Suspend Your Disbelief

Recent Posts

Essays |

Quotes & Notes: Best Shots and Shortcuts

by Steven Wingate

“Always give your characters their best shot.” — Stuart M. Kaminsky

As writers, we can add on (and on) to the external details of a character, trying to make that person real in the way that Pinocchio hopes to become so. Theoretically, we might be able to acquire enough details in a personality inventory for our readers to accept our characters as convincing. But ultimately, as Stuart Kaminsky knew, this way of creating character doesn’t work because it’s the subtext of our characters’ lives that make them real. Using the “inventory” process to get to know them is fundamentally flawed because it makes us lazy.


Shop Talk |

2010 NEA Grants Announced

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

The National Endowment for the Arts just announced this year’s recipients of their Literature Fellowships. Each individual is awarded $25,000 to “set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.” The Creative Writing Fellowships alternate years between prose (fiction and creative nonfiction) and poetry. The next cycle will be poetry, with an application deadline of March 4, 2010. You can find guidelines and more information here. This year’s winners were a diverse group, ranging from established authors like Z.Z. Packer to relative newcomers. Other standouts were essayist Donovan Hohn, whose forthcoming book, based on his Harper’s essay “Moby […]


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New Lit Site: The Nervous Breakdown

by Celeste Ng

Have you met The Nervous Breakdown yet? Founded by author Brad Listi, this new website is intended as a new space for authors to promote their work. The fiction section’s aim, as explained in an open letter, is not only akin to that of all good literary magazines–to showcase some of the most vibrant writers working today–but also to help provide these writers with a vehicle to market their books. This is why we provide links to authors’ websites and sales pages: to help directly connect the writers we love with their audience–TNB’s large, loyal and growing readership. But don’t […]


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Literary Gifts #3: MotherReader's 105 Ways to Give a Book

by Celeste Ng

Books always make great presents, but just wrapping it up and handing it over is a little… blah. MotherReader offers a list of 105 books paired with complementary gifts. Ideas are grouped by recipient’s age range; many are aimed at kids and could be great ways to encourage budding readers. Here’s a sampling of my favorites: 3. Give a book with a movie theater gift card to see the upcoming film. 10. Give an interesting, insightful book with a restaurant gift card and a date to discuss the book together over a meal. 44. Everyone needs Mo Willems’ book Don’t […]


Shop Talk |

"The Mommy Problem," and the larger notion of life beyond work

by Danielle Lazarin

Over at The Millions, Sonya Chung’s essay “The Mommy Problem” throws more questions at a question I’m still trying to answer. I, too, have indulged in her habit of close-reading women writers’ biographies for suggestions of children and clues as to their familial satisfaction to productivity ratio. While the argument over how writers should spend their time, money, and reproductive organs is endless, and as Chung points out, ultimately individual and unanswerable even through close examination of the examples we have, the question of how acceptable or manageable it is to be a writer-slash—whether that slash is a parent, a […]


Interviews |

Creative Writing and the University: an Interview with Mark McGurl

by Polly Stewart

McGurl, a professor of English at UCLA, is a literary scholar who actually likes writers. More amazingly, he likes MFA programs. In The Program Era, published by Harvard University Press, McGurl argues that the rise of the MFA program in the twentieth century made a uniquely significant contribution to the excellence of postwar American literature.


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Bread Loaf Lectures and Readings Available on iTunes

by Celeste Ng

Didn’t make it to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference this summer? You can now download many of the lectures and readings from the 2009 session for free on iTunes. A partial list is available now; more will be added soon. Lectures include Ellen Bryant Voigt on irony, Charles Baxter on lush styles in prose, and Thomas Mallon on the letters of presidents . And there’s a wide selection of fiction readings, including faculty members Maud Casey, Thomas Mallon, and Luis Alberto Urrea; special guest Lorrie Moore; and fiction fellows Lauren Groff, Aryn Kyle, Skip Horack, and many more–plus readings by […]


Shop Talk |

Literary Gifts #2: Novel-T Tees

by Celeste Ng

Here’s a clever gift idea for the bookishly AND sportishly inclined. Novel-T offers a complete lineup of literary T-shirts–literally. Designed to resemble baseball jerseys, each offers “an opportunity to express your support for the all-stars of literature” and bears the name of a literary figure-cum-position player. Appropriately enough, the “expansive” poet Whitman plays center field, quick-witted Huck Finn plays shortstop, Bartleby is out in left field (where else?), and Ahab is both pitcher and–heh–captain. The front of the shirt bears an appropriate logo, from Hester Prynne’s A to Poe’s raven. Even many of the players’ numbers have been carefully chosen: […]


Shop Talk |

Real Life: Novel or Memoir?

by Celeste Ng

The latest installment of the L.A. Times’s Off the Shelf series features an essay by writer Maud Newton on why she’s writing a novel instead of a memoir. Newton describes how, as an adolescent, she always thought she’d write a tell-all True Story: Pre-teen novels were my frame of reference. I envisaged a story in the downbeat, questioning vein of “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret” or “My Darling, My Hamburger.” But unlike those books, mine would be true, and, because I could not see beyond the sphere of my own unhappiness, it would be called, “And You Think […]


Reviews |

We Are the Friction: Illustration vs. Short Fiction (edited by Sing Statistics)

by Lee Thomas

Even the idea itself is intriguing: pair twelve international illustrators and short fiction writers, press go, see what happens. The slim, wonderfully designed collection We Are the Friction sets the stage for unexpected relationships. Following their 2008 collaboration, I Am the Friction, the masterminds behind the concept are designer Jez Burrows and illustrator Lizzy Stewart, who together form Sing Statistics. Both Burrows and Stewart are based in Edinburgh, but the two-dozen writers and illustrators in this anthology reside across the globe – from Toronto to Kansas City to Barcelona. The cover promises a veritable garden of earthly delights: “5 Giant Animals, 63 Expletives, 6 Instances of the Ocean,” and “1 Sentient Muffin” among them. Let’s begin with that muffin.




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