Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

Critterati: the literary, costumed pet

by Anne Stameshkin

I’ve been meaning to post about the Book Bench‘s whimsical dress-up-your-pet-as-literary-character Critterati contest for several days, but there have been technical difficulties. Namely, my cat, Mr. Oliver Dash Stameshkin-Zook, has proved resistant to dressing up as Dickensian orphan Oliver Twist. Blood was shed; there may even be scars. What there isn’t, sadly, is a photograph of Oliver in a Newsies cap, looking expectantly up at me from an empty food bowl. Please sir, can I have some more? He was willing to show his love for the dictionary, however, so perhaps he prefers The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee? […]


it's okay to be scary…and scared

by Celeste Ng

One last take on Where The Wild Things Are: its author, Maurice Sendak, has some advice for parents who think the book is too scary for kids: “I would tell them to go to hell,” Sendak said. And if children can’t handle the story, they should “go home,” he added. “Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it’s not a question that can be answered.” In a bracingly unsentimental interview with Newsweek, Sendak, director Spike Jonze, and screenwriter Dave Eggers discuss why Max’s dinner is “still hot” and not “still warm,” why he believes Disney is bad for […]


Less is More

by Celeste Ng

Earlier this year, the New York Times profiled the writing space of novelist Roxana Robinson. Robinson lives on the Upper East Side near Park Avenue and has a study that would seem the ideal lair for a novelist. This room […] combines all the necessities of 21st-century life — computer, printer, fax machine — with immense personality, thanks to dozens of works of art and memorabilia that paint an indelible portrait of Ms. Robinson and the richly textured world she inhabits. Instead, however, she chooses to write “in an 8-by-10 space that faces a tan brick wall and was formerly […]


Wild Things Roundup

by Celeste Ng

Maurice Sendak’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are is nearly 50 years old, but the release of Spike Jonze’s film adaptation has sparked a resurgence of critical interpretations of the story. A sampling: On the Oxford University Press blog, philosophy professor Stephen T. Asma ties our love for Where the Wild Things Are to our fascination with other monsters–“zombies, vampires, and serial killers”: As the movie’s trailer reminds us, “Inside all of us is a wild thing.” And in our therapeutic era, we generally accept that it is good and healthy to visit our wild things –to let them […]


Boston Book Festival – This Weekend!

by Celeste Ng

Boston-area FWR readers, check out the Boston Book Festival THIS Saturday, October 24, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm at Copley Square. The festival features readings, lectures, and discussions such as: Keynote speaker Orhan Pamuk “Ties That Bind”: novelists Richard Russo, Michael Thomas, and Elinor Lipman on the family in fiction John Hodgman interviewed by Tom Perrotta “Book Worms and Net Crawlers”: thoughts on “the ubiquitous internet and the explosion of social media” by authors Ben Mezrich and Ethan Gilsdorf and New York Times technology columnist David Pogue. (Read the FWR review of Ethan’s book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, here.) […]


McSweeney's 33: Litmag Meets News

by Celeste Ng

McSweeney’s next issue will be packaged in the form of an old-fashioned newspaper. The New York Times‘s ArtsBeat reports: McSweeney’s No. 33 is to be in the form of a daily broadsheet — a big, old-fashioned broadsheet. The pages will measure 22 by 15 inches. (Pages of The New York Times, by comparison, are 22 by 11 1/2 inches.) Called San Francisco Panorama, the editors say it is, in large part, homage to an institution that they feel, contrary to conventional wisdom, still has a lot of life in it. Their experience in publishing literary fiction is something of a […]


I Can't Go On, I'll Go On

by Celeste Ng

Junot Diaz has a powerful and inspiring essay in O Magazine about writing his Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Though the piece is titled “Becoming a Writer,” it’s really an account of almost giving up on writing and, inexorably, being drawn back to it: Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn’t been pretty damn cool. But they were cool, showed a lot of promise. Would also have been fine if I could have just jumped to something else. But […]


Rolling back prices, indeed—Wal-Mart and Amazon in preorder price war for this season’s new hardcovers

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

In the Arts section of today’s New York Times, Motoko Rich reports on the “tit-for-tat price war between Wal-Mart and Amazon [that] accelerated late on Friday afternoon when Wal-Mart shaved another cent off its already rock-bottom prices for hardcover editions of some of the coming holiday season’s biggest potential best sellers, offering them online for $8.99 apiece.” Originally the company had intended to sell these selected books at $10, but Amazon, perhaps feeling threatened by Wal-Mart’s foray into the online retail market, retaliated by lowering their prices on the same titles to a mere $9. So Wal-Mart responded in kind, […]


Furnishings of a literary life

by Celeste Ng

How often do we think about our books as physical objects, part of the essential furniture of our homes? The Elegant Variation has a lovely little post about the joy of setting up one’s library again after a move: So now the arduous task of refilling the books begins. First, we need to douse the whole collection to protect against silverfish (also at Mrs. TEV’s insistence). Then I need to incorporate new additions to my library into the boxes packed more than a year ago, and figure out exactly how to order the whole thing. (The previous arrangement could politely […]


2009 National Book Award finalists: "strangers" no more

by Anne Stameshkin

For the Star Tribune, Laurie Hertzel comments on this year’s remarkably un-famous crop of fiction finalists; many seemed dark horses next to literary legends like Margaret Atwood, Kazsuo Ishiguro, Lorrie Moore, and John Irving — each of whom published new books this fall, and none of whom made the list. To get better acquainted with the work of one finalist, here’s an excerpt from Column McCann’s Let the Great World Spin.


P&W: Top 50 creative writing programs, and a conversation with Jonathan Karp

by Anne Stameshkin

The numbers are in…and the top 50 creative writing MFA programs are ranked in the new issue of Poets & Writers. Here’s an excerpt from the accompanying article by Seth Abramson, who compiled the list based on extensive research. (Note: The full article is available only in the print edition.) Abramson admits the difficulties of quantifying and comparing MFA program experiences: [T]he evils of educational rankings are indeed legion and do urge caution on the part of any prospective analyst of MFA programs. At base it is impossible to quantify or predict the experience any one MFA candidate will have […]


National Book Award Finalists Announced

by Celeste Ng

The National Book Foundation has announced the 2009 National Book Award Finalists. Here are the contenders in fiction: Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press) Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House) Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W. W. Norton & Co.) Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf) Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) The complete list, as well as other fun stats and figures, can be found here. Winners will be announced on November 18 at the 60th National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony in New York. […]




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