The Best Machine: An Interview with Elliott Holt
by Laura van den Berg
Elliott Holt discusses writing You Are One of Them, her debut novel about friendship and propaganda during the Cold War, with friend and fellow writer Laura van den Berg.
Elliott Holt discusses writing You Are One of Them, her debut novel about friendship and propaganda during the Cold War, with friend and fellow writer Laura van den Berg.
This week’s feature is Jonathan Callahan’s debut collection The Consummation of Dirk, which was selected by judge Zachary Mason as the winner of Starcherone Press’s 8th Prize for Innovative Fiction and has just been released by Starcherone, an imprint of Dzanc. Callahan’s fiction has appeared in The Collagist, Pank, Unsaid, Witness, The Lifted Brow, Quarterly West, Keyhole, >Kill Author, Used Furniture Review, Western Humanities Review, Underwater New York, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. Essays on Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, Don DeLillo, Rick Moody, LeBron James, and David Foster Wallace can be found in The Collagist, Wag’s Revue, and here at Fiction […]
Last week’s feature was Slice Magazine, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Shelly Roberts (@shelly_roberts) Dana Staves (@DanaStaves) Mindy Fulroth (@equineaurora) Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us! Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books and journals out there!
“Above all, it must be compelling,” James Salter told the Paris Review in 1993 when asked about his idea of the short story. “You’re sitting around the campfire of literature, so to speak, and various voices speak up out of the dark and begin talking. With some, your mind wanders or you doze off, but with others you are held by every word. The first line, the first sentence, the first paragraph, all have to compel you.” Long before I ever read those remarks by Salter, I’d already come under the influence of his short stories and, in particular, his […]
I’m not the kind of bibliophile who owns multiple copies of the same book—first editions, paperbacks, reprints, limited editions, and so on. I’ve never really had the living space to accommodate such a habit, but more over my books are littered with margin notes, end notes, notes for stories I’m working on, notes for stories I want to work on, so many red and blue-inked annotations that purchasing a new copy of Salinger’s Nine Stories or Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago would feel like cheating on the marked-up copies, betraying some long-term, intimate relationship. So there was no reason to […]
Any story I consider a favorite stirs up in me feelings of envy and wonder. “A Father’s Story,” by Andre Dubus, has this effect. On the first count, it’s the I-sure-wish-I’d-written-that moment. If you write and if you read, you know this feeling. Think early motivations. Maybe that feeling—we could dress it up and call it admiration, but that seems too mild—led you to write in the first place. Envy being the mother of imitation, maybe, hypothetically, it led you to write a story about a vampire gerbil that sucked fruit white. Gerbacula. Maybe you are very, very sorry about […]
Acclaimed fiction writer Rick Moody continues his conversation with debut author Jonathan Callahan, author of The Consummation of Dirk, which won the 8th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, in Part II of their interview. The two writers discuss the qualities of a great paragraph, correctly deployed endings, and more. They have never met.
“It’s a story about how pain lives with us, and the ways we strive to make up for the past”: Celeste Ng on fear and quiet revelations in Frederick Busch’s “Ralph the Duck.”
This week’s feature is Slice Magazine, which was co-founded and remains co-published by Maria Gagliano and Celia Blue Johnson. The two launched their Brooklyn-based literary magazine in 2007, back when they were both twenty-three-year-olds working long hours in the demanding publishing industry and dreaming big dreams about running a magazine. Today, Gagliano and Johnson are both accomplished editors, publishers, and writers. The current issue of Slice features work by two of FWR’s Contributing Editors: Joshua Bodwell and Steve Wingate. So FWR’s editors sat down with Gagliano and Johnson to chat. In response to a question about the diversity of the […]
Last week’s feature was Ethan Rutherford’s debut collection, The Peripatetic Coffin, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Will McClure (@WillMcClure) Elizabeth Eaves (@ElisabethEaves) Trisha Ellen (@TrishaEllen1) Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us! Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!
