Suspend Your Disbelief

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Shop Talk |

The 2009 Bad Sex Awards (NSFW)

by Celeste Ng

It’s the end of fall, and you know what that means. Okay, yes, NaNoWriMo is over–but I’m talking about the Literary Review‘s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. It’s a shame the Literary Review doesn’t select runners-up, as each of their selections was capital-B Bad in its own special way. So here are my votes for superlatives. Check to be sure your boss isn’t around and get ready to cringe. Most Explicit Play-by-Play: from Philip Roth’s The Humbling First Pegeen stepped into the contraption, adjusted and secured the leather straps, and affixed the dildo so that it jutted straight out. […]


Shop Talk |

Gawker auctions signed Palin memoir for charity

by Celeste Ng

War makes strange bedfellows, but what about charity? Gawker attended the National Book Awards and asked attending writers to sign a copy of Sarah Palin’s ghostwritten memoir Going Rogue. The signed book is now up for auction on eBay, with proceeds going to Save the Children. Actually, the combination of Palin + literary stars makes total sense. The Gawker folk explain: At 2009’s National Book Awards we honored Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue as 2010’s frontrunner for the NBA Fiction Prize by getting it signed by the gathered literary luminaries. And now, it can be the best charitable, tax-deductible present ever. […]


Shop Talk |

Economics of a NYT Bestseller

by Celeste Ng

You may have heard about author Lynn Viehl’s post about how much–or rather, how little–she earned on her New York Times mass market bestseller Twilight Fall. Viehl analyzed her royalty statement and came to a sobering conclusion: My income per book always reminds me of how tough it is to make at living at this gig, especially for writers who only produce one book per year. If I did the same, and my one book performed as well as TF, and my family of four were solely dependent on my income, my net would be only around $2500.00 over the […]


Shop Talk |

The End of Oprah

by Celeste Ng

Oprah gave book publicists a collective fit of the vapors when she announced her show—and its high-profile book club—would be ending in 2011. Many fretted over the effects on publishing, calling it “a blow”: “Other than a book being turned into a popular movie nothing brings readers to a book like Oprah,” said Dawn Davis, editorial director of the Amistad imprint of News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers. […] “She brings a variety of readers to a variety of books. Her impact is immeasurable.” Another publicist mourned, “If it is the end of her daily talk show,we probably won’t see something else […]


Shop Talk |

Literary Gifts #1: EWN's Holiday Shopping Guide and more

by Anne Stameshkin

During this holiday season, many FWR contributors and readers enjoy giving friends and family gifts of the literary variety: novels we know they’d love, subscriptions to lit magazines or journals, a Kindle or Nook, blank notebooks, the perfect pen, novelist-friendly software like Scrivener. Want some inspiration? We’ll be linking to bookish gift ideas throughout the holiday season. Be sure to visit the Emerging Writers Network frequently over the next month: the site has just kicked off its Holiday Shopping Guide; in the EWN’s most recent newsletter, Dan Wickett tells us the guide will feature numerous posts (at least one a […]


Interviews |

Listening to the Tiny Voice: An Interview with Kathryn Ma

by Neelanjana Banerjee

Neela Banerjee talks with Kathryn Ma, the first Asian American to win the Iowa Prize in that contest’s 40-year history. Ma channels rage and its antidote, humor, in her debut collection, All That Work and Still No Boys, which features unapologetically Asian American characters who don’t do any cooking or talking to ghosts.


Shop Talk |

Largehearted Lit, with Marie Mutsuki Mockett and Emma Straub

by Anne Stameshkin

NYC-based writers: on Sunday, December 6 at 5 PM, gather for a free and awesome Largehearted Lit event at the Knitting Factory (361 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn). We at FWR are big fans of (and frequent linkers to) David Gutowski’s LargeheartedBoy.com, a music-lit-culture website whose Book Notes column gives established and emerging authors the chance to create and discuss music playlists connected to–or inspired by–their books. Now a new Largehearted Lit series, curated by Brooklyn-based fiction author Jami Attenberg (Instant Love, The Kept Man, The Melting Season), actualizes these playlist interviews into live readings with musical performances. In this interview, David […]


Reviews |

Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker

by T. M. De Vos

Life in Russia, said author Aleksander Snegirev, at Housing Works’ September 21 Rasskazy event, is uncomfortable, but always interesting. So, too, are the stories in this plump new anthology from Tin House: Arkady Babchenko’s beleaguered soldier returns to Chechnya a page away from German Sadulaev’s lyrical descriptions of Chechnya’s devastated countryside. The binding is a veritable trench across which both narrators peek at each other warily.


Shop Talk |

Mentors, Muses, and Monsters event at Greenlight Books

by Anne Stameshkin

NYC-based writers, head to Brooklyn’s newest bookstore, Fort Greene’s Greenlight Books (686 Fulton St., at S. Portland), tonight (Monday, November 23) at 7:30 PM for a special event featuring local authors and the editor of Mentors, Muses, and Monsters, a book that we at FWR are excited to read. This is also the bookstore’s first installment of what promises to be an exciting series of events featuring both authors and lit bloggers. On a personal note, I’m thrilled at Greenlight’s birth, if a bit heartsick that I had to leave Fort Greene about a month before it opened; when I […]


Shop Talk |

Bestselling authors speak out against big-box discounting

by Celeste Ng

For the past few months, writers at FWR — like those across the literary blogosphere–have been responding to and critiquing the Target-Walmart-Sears-Amazon price-war kerfuffle. Yet outside the publishing and writing worlds, it’s not clear if anyone sees big-box discounting as a Bad Thing; maybe people are too excited about snagging $9 hardback new releases. Recently, though, two big-name authors spoke up about the scary ramifications for emerging writers. In a Big Think talk, John Irving discusses how much harder it is for first-time novelists to get started today, admitting that his first novel would not have been published today. (The […]




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