Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

"The Mommy Problem," and the larger notion of life beyond work

by Danielle Lazarin

Over at The Millions, Sonya Chung’s essay “The Mommy Problem” throws more questions at a question I’m still trying to answer. I, too, have indulged in her habit of close-reading women writers’ biographies for suggestions of children and clues as to their familial satisfaction to productivity ratio. While the argument over how writers should spend their time, money, and reproductive organs is endless, and as Chung points out, ultimately individual and unanswerable even through close examination of the examples we have, the question of how acceptable or manageable it is to be a writer-slash—whether that slash is a parent, a […]


Bread Loaf Lectures and Readings Available on iTunes

by Celeste Ng

Didn’t make it to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference this summer? You can now download many of the lectures and readings from the 2009 session for free on iTunes. A partial list is available now; more will be added soon. Lectures include Ellen Bryant Voigt on irony, Charles Baxter on lush styles in prose, and Thomas Mallon on the letters of presidents . And there’s a wide selection of fiction readings, including faculty members Maud Casey, Thomas Mallon, and Luis Alberto Urrea; special guest Lorrie Moore; and fiction fellows Lauren Groff, Aryn Kyle, Skip Horack, and many more–plus readings by […]


Literary Gifts #2: Novel-T Tees

by Celeste Ng

Here’s a clever gift idea for the bookishly AND sportishly inclined. Novel-T offers a complete lineup of literary T-shirts–literally. Designed to resemble baseball jerseys, each offers “an opportunity to express your support for the all-stars of literature” and bears the name of a literary figure-cum-position player. Appropriately enough, the “expansive” poet Whitman plays center field, quick-witted Huck Finn plays shortstop, Bartleby is out in left field (where else?), and Ahab is both pitcher and–heh–captain. The front of the shirt bears an appropriate logo, from Hester Prynne’s A to Poe’s raven. Even many of the players’ numbers have been carefully chosen: […]


Real Life: Novel or Memoir?

by Celeste Ng

The latest installment of the L.A. Times’s Off the Shelf series features an essay by writer Maud Newton on why she’s writing a novel instead of a memoir. Newton describes how, as an adolescent, she always thought she’d write a tell-all True Story: Pre-teen novels were my frame of reference. I envisaged a story in the downbeat, questioning vein of “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret” or “My Darling, My Hamburger.” But unlike those books, mine would be true, and, because I could not see beyond the sphere of my own unhappiness, it would be called, “And You Think […]


The 2009 Bad Sex Awards (NSFW)

by Celeste Ng

It’s the end of fall, and you know what that means. Okay, yes, NaNoWriMo is over–but I’m talking about the Literary Review‘s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. It’s a shame the Literary Review doesn’t select runners-up, as each of their selections was capital-B Bad in its own special way. So here are my votes for superlatives. Check to be sure your boss isn’t around and get ready to cringe. Most Explicit Play-by-Play: from Philip Roth’s The Humbling First Pegeen stepped into the contraption, adjusted and secured the leather straps, and affixed the dildo so that it jutted straight out. […]


Gawker auctions signed Palin memoir for charity

by Celeste Ng

War makes strange bedfellows, but what about charity? Gawker attended the National Book Awards and asked attending writers to sign a copy of Sarah Palin’s ghostwritten memoir Going Rogue. The signed book is now up for auction on eBay, with proceeds going to Save the Children. Actually, the combination of Palin + literary stars makes total sense. The Gawker folk explain: At 2009’s National Book Awards we honored Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue as 2010’s frontrunner for the NBA Fiction Prize by getting it signed by the gathered literary luminaries. And now, it can be the best charitable, tax-deductible present ever. […]


Economics of a NYT Bestseller

by Celeste Ng

You may have heard about author Lynn Viehl’s post about how much–or rather, how little–she earned on her New York Times mass market bestseller Twilight Fall. Viehl analyzed her royalty statement and came to a sobering conclusion: My income per book always reminds me of how tough it is to make at living at this gig, especially for writers who only produce one book per year. If I did the same, and my one book performed as well as TF, and my family of four were solely dependent on my income, my net would be only around $2500.00 over the […]


The End of Oprah

by Celeste Ng

Oprah gave book publicists a collective fit of the vapors when she announced her show—and its high-profile book club—would be ending in 2011. Many fretted over the effects on publishing, calling it “a blow”: “Other than a book being turned into a popular movie nothing brings readers to a book like Oprah,” said Dawn Davis, editorial director of the Amistad imprint of News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers. […] “She brings a variety of readers to a variety of books. Her impact is immeasurable.” Another publicist mourned, “If it is the end of her daily talk show,we probably won’t see something else […]


Literary Gifts #1: EWN's Holiday Shopping Guide and more

by Anne Stameshkin

During this holiday season, many FWR contributors and readers enjoy giving friends and family gifts of the literary variety: novels we know they’d love, subscriptions to lit magazines or journals, a Kindle or Nook, blank notebooks, the perfect pen, novelist-friendly software like Scrivener. Want some inspiration? We’ll be linking to bookish gift ideas throughout the holiday season. Be sure to visit the Emerging Writers Network frequently over the next month: the site has just kicked off its Holiday Shopping Guide; in the EWN’s most recent newsletter, Dan Wickett tells us the guide will feature numerous posts (at least one a […]


Largehearted Lit, with Marie Mutsuki Mockett and Emma Straub

by Anne Stameshkin

NYC-based writers: on Sunday, December 6 at 5 PM, gather for a free and awesome Largehearted Lit event at the Knitting Factory (361 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn). We at FWR are big fans of (and frequent linkers to) David Gutowski’s LargeheartedBoy.com, a music-lit-culture website whose Book Notes column gives established and emerging authors the chance to create and discuss music playlists connected to–or inspired by–their books. Now a new Largehearted Lit series, curated by Brooklyn-based fiction author Jami Attenberg (Instant Love, The Kept Man, The Melting Season), actualizes these playlist interviews into live readings with musical performances. In this interview, David […]


Mentors, Muses, and Monsters event at Greenlight Books

by Anne Stameshkin

NYC-based writers, head to Brooklyn’s newest bookstore, Fort Greene’s Greenlight Books (686 Fulton St., at S. Portland), tonight (Monday, November 23) at 7:30 PM for a special event featuring local authors and the editor of Mentors, Muses, and Monsters, a book that we at FWR are excited to read. This is also the bookstore’s first installment of what promises to be an exciting series of events featuring both authors and lit bloggers. On a personal note, I’m thrilled at Greenlight’s birth, if a bit heartsick that I had to leave Fort Greene about a month before it opened; when I […]


Bestselling authors speak out against big-box discounting

by Celeste Ng

For the past few months, writers at FWR — like those across the literary blogosphere–have been responding to and critiquing the Target-Walmart-Sears-Amazon price-war kerfuffle. Yet outside the publishing and writing worlds, it’s not clear if anyone sees big-box discounting as a Bad Thing; maybe people are too excited about snagging $9 hardback new releases. Recently, though, two big-name authors spoke up about the scary ramifications for emerging writers. In a Big Think talk, John Irving discusses how much harder it is for first-time novelists to get started today, admitting that his first novel would not have been published today. (The […]




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