Suspend Your Disbelief

Recent Posts

Shop Talk |

extended previews available on Google Book Search

by Anne Stameshkin

From PW Daily: Yesterday, Google announced a new feature tied to its Book Search program, a widget-like tool called Google Previews. By adding simple code to their Web sites, publishers, retailers or anyone with sufficient technical knowledge can embed a Google-hosted preview of up to 20% of any book that has been included in the Google Book Search database. Fabulous! Excerpts are gateway drugs. I’ll see if we can add this “simple code” and include samplings from books reviewed on FWR.


Shop Talk |

Books for Barack

by Anne Stameshkin

I still haven’t read one of her mysteries, but in 2005, Ayelet Waldman had me at hello with her infamous Modern Love essay — the one where she admits – blissfully – to loving her husband even more than her children. (Bonus: said husband is Michael Chabon.) Now Waldman is channeling some of that passion toward electing Barack Obama, who she first met in law school. She’s launched a Books for Barack fundraising drive. In a widely circulated email, Waldman called for writers to donate signed copies of their books, including rare collectibles and first editions, to offer as gifts […]


Interviews |

Interview with Susannah Felts, This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record

by Gwen Glazer

Susannah Felts gets questioned about the line between fiction and autobiography on a regular basis. This speaks, she suggested, to a very real longing in readers to make that distinction. “We have this fascination with memoir,” she said. “We want to connect representations of reality to reality itself. There’s an insatiable need for that.”


Shop Talk |

Fort Greene Independent Bookstore Initiative

by Anne Stameshkin

Last Tuesday night I joined over 300 neighbors and book lovers in the lobby of BAM-Harvey to rally support for an independent bookstore in Fort Greene. The event was sponsored by FGIBI, or the Fort Greene Independent Bookstore Initiative (FGIBI), and its guest of honor was Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, winner of the 2007 Brooklyn Public Library PowerUp! prize for her business plan to open an independent bookstore in Brooklyn (and publicity/events coordinator at McNally Jackson). FGIBI formed after a survey by the Fort Greene Retailers Association showed that 75% of respondents prioritize having a bookstore (as opposed to other types […]


Reviews |

Three Girls and Their Brother, by Theresa Rebeck

by Lauren Hall

In a world insatiable for celebrity access, where there are reality shows about reality shows, and magazines shriek that the stars are “just like us!” whenever one buys a latte, pops out a baby, or heads for rehab, it seems redundant to ask if we’ve gone too far. But that’s exactly what Theresa Rebeck does with Three Girls and Their Brother, and, for the most part, it works.


Reviews |

Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock

by Phil Sandick

Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection Knockemstiff begins with an epigraph from satirist Dawn Powell: “All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.” And yet, when it comes to Knockemstiff, Ohio—Pollock’s hometown and the purgatorial setting for these eighteen gritty stories—the fictional inhabitants rarely leave.




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