Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

The End of Publishing: The Video

by Celeste Ng

We’ve had book trailers and vooks and now… a video about the end of publishing. (Or is it?) DK (Dorling Kindersley) Books put this clever video together for a sales conference: The Penguin website offers some insight into the creation of the clip: We asked DK to give us a list of facts and statistics about publishing in 2010, and where they see it going in the future, and then our scriptwriter, Jason LaMotte took this information and wove the facts into the current script.


President Sends Fan Mail…to Novelist

by Celeste Ng

As if we didn’t already know Obama was the Reader-in-Chief, here’s further proof: recently, President Obama sent a fan letter to author Yann Martel. Galleycat reports: Today novelist Yann Martel posted a piece of fan mail he received from President Barack Obama. The president wrote: “My daughter and I just finished reading Life of Pi together. Both of us agreed we prefer the story with animals. It is a lovely book–an elegant proof of God and the power of storytelling.” Martel’s response? If there was a way of tattooing it on my back, I would. What amazes me is the […]


In Defense of Comic Novels

by Celeste Ng

In the art world, comedy seldom gets its dues: if it’s funny, many assume, it can’t also be “real” art. At the Oscars a couple of years back, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly lamented the plight of “A Comedian at the Oscars”: “the saddest man of all / Your movies may make millions, but your name they’ll never call.” Something similar happens in literature, Erica Wagner points out in the UK’s Times: Comic novels — let’s call them terrific novels that happen to be funny — tend to fall through the cracks, especially where prizes are concerned. […]


Day Jobs of Famous Writers

by Celeste Ng

If you’re reading the FWR blog furtively, hunched in your cubicle over your TPS reports, this post is for you. You are not alone: almost all writers need a day job to support their art. Lapham’s Quarterly reveals the day jobs of some famous writers, such as Charlotte Bronte, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner in trading-card format. Or quiz your friends: Which novelist helped create the modern London police force? Which novelist made only $1838 per year in today’s dollars? If these writers could turn out masterpieces like As I Lay Dying and In the Penal Colony and the Chronicles […]


The Second Pass, and life after print

by Anne Stameshkin

Tonight I stumbled (for the first time, I’m ashamed to admit) upon The Second Pass. This fantastic lit site, edited by freelance writer and former Harper Collins editor John Williams, features a blog and an impressive range of features: essays, interviews, and reviews covering both new releases (Circulating) and backlist titles (Backlist). Another section, The Shelf, features reviewlets of recent titles, with links to and excerpts from other reviews across the bookosphere. To celebrate the site’s first year anniversary, twelve contributors (including the editor) wrote pieces on their favorite out-of-print books. Williams introduces the combined result, “Tales of the Unread,” […]


Andrew's Book Club: March 2010 Picks

by Anne Stameshkin

This month, Andrew Scott — our Oprah of story collections, long may he reign! — recommends the following books: Big House Pick: Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, by Brad Watson (Norton) “The dark and brilliant tales of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives capture the strangeness of human (and almost-human) life. In this, his first collection of stories since his celebrated, award-winning Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson takes us even deeper into the riotous, appalling, and mournful oddity of human beings. In prose so perfectly pitched as to suggest some celestial harmony, he writes about […]


Bloggers Host Authors at Greenlight Bookstore

by Anne Stameshkin

Next Monday, March 22, at 7:30 PM, Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore continues their Blogger/Author Pairings series, wherein lit bloggers host and talk with authors whose books they love, and the authors read from their work. Next up is Brooklyn’s own blogger/critic Maud Newton (of MaudNewton.com, one of the finest lit blogs, exclamation point) and award-winning author Victor LaValle, whose work has drawn comparisons to the likes of Ralph Ellison, Shirley Jackson, and Thomas Pyncheon, and whose novel (of the same title) inspired Mos Def’s The Ecstatic. LaValle will read from and discuss his new novel Big Machine, which Greenlight’s newsletter describes […]


Microchondria Short Short Story Anthology

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last month we announced the Harvard Book Store’s short short story contest. In honor of the shortest month of the year, the store was seeking submissions that were both short in length (less than 500 words) and written during a brief period of time (between February 1-17). The results have now been posted, and we are pleased to announce that a story by contributor Liana Imam will be collected in an anthology of the winners, entitled Microchondria. In addition to Liana’s work, friend of FWR Cody Walker–whose cartoon caption won a recent New Yorker caption contest that we blogged about […]


The Best Sentences, One Tweet at a Time

by Celeste Ng

New York Magazine book critic Sam Anderson is running a literary Twitter experiment — and no, this isn’t a Twitter novel. In fact, it’s almost the exact opposite. Anderson tweets the best sentence he reads each day, and as he points out, “‘Best,’ in this context, can mean almost anything: funny, beautiful, enlightening, stylistically amazing.” A few of his selections: “Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.” (philip larkin, ‘absences’) I think that at least a third to half of all MFA seats should be reserved for people with families. (junot diaz, panorama interv. w eggers) “But according […]


Steve Almond on Self-publishing

by Celeste Ng

On The Rumpus, author Steve Almond explains why he recently decided to self-publish a book of short stories and essays, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey–and it’s probably not for the reasons you’d think: If this were a traditional publishing endeavor, the next question would be how to get the book a “bigger platform,” meaning a place in the great Barnes-&-Noble-Amazon-Kindle-i-Pad-clusterfuckosphere. But because this is something much more personal, I decided – nah. I was cool with Harvard Bookstore selling it. But other than that, Minute, Honey is available only at readings. My reasoning is pretty simple: I want […]


Recommended Reading: Aryn Kyle story in Five Chapters

by Celeste Ng

I am not a patient person. People who do slow, meticulous things like needlepoint and whittling amaze and bewilder me. This impatience applies to my reading habits, too: when immersed in a book I love, I can’t stop myself from reading faster and faster, eager to see the whole picture, to wolf the whole story into my head. Luckily, though, Five Chapters exists to remind me that patience is a virtue. Five Chapters publishes one story each week, with one section of the story posted each day. It’s an old-fashioned exercise in delayed gratification, and as this week’s story is […]


2010 Asian American Short Story Contest

by Celeste Ng

Entries are now being accepted for the 2010 Asian American Short Story Contest–the only national, pan-Asian American writing competition of its kind. The contest’s sponsors are two of the leading promoters of Asian American literary arts: Hyphen magazine is a non-profit news and culture magazine and blog that focuses on exploring Asian American identity, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) is the most prominent organization in the country dedicated to exceptional literature by writers of Asian descent. Fiction Writers Review is proud to be a media partner for the 2010 contest. This year’s judges are Alexander Chee and Jaed […]




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