Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

The Hypothetical Library

by Celeste Ng

The subtitle of the blog The Hypothetical Library is “Imaginary Book Covers. Designed for Real Authors.” And that sums up this interesting little project nicely. Book designer Charlie Orr collaborates with real authors like Colum McCann, David Lehman, and Thomas Kelly to design covers for books that the authors have not written—and never will write. I ask each writer to provide flap copy for a book that they haven’t, won’t, but in theory could, write, and then I design a cover for it. I am not a writer. I have tried over the years, but it is simply something I […]


FWR @ AWP: Panels, Panels, Panels!

by Anne Stameshkin

Several of our fabulous contributors are participating in panels and readings at AWP. In addition to our panel on online journals and lit sites in 2010 (Saturday from noon to 1:15, featuring Jeremiah Chamberlin), don’t miss the following sessions: Thursday, April 8 10:30 – 11:45 a.m. Rooms 102, 104 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level R124. Bollywood, Bullets, and Beyond: The Poetry of South Asian America. (Featuring: Summi Kaipa, Pireeni Sundaralingam, Ravi Shankar, Bhanu Kapil, Subhashini Kaligotla and Monica Ferrell) What do a sestina, 9/11, and Amitabh Bachchan have in common? Popular, political, and poetic themes all appear in Indivisible (University […]


More on the DIY Book Tour

by Celeste Ng

Jeremy recently posted about Allison Amend’s tips for a do-it-yourself book tour. Author-arranged promotions are becoming more and more common as publishers cut back on marketing and publicity, and the L.A. Times has some firsthand accounts of what such a book tour can be like: A cat peeing in an author’s bag? A writer waking up to discover that a complete stranger has left him four jars of delicious homemade preserves? Such things are not traditionally part of book promotion. But they happened to Bill Cotter and Annie La Ganga, an Austin, Texas-based couple who celebrated the simultaneous release of […]


Reviewlet: An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell

by Tyler McMahon

An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell Unbridled Books, April 2010 256 pp Concert violist Suzanne Sullivan is preparing dinner when she hears on the radio that her long-term lover Alex—a well-known conductor—has perished in a plane crash. Living with her husband (a composer), her best friend Pertra (a concert violinist) and Petra’s deaf daughter Adele, Suzanne is forced to grieve in secret. With one foot in a dysfunctional marriage and one hand in the rearing of a child not her own, she comes to realize that it was during her stolen moments with Alex that she felt most whole. But […]


FWR @ AWP 2010

by Anne Stameshkin

AWP 2010 in Denver is just days away, and Fiction Writers Review will be there. Stop by our table at the bookfair, sign up for our mailing list, win loot from the FWR store, and check out our panel with the editors of Waccamaw, The Emerging Writers Network/Dzanc, and storySouth on Saturday from noon to 1:15 (Granite Room: Hyatt Regency, 3rd Floor): S163. Evolution of the New Media: Online Literary Journals and Websites in 2010. (Dan Albergotti, Dan Wickett, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Terry Kennedy) This panel examines the evolution of online publishing and literary promotion via digital media in the 21st […]


Literature of the Workplace

by Celeste Ng

In The New York Times, Book Review editor Jennifer Schuessler discusses the evolution of office-lit and why working the double shift might actually be shaping contemporary novels: Enough with the cozy stay-at-home dramas and urban picaresques featuring young slackers with no identifiable paycheck! The literary novel needs more tinkers and tailors, the argument goes. (The best-seller list seems to take care of the soldiers and spies.) In a video introduction to the latest issue of Granta, dedicated to the theme of “Work,” John Freeman, the magazine’s editor, lamented the literary “invisibility” of daily toil. The essayist Alain de Botton, writing […]


FWR's Latest Features

by Anne Stameshkin

It’s been a busy few weeks at Fiction Writers Review: here’s a roundup of some of our recent features: John Madera reviews Leni Zumas’s collection Farewell Navigator: “There is a seductive element to how these narratives unfold: a slow accretion of details, together with the use of fragmentation, absence, and space, achieves a confluence of associations, connections, and even some kind of understanding.” Mary Stewart Atwell reviews Pieces for the Left Hand, by J. Robert Lennon, describing this collection of linked short-short stories as “shar[ing] with the work of [Stuart Dybek and Lydia Davis] an interest in the precise image […]


Jim Crace's Last Book

by Celeste Ng

We love our debut novels here at Fiction Writers Review. As a site devoted to emerging writers, we love calling attention to the start of a literary career and the promise of a new voice. But here is some news of a very different sort: recently, veteran author Jim Crace made news by announcing that his next novel will be his last. The Independent reports: “Writing careers are short,” [Crace] expands. “For every 100 writers, 99 never get published. Of those who do, only one in every hundred gets a career out of it, so I count myself as immensely […]


Reading Rainbow Resurrected?

by Celeste Ng

Six months ago, we here at FWR (and many others) mourned the end of long-running PBS show Reading Rainbow. Now, rumor has it that Reading Rainbow may make a comeback. Host LeVar Burton recently tweeted: You heard it here first… Reading Rainbow 2.0 is in the works! Stay tuned for more info. But, you don’t have to… If you can complete that sentence, you’re probably one of the millions who can’t wait to see this show—which encouraged kids to love books and reading—back on the air. No further details have been released yet, but we can hope, right? Via.


2010 Asian American Short Story Contest–DEADLINE EXTENDED

by Celeste Ng

Hyphen Editor Neelanjana Banerjee reports that due to excellent response to the 2010 Asian American Short Story Contest, the contest deadline has been extended to April 12, 2010. As a reminder, the contest is open to all writers of Asian descent living in the United States and Canada, and there is no required theme. This year’s judges are Alexander Chee and Jaed Coffin. Ten finalists will receive a one-year subscription to Hyphen and a one-year membership to Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and one grand prize winner will also receive $1,000 and publication in Hyphen. Read our earlier post about the […]


In Defense of Comic Novels, Part II

by Celeste Ng

Recently we discussed a Times article about why comic novels often get overlooked when it comes to literary awards. Over at BlackBook, author and Columbia professor Sam Lipsyte adds his thoughts on the status of funny fiction today: Do you feel that literary fiction is afraid to make people laugh these days? I think there’s a worry that if it’s funny then perhaps there’s something slight about it. That it’s not as important as a deeply researched, earnest, historical novel, or a kind of humorless tale of contemporary life. I think there possibly was a moment in the ‘60s and […]


March Madness for Books

by Celeste Ng

So it’s March, which means that if you work in an office, all you probably hear are things like “Northern Iowa upset KU?!” and “Can you believe Cornell is still in this thing?” and “OMG all this is really f*ing up my bracket.” If, like me, you could not care less about college basketball but secretly wish that you, too, could have the thrill of completing a tidy little chart and enjoying some head-to-head competition, The Morning News has a solution: the Tournament of Books. Yes, the very concept of a matchup between books is a little silly—especially when the […]




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