Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

Best American Short Stories by the numbers

by Celeste Ng

The Millions pointed us to this interesting analysis of the Best American Short Stories series from the blog Years of BASS. Jake, the brain behind Years of BASS, has read all of the collections since the 1978 edition and compiled some statistics. C. Max Magee (of The Millions) reports: Interestingly, Alice Munro, though Canadian, has made the most BASS appearances over the last 30 years by a wide margin with 18 appearances. After her come some more of the leading lights of short fiction: Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike with nine stories each; Mavis Gallant (another Canadian) with eight; […]


NPR's "What We're Reading"

by Celeste Ng

Last week, NPR launched a new feature on its website: “What We’re Reading,” which describes itself as “Staff picks of standout books.” The first installment included Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, Philip Roth’s The Humbling, and Paul Auster’s Invisible. My favorite part of this column, though, is that NPR reporters and hosts chime in with their reactions. Here’s what All Things Considered host Guy Raz had to say about Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Eating Animals: It’s part memoir, part investigative journalism — a departure from what Foer’s done in the past. But he still uses a novelist’s pen. It’s very […]


New Yorkers heart books and satire, want free Times, music

by Celeste Ng

Last week, New York magazine polled 100 pedestrians in SoHo about where they got their information and entertainment and found some encouraging news–at least about books. Of those polled, 67% spent $50 or more on books in the past year; 19% had spent over $250. (By way of comparison, well under half of those surveyed spent $50 or more on music–whether online or on CD–and 63% said they’d be unwilling to pay anything for online access to the New York Times.) Additionally, 90% said they did not own an e-reader like the Kindle or the Nook, and 68% said they […]


Significant Objects

by Celeste Ng

Does having a history makes an object more valuable? Part writing project, part community art, part economic study, the Significant Objects project intends to find out. The project asks writers to invent a story for a thrift-store object–each costing just a few dollars–and then posts the object on eBay, with the fictional story as its description. Past contributors have included Aimee Bender on a seahorse cigarette lighter (final price: $36); Colson Whitehead on a wooden mallet ($71), and Matt Klam on a duck-shaped vase ($15.50). Curtis Sittenfeld’s story about a spotted dog figurine–which bears the motto “Glad I Spotted You!” […]


Tobias Wolff, on the future of the short story

by Celeste Ng

The Morning News has a great interview with Tobias Wolff by Robert Birnbaum. As contemporary writers go, Wolff has a somewhat unusual publication record: he’s published one novel, one novella, and five collections of stories. But dip into any of them and you’ll see why. Wolff can rightly be called a master of the short form, and in the interview, he shares some thoughts on both it and its future: RB: You would think somehow that—this being a hyper-accelerated era where time is so precious to people—that short stories would be more popular; they would be more digestible. People would […]


NYC's first Independent Bookstore Week: Nov. 15-22

by Anne Stameshkin

New York-based writer-readers: next week, the NYCIB is hosting the very first Independent Bookstore Week, featuring day and evening events in indie bookstores across all five boroughs! For a (still-growing) list of events–readings, signings, meals, lectures, discussions, book launch parties, a master class, a midnight costume party, and more–visit the NYCIB’s website. This double-launch party at Unnameable Books sounds particularly insane/intriguing: November 17 MIDNIGHT A never-before-seen, new publication from the posthumous Vladimir N. AND A we’ve-seen-it-all-before, new publication from the maverick Sarah P. THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA by V. Nabokov & GOING ROGUE by S. Palin Dress as your favorite […]


Book World seeks subscribers

by Celeste Ng

Lit journals fold if no one subscribes, and in the digital age, the same goes for podcasts. For the Washington Post‘s Book World series, it’s get subscribers, or get the ax. Ron Charles, deputy editor of the section, explained the dire situation in an interview with Washington City Paper: [T]he paper’s top brass have threatened to kill the section’s podcast if it can’t rally more iTunes subscribers. There’s no concrete deadline for adding more subscribers, Charles says, or even a goal for how many it needs, just “a general mandate to make sure we’re concentrating our efforts on projects that […]


We've got a book for that.

by Celeste Ng

A recent report finds that in the last four months, book apps are now more popular than games on the iPhone. Says the UK’s Telegraph: [I]n the last four months, book apps have exceeded the popularity of games apps – with one out of every five new apps launching in October having been a book. In September, games apps were overtaken by book apps for the first time. The reporting firm, Flurry, suggests that the iPhone might even compete with e-readers like the Kindle. Read the full report here. If you’ve got an iPhone, do you read on it? Now […]


How They Write

by Celeste Ng

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating look at how several writers get down to business–from writing in blue exam books to dressing in character to collage-making. Some highlights: Orhan Pamuk: Mr. Pamuk writes by hand, in graph-paper notebooks, filling a page with prose and leaving the adjacent page blank for revisions, which he inserts with dialogue-like balloons. He sends his notebooks to a speed typist who returns them as typed manuscripts; then he marks the pages up and sends them back to be retyped. Kazuo Ishiguro: Since his novels are written in the first person, the voice is crucial, […]


Uwem Akpan Live Web Event on Monday

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Don’t miss Oprah’s live webcast discussion with Uwem Akpan about his collection Say You’re One of Them this Monday, November 9th, at 9pm EST. The conversation will be simulcast on both Oprah.com and CNN.com, as well as on Facebook. Also be sure to check out Eileen Pollack’s wonderful essay for CNN.com about working with Uwem during his time at The University of Michigan, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing in 2006. In addition to discussing what it was like to have Uwem in the classroom as one of her students, she also describes how her initial hesitancy to […]


Bone on Bone film collaboration

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Earlier this fall, FWR contributor Sarah Van Arsdale was in residence at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in the Santa Cruz mountains. While there, she collaborated with filmmaker Peter Gossweiler on a short video titled Bone on Bone. Sarah calls it “the story of one hapless human’s encounter with modern medicine.” Readers of Sarah’s recent essay “Hobbling Up The Magic Mountain“ will recognize her wonderful illustrations. The wit and humor of her voice as a writer are here again too, highlighted even more so by the fact that Sarah narrates the piece (via Vimeo): The next application deadline for the […]


More on Literary Influences

by Celeste Ng

If you liked Alexander Chee’s essay on studying with Annie Dillard, rejoice. There’s more where that came from. Chee’s piece is part of the just-published anthology Mentors, Muses and Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, edited by Elizabeth Benedict (Simon & Schuster, Oct. 2009). I love hearing about how writers interact with other writers and what lessons–positive or negative–they gleaned from their teachers, so I can’t wait to read this. Here are some additional sneak peeks: “The Scholars and the Pornographer”: Carolyn See on her father, who turned to writing pornography at the age of 70, […]




Literary Partners