Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

DISPATCH FROM BREAD LOAF #1: What I (Heard) Read This Summer

by Celeste Ng

I was lucky enough to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont this summer, as a tuition scholar, and I’m still processing all that I learned. In the 12 days I spent on the mountain, I heard 101 people read in 24 separate readings. I attended 5 workshop sessions, 5 lectures, 3 craft classes, and countless cocktail hours. And I’m still kicking myself for not doing more. But I guess that’s part of the experience. Bread Loaf is an exercise in excess: a positive glut of new ideas and voices and inspirations. I left completely overstimulated, with a stack […]


Reading Rainbow snuffed out by short-sighted, phonics-loving imagination killers

by Anne Stameshkin

Apparently getting kids excited about books isn’t worth funding. It’s better to focus on the “mechanics” of reading because, you know, that will definitely instill the next generation with a passion for it. **head explodes** Via NPR: The show’s [26-year] run is ending, Grant explains, because no one — not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights. Grant says the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in […]


writing time

by Anne Stameshkin

J. Robert Lennon, whose story collection Pieces for the Left Hand will be reviewed on FWR later this fall–and who was recommended highly to our readers by Lydia Davis–recently made this fantastic confession on behalf of all writers. We don’t spend much time writing. There. It’s out. Writers, by and large, do not do a great deal of writing. We may devote a large number of hours per day to writing, yes, but very little of that time is spent typing the words of a poem, essay or story into a computer or scribbling them onto a piece of paper. […]


Andrew's Book Club: September Collections

by Anne Stameshkin

This month, Andrew’s UP pick is Triple Time (U of Pittsburgh Press), Anne Sanow‘s debut collection of linked stories about life in modern Saudi Arabia and 2009 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Via the author’s website: For Jill, a young American living in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, life is in “a holding pattern” of long days in a restrictive place—”sandlocked nowhere,” as another expat calls it. Others don’t know how to leave, and try to adopt the country as their own. And to those who were born there, the changes seem to come at warp speed: Thurayya, […]


Miles from Nowhere's Paperback Tour

by Anne Stameshkin

The paperback edition of Nami Mun‘s Orange Prize-nominated debut novel-in-stories, Miles from Nowhere, will publish Tuesday, September 1, 2009. And Chicago magazine just named Nami Best New Novelist in their “Best of Chicago” feature. Here’s my own reviewlet of the hardcover: Miles from Nowhere began as a collection of linked stories (two of which I had the pleasure to read in workshop at Michigan). As a novel, the chapter-stories work together beautifully; Miles remains episodic, but breaks between chapters feel hauntingly like lost years…perfect for this particular story. Set in New York City in the 1980s, the book follows a […]


The Great Geek Giveaway Contest

by Anne Stameshkin

On Monday, FWR will publish Sophie Powell’s review of Ethan Gilsdorf‘s memoir-adventure hybrid Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. In the meantime, this contest on the author’s website sounds fun. Click on that link for all the details, but here’s a snippet: What is your geekiest secret? Your freakiest fandom moment? Your most embarrassing gaming gaffe? In a brief essay, photo or video, we want you to spill the beans. The folks at Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks Headquarters want to know about that time you stalked your favorite Star Trek celebrity to a coffee shop, made a pilgrimage to a […]


Margaret Atwood's book tour / fundraiser / theatre piece

by Anne Stameshkin

To promote her new novel, The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood will be touring five countries and thirty-five cities, performing staged readings with trios of local actors who will also sing some of the book’s original hymns (set to music). A number of these events will also serve as fundraisers for BirdLife International. Here’s the author’s own take on the project (via the Times Online), and you can follow the tour’s progress on her blog and Twitter. Atwood gracefully owns “book tour overkill,” joking that “[t]wittering, or is it tweeting?” is actually quite “appropriate for a bird-saving project!” In […]


Jeffrey E. Smith Editor's Prize

by Anne Stameshkin

The Missouri Review‘s Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize Three winners, one per genre (poetry, fiction, and nonfiction) will each receive $5,000 and publication in the journal. Finalists will receive $100 and be considered for publication. Submission info: You can enter online or by mail. There is a fee of $20 per submission, but this includes a one-year subscription to the journal, and entrants can choose between the print edition or the new digital format; the latter offers additional audio content and leaves a smaller carbon footprint. Submissions should be no longer than 25 pages of poetry or prose. Deadline: October […]


while we're talking book clubs…

by Anne Stameshkin

Politico.com is calling Obama “the next Oprah.” The president’s widely circulated summer reading list seems to have given every book on it a huge bump in sales, as indicated by these Amazon rankings (stats are via Politico) BEFORE = on Monday, before Obama’s list was released / AFTER = as of Wednesday): – The Way Home by George Pelecanos — BEFORE: no. 33,349 / AFTER: no. 328 – Lush Life, by Richard Price — BEFORE: no. 74,289 / AFTER: no. 10,295 – Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman — BEFORE: no. 231 / AFTER: no. 41 – John Adams […]


[rumors] Might Say You're One of Them be the next Oprah pick?

by Anne Stameshkin

This is strictly gossip at this point, but another FWR contributor whispered in my virtual ear that the debut collection by our friend and former classmate Uwem Akpan has a shot at being the next Oprah’s Book Club selection. Others across the blogosphere are also betting on Say You’re One of Them as a strong possibility: Thom Geier at Entertainment Weekly (who named the debut collection the top fiction title of 2008), Gwen Dawson at Literary License, and Ron Hogan at Media Bistro, who points out that Oprah has never picked a short story collection before. (On Twitter, Oprah’s clues […]


co-muse-ing: We Are the Friction

by Anne Stameshkin

Lee just sent me this link (from DesignSponge) about We Are the Friction, a new book featuring stories by twenty-four authors and illustrations by twenty-four artists. But this is no typical collection: its contributors were paired up specifically to inspire work from each other…to illustrate a writer’s story or put words to an artist’s illustration. This is the second book project from UK-based Sing Statistics‘ co-editors (and contributors) Jez Burrows and Lizzy Stewart, who describe We Are the Friction as “an erratic, eclectic collection of work that takes in space travel, Japanese deities, monster husbandry, and the Marx Brothers. We […]


when writers stop drinking (or start taking meds, or start reading Peter Kramer)

by Anne Stameshkin

While doing research for his debut novel, In the Rooms (about a literary agent named Patrick Miller who feigns, in the tradition of Dexter and Fight Club, an addiction as a means to an end…in this case, signing a literary legend), Tom Shone studied the effects of sobering up (or not) on some famous writers, as well as their widely differing attitudes toward recovery, rehab, and programs like AA. Here are some of his findings in this essay for Intelligent Life magazine. A couple of, er, tastes: Cheever emerged from rehab a different man, 20 pounds lighter, feeling 20 years […]




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