Suspend Your Disbelief

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Shop Talk |

Ryan Adams and Mary-Louise Parker at the NYPL

by Anne Stameshkin

NYCers, head to the New York Public Library this Friday for an exciting LIVE from the NYPL/Askashic event: Singer-songwriter Ryan Adams will discuss his new book, a collection of short fiction and poems called Hello, Sunshine, with that Weedstastic actress of stage-and-screen, Mary-Louise Parker. The details: When: Friday, September 25, 2009, 6:00pm Where: Celeste Bartos Forum, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (5th Avenue & 42nd St.) What it costs: $25 general admission; $15 library donors, seniors and students with valid identification. For more information, and to buy tickets, click here. Via Akashic’s website, here is Parker on Adams: “Ryan Adams writes […]


Shop Talk |

HuffPo Books!

by Celeste Ng

It was selected as one of Time magazine’s Top 25 Blogs of 2009. The Observer (UK) went one step further and named it the most powerful blog in the world. According to Technorati, it’s the most linked-to blog on the Internet. And its founder, Arianna Huffington, came in at #12 in Forbes ‘ 2009 list of the most influential women in the media. Now the Huffington Post is starting–drumroll please!–a book section. Last Tuesday the New York Observer announced that HuffPo’s new book section would launch October 5th under the editorship of Amy Hertz, an editor-at-large for Penguin’s Dutton division. […]


Shop Talk |

book blogs heart novellas

by Anne Stameshkin

Over at The Fiction Desk, Rob explores why novellas might be ideal subjects for book bloggers; might this, in turn, inspire more novella-writing? Despite their increasing importance to the industry, bloggers don’t (or rarely) get paid, and so the time they can dedicate to their book coverage is limited by work and family commitments. On top of this, it’s important to keep blogs going with fresh new content, and if your content is book reviews, those hours can really add up. Novellas may be the perfect format: often as substantial as longer novels, more “newsworthy” than short stories as they’re […]


Shop Talk |

New features on Fiction Writers Review

by Anne Stameshkin

If you haven’t visited the Features side of FWR this month, I highly recommend it. – Our most recent offering is an essay with original illustrations by novelist Sarah Van Arsdale about the experience of reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain while recovering from a major, invasive surgery. – T. M. De Vos (of Many Mountains Moving) reviews Aleksandar Hemon’s new story collection, Love and Obstacles. – Comestibles‘ Kathryn McGowan serves up recipes-in-context from The Time Traveler’s Wife in her Novel Dishes column (three so far, with another to come this Friday — here are installments I, II, and III). […]


Essays |

Hobbling Up The Magic Mountain

by Sarah Van Arsdale

I just read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The whole thing. Starting on page one and ending on page 706. The events in the book span seven years, and reading it seemed to take almost as long. When I embarked on this project, I was recovering from orthopedic surgery … Why, then, would I want to read a lengthy book packed with intellectual digressions set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps prior to the start of World War II? Hadn’t I been through enough? How about something light, or at least short? A Carol Goodman murder mystery, or something by Nick Hornby? As it turned out, The Magic Mountain was a choice so perfect I’m thinking a copy should be handed out with every pre-admission packet given to surgical patients…


Reviews |

Love and Obstacles, by Aleksandar Hemon

by T. M. De Vos

Perhaps, in keeping with the stricter labeling laws, Aleksandar Hemon‘s new collection of stories should list its primary ingredient first. Impediments, more than love, are the foundation of Love and Obstacles: Stories (Riverhead, May 2009). Foreignness, prepubescence, awkward bookishness… Even sex itself is a liability: the characters look ridiculous pursuing it, worse doing it, and we think less of them afterward. Men offer up their partners for it, threaten each other’s mothers and sisters with it, reminisce about it, and thwart each other’s pursuits of it. Aleksandar Hemon’s vivid prose serves as the overlit bar mirror, showing us every wax bead in his characters’ pores.


Shop Talk |

Dispatch From Bread Loaf #4: What I Learned from Ann Hood

by Celeste Ng

With all the posts on lectures and readings, you may be surprised to hear that we had any time to workshop at the conference at all. I was very lucky to be in Ann Hood’s workshop, as Ann offered specific concrete approaches to thinking about plot, theme, tension, and all of those nebulous concepts fiction writers have to deal with. We had a lot of novel excerpts in the class, so much of the workshop discussion focused on issues of the novel rather than the short story—a change from the norm. Fellow Bread Loafer Eugene Cross has written an account […]


Shop Talk |

Say You're One of Them is Oprah Book Club pick!!

by Anne Stameshkin

Warm congratulations, Uwem. FWR is thrilled that so many more people will know about and read your stories because of this endorsement. And Oprah, kudos for picking a story collection! Learn more about Say You’re One of Them here; read “An Ex-Mas Feast,” the collection’s first story (previously published in the New Yorker); and check out FWR Associate Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin’s interview with Uwem (for Granta).


Shop Talk |

Buy a book for a public school library!

by Anne Stameshkin

Via Jeffrey Rotter: ReadThis is a great organization “devoted to promoting access to books and reading wherever needed.” Among other projects, they helped create a library last spring for the public middle/high school Brooklyn Collegiate. Now you can help stock this library by clicking here and buying a book (chosen by the school to fill gaps) from Book Culture for for its collection. ReadThis will pay shipping, and the bookstore will donate 15% of sales for each book back to the school as a donation. In one swoop you’ll be supporting a library and an independent bookstore. Geri Ellner, Library […]




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