Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

Buy a book for a public school library!

by Anne Stameshkin

Via Jeffrey Rotter: ReadThis is a great organization “devoted to promoting access to books and reading wherever needed.” Among other projects, they helped create a library last spring for the public middle/high school Brooklyn Collegiate. Now you can help stock this library by clicking here and buying a book (chosen by the school to fill gaps) from Book Culture for for its collection. ReadThis will pay shipping, and the bookstore will donate 15% of sales for each book back to the school as a donation. In one swoop you’ll be supporting a library and an independent bookstore. Geri Ellner, Library […]


Sirenland 2010: workshop your writing in Italy

by Anne Stameshkin

So…who wants to spend a week with One Story magazine at this hotel in Positano, Italy, engaging in a series of advanced fiction- and memoir-writing workshops with Dani Shapiro, Jim Shepard, and Ron Carlson; giving and attending readings; and dining with a view of the Tirreno Sea? Submissions are open from now through October 31 for the third annual Sirenland Writers Conference (March 21-27, 2010). As someone lucky enough to have been workshopped by Shepard once, I urge other writers to jump at any chance to discuss work with him! Visit the Sirenland website to learn more about the conference […]


at the cocktail party, with the birds

by Anne Stameshkin

As you can see on the left sidebar, FWR is now Twitterpated (name: “fictionwriters”). Come follow us… I had mixed feelings at first about tweeting. It’s one thing to offer readers detours and chances to read more about an author, book, or issue via hyperlinks, but as an all-volunteer labor-of-love site, did we really need to maintain multiple online presences? There seemed something homey and focused — and time-efficient — about just being and not tweeting about it. But ultimately, we’d love to let more readers know about us, to reach out to new potential writers, and to establish more […]


Dispatch from Bread Loaf #3: Maud Casey on Historical Fiction

by Celeste Ng

Toward the end of the conference, I was seriously overstimulated and running on an average of 5 hours of sleep per night. But the title alone of Maud Casey’s lecture, “The Secret History: The Power of Imagined Figures in Historical Fiction,” lured me out of bed that very last morning. Although I haven’t yet written any historical fiction myself, I’m especially interested in the space where the fictional meets the real, and how writers balance the responsibilities they have toward historical fact with the responsibilities they have toward emotional and aesthetic truths. Casey’s lecture was more than worth the lack […]


Happy 30th Birthday, Square Books!

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Square Books, the famed independent bookstore in Oxford, Mississippi, celebrates three decades in business this month. Festivities began last Thursday, September 10th, with a special program on Thacker Mountain Radio, which broadcasts a live show made up of “literary readings and an eclectic mix of musical performances” each week from Off Square Books. This most recent one featured musical guests King Curly and Sanders Bohlke, as well as a reading by John Brandon, the current John Grisham writer in residence at Ole Miss. John received his MFA from Washington University, in St. Louis. His first novel, Arkansas, was recently published […]


[reviewlet rewind] She Got Up Off the Couch, by Haven Kimmel

by Katie Umans

Reviewlets give FWR contributors the chance to recommend books of all genres that other fiction writers might enjoy. Reviewlet Rewinds like this one highlight books published more than two years ago, and Reviewlet Classics refer to books published more than twenty years ago. At first I was not so sure about She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana (Free Press, 2005), the sequel/companion to Haven Kimmel‘s A Girl Named Zippy. She Got Up seemed like outtakes from its predecessor, and the aw shucks introduction justifying a sequel worried me. (“I didn’t expect much from […]


[reviewlet rewind] A Girl Named Zippy, by Haven Kimmel

by Katie Umans

Reviewlets give FWR contributors the chance to recommend books of all genres that other fiction writers might enjoy. Reviewlet Rewinds (like this one) highlight books published more than two years ago, and Reviewlet Classics refer to books published more than twenty years ago. You know that moment in life when you realize that stories of the things that loomed large in childhood — your terror of the woman who lives next door or your absolute certainty that some of the playing cards in a deck are female and some, male — can be condensed, as if through a trash compactor, […]


recommended event: short plays by Brian Bartels

by Anne Stameshkin

NYC-based writers: On Tuesday, September 22 at 7 PM, head to the Rattlestick Theater to see a one-night only reading of Mulletfingers: Short Plays on Hands and Fingers by FWR contributor Brian Bartels. I was lucky enough to attend another night of Brian’s hilarious yet thought-provoking plays, Versus, in March, and the short pieces resonated together like a stories in a thematically linked collection. The Rattlestick is located at 224 Waverly Place (2nd Floor). Break a leg, Brian and company!


recommended event: The Brooklyn Book Festival

by Anne Stameshkin

This Sunday, I’ll sadly be driving away from Brooklyn, but if you’re lucky enough to live in or near King’s County, check out this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival. Where: Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza When: Sunday, Sept. 13 from 10 AM – 6 PM What: A book fair surrounded by a variety of wonderful events — readings, panels, interviews, tributes, literary quiz games, film screenings, a comics jam, and workshops in book-making and cartooning. All events are free, but some require that you reserve space by picking up tickets one hour before the event at one of the info booths […]


recommended site: Lit Drift

by Anne Stameshkin

New on the lit blog scene is the very fun Lit Drift, a self-described “resource and community dedicated to the art & craft of storytelling in the 21st century.” Our name is a nod to how traditional forms of storytelling are, well, drifting into forms wholly new and unexpected. We’re interested in sifting through the palimpsests known as the Internet, the arts, and the in-between to uncover those new forms and techniques in constructing fiction. We believe that literature should be fun in an age when it’s only too easy to turn on the TV and watch shitcoms instead. We […]


Dispatch from Bread Loaf #2: On Lushness, Irony, and Honesty

by Celeste Ng

At Bread Loaf, the first thing people asked–after “What’s your name?”–was often “What genre do you write?” There wasn’t any great divide between poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers, but somehow it seemed important to know. Maybe this is because we tend to think of our genres as very different forms with very different concerns and goals. I can’t count how many times I heard fiction writers say, “But I don’t know anything about poetry…” and poets say, “Well, I don’t get plot.” But actually, I think that poets and fiction writers have more overlap than they often believe. A […]


impulse buy: Gourmet Rhaposdy by Muriel Barbery

by Anne Stameshkin

On Thursday I emerged from a fog of editing work and serious reading in need of a pick-me-up, so I headed to Borders, hoping to get my hands on that much-hyped smeary deliciousness known as “Me and Mrs. Palin.” Alas — it’s in the October, not September, issue of Vanity Fair, and since I’m no longer a New Yorker, I’ll have to wait until Sept. 8 to buy a copy. To assuage my (embarrassing) disappointment, I reminded myself that I was in a bookstore, a struggling one at that. Never mind the towering to-read pile of books on my nightstand: […]




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