk |

Allison Amend's Tips for a DIY Book Tour

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

The current Glimmer Train Bulletin features a short essay by Allison Amend with her instructions for a Do-It-Yourself Book Tour. Amend is the author of the acclaimed 2008 story collection Things That Pass for Love. Her novel Stations West publishes this month. Here is the opening of her essay: It is a truth universally acknowledged that book tours don’t really sell books. Or at least they don’t sell a lot of books in comparison to the amount of time and expense involved. So then why do authors continue to go on them? Well, book tours have ancillary benefits, otherwise publishers […]


Essays |

Every Line Matters: In Memory of Barry Hannah (1942-2010)

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This morning I woke to hear the sad news that Barry Hannah had died. He was 67, and the apparent cause was a heart attack, according to the Jackson Free Press. Barry had had several bouts with cancer over the last ten years, yet I was still shocked to hear that he was gone. I guess I’d come to think of him as oddly invincible.


Shop Talk |

Barry Hannah Gone (1942-2010)

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This morning I woke to hear the sad news that Barry Hannah died yesterday afternoon. He was 67, and the apparent cause was a heart attack, according to the Jackson Free Press. Barry had had several bouts with cancer over the last ten years, yet I was still shocked to hear that he was gone. I guess I’d come to think of him as oddly invincible. Maybe it’s also because Barry’s prose felt like it was carved out of stone. Not weighty, but permanent. With a hint of the divine. That crazy Old Testament kind of divinity that’s equal parts […]




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