The Story Prize Goes to… George Saunders!
by Jackie Reitzes
I was lucky enough to attend on behalf of FWR, and the evening was pretty magical—the-Oscars-meets-Inside-the-Actors-Studio of short-story collections.
I was lucky enough to attend on behalf of FWR, and the evening was pretty magical—the-Oscars-meets-Inside-the-Actors-Studio of short-story collections.
It was October 2005, and professionally and personally, I was rudderless. Where had I gone wrong? In the preceding two years, I’d finished serving my grad school sentence and been released from Boulder. Back in Chicago, the city in which I’d grown up, I’d taken a one-bedroom apartment in a baseball-sodden neighborhood with scant street parking. I was halfheartedly teaching some community college comp and developmental reading courses (my sole qualification for getting the unclaimed developmental reading assignment: my willingness to take the teacher’s edition and my vow to learn something in the days before I’d have to face the […]
Today is a very special day indeed: the relaunch of FWR 2.0! We are excited to introduce these new features:
Hey, Park Rangers. Echoing the bold everlasting words of narration in Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love, “What a Midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on his sleeve, in plain sight,” I wanted to share some stories I loved from last year. There’s quite a bit of corny, unapologetic and Hallmark-y content in mid-February, and it can make any toiled romance feel heightened for unnecessary reasons. I know you’re smart enough to not place all your chips in the same stack. Of course I’m getting at sleeping around. It can’t be just […]
Something I often heard in my experience as an MFA student was that one should write “painfully slow,” making every sentence count by tinkering with each word before moving on to the next one. In short: the story stalls, or never soars. The sentence is god. Typically, creative writing courses focus on the language of scene, character, plot, and dialogue the way we learn the parts of speech. This is the predicate; it should follow the subject sounds incredibly similar to This is the denouement; it should follow the climax. Even at the graduate level, workshops expend their energy with […]
Steve Wingate urges fiction writers to write prose poetry, in an attempt to return to the proto-writer inside—that self that loves words simply for the sake of language itself.
Busch was an incredibly important and influential author and teacher prior to his death in 2006, and a voice of contemporary fiction who we are happy to have the opportunity to honor in a small way.
Last week’s feature was Kelcey Parker’s novellla, Liliane’s Balcony, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Kim Triedman (@kimtriedman) Jill Hughes (@JillSHughes) Jean-Marie (@JeanMarieMaier) Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us! Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!
This week’s feature is Kelcey Parker’s new book, Liliane’s Balcony, which was published this fall by Rose Metal Press. Parker’s story collection, For Sale by Owner (Kore Press), won the 2011 Next Generation Indie Book Award in Short Fiction and was a finalist for the 2012 Best Books of Indiana in Fiction. She is the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission and a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Her stories have appeared in numerous literary journals including Notre Dame Review, Bellingham Review, Santa Monica Review, Indiana Review, Third Coast, Redivider, Western Humanities Review, […]
This week’s feature is Kelcey Parker’s new book, Liliane’s Balcony, which was published this fall by Rose Metal Press. Parker’s story collection, For Sale by Owner (Kore Press), won the 2011 Next Generation Indie Book Award in Short Fiction and was a finalist for the 2012 Best Books of Indiana in Fiction. She is the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission and a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Her stories have appeared in numerous literary journals including Notre Dame Review, Bellingham Review, Santa Monica Review, Indiana Review, Third Coast, Redivider, Western Humanities Review, […]
Editor’s Note: The Hopwood Room Roundtable is a weekly event in which visiting writers of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing discuss their work and the writing life with the University of Michigan’s student body, faculty, and the local literary community. Inside the Hopwood Room, friends and colleagues caught up over coffee and cookies, discussing avalanche survival tactics and personal rules about never living in alligator-populated states, awaiting the main event: an in-the-flesh Genius. When Karen Russell—novelist, short story writer, MacArthur Genius Fellow, and probably the most easy-to-be-around and gracious person you’ll ever encounter—entered the room, which was […]
