Suspend Your Disbelief

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Book-of-the-Week Winners: We Need New Names

by The Editors

Last week’s feature was NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut, We Need New Names, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Laurie Hertzel (@StribBooks) Bailey Lewis (@baileysendsword) Goldie (@gracieamara) 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!


"A Physical Link into the World of the Fictional"

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

For the last several years, we’ve periodically explored the intersections between fiction and video games in these pixilated pages–they are, after all, both narrative art forms. Back in 2009, we published Christine Hartzler’s “Games Are Not About Monsters,” which was subsequently anthologized in Dzanc’s 2010 Best of the Web. In 2010, Mike Rudin argued that the Next Great American Novel just might be a video game (heresy!). And in 2011, Celeste Ng wondered, along with the Guardian, “Why aren’t more novelists weren’t writing vido games?” Most recently, James Pinto sat down in March for an interview with Tom Bissell, who […]


Book of the Week: We Need New Names, by NoViolet Bulawayo

by The Editors

This week’s feature is NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names, which was just published by Reagan Arthur Books. Bulawayo’s stories have won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing and were shortlisted for the 2009 SA PEN Studzinsi Award, judged by J.M. Coetzee. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, she earned her MFA at Cornell University, where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship, and, most recently, a lecturer of English. Bulawayo is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. In the introduction to Rebecca Scherm’s review of We Need New Names, she writes: NoViolet Bulawayo’s […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: The Consummation of Dirk

by The Editors

Last week’s feature was Jonathan Callahan’s debut, The Consummation of Dirk, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Raekha (@Raekha) Courtney Taddonio (@ctaddonio) Pedro Ramirez (@pedritpab1231) 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!


Guilty (Dis)Pleasures: 3 Things I Just Can’t Get Into

by Celeste Ng

Do you remember a while back when goat cheese became a Huge Culinary Thing? And it started appearing everywhere—on pizzas, in salads, in ice cream, even in cheesecakes. Everyone I knew loved it. “Try it,” they kept telling me. “It’s so delicious.” But when I did, I couldn’t stand it. “Try it again,” they’d say, the next dinner out. “You know, it takes 10 times before your taste buds really decide if they like something.” They were so excited about it, and loved it so much, that I really, really, really wanted to like goat cheese. But I just didn’t. […]


Book of the Week: The Consummation of Dirk, by Jonathan Callahan

by The Editors

This week’s feature is Jonathan Callahan’s debut collection The Consummation of Dirk, which was selected by judge Zachary Mason as the winner of Starcherone Press’s 8th Prize for Innovative Fiction and has just been released by Starcherone, an imprint of Dzanc. Callahan’s fiction has appeared in The Collagist, Pank, Unsaid, Witness, The Lifted Brow, Quarterly West, Keyhole, >Kill Author, Used Furniture Review, Western Humanities Review, Underwater New York, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. Essays on Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, Don DeLillo, Rick Moody, LeBron James, and David Foster Wallace can be found in The Collagist, Wag’s Revue, and here at Fiction […]


Journal-of-the-Week Winners: Slice Magazine

by The Editors

Last week’s feature was Slice Magazine, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Shelly Roberts (@shelly_roberts) Dana Staves (@DanaStaves) Mindy Fulroth (@equineaurora) 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 and journals out there!


Under the Influence: Around the Campfire of Literature with James Salter’s Opening Paragraphs

by Joshua Bodwell

“Above all, it must be compelling,” James Salter told the Paris Review in 1993 when asked about his idea of the short story. “You’re sitting around the campfire of literature, so to speak, and various voices speak up out of the dark and begin talking. With some, your mind wanders or you doze off, but with others you are held by every word. The first line, the first sentence, the first paragraph, all have to compel you.” Long before I ever read those remarks by Salter, I’d already come under the influence of his short stories and, in particular, his […]


Stories We Love |

Stories We Love: “The Archetypes Girlfriend” by Elizabeth Crane

by Nick Ostdick

I’m not the kind of bibliophile who owns multiple copies of the same book—first editions, paperbacks, reprints, limited editions, and so on. I’ve never really had the living space to accommodate such a habit, but more over my books are littered with margin notes, end notes, notes for stories I’m working on, notes for stories I want to work on, so many red and blue-inked annotations that purchasing a new copy of Salinger’s Nine Stories or Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago would feel like cheating on the marked-up copies, betraying some long-term, intimate relationship. So there was no reason to […]


Stories We Love |

Stories We Love: “A Father’s Story” by Andre Dubus

by Michael Hinken

Any story I consider a favorite stirs up in me feelings of envy and wonder. “A Father’s Story,” by Andre Dubus, has this effect. On the first count, it’s the I-sure-wish-I’d-written-that moment. If you write and if you read, you know this feeling. Think early motivations. Maybe that feeling—we could dress it up and call it admiration, but that seems too mild—led you to write in the first place. Envy being the mother of imitation, maybe, hypothetically, it led you to write a story about a vampire gerbil that sucked fruit white. Gerbacula. Maybe you are very, very sorry about […]


Journal of the Week: Slice Magazine

by The Editors

This week’s feature is Slice Magazine, which was co-founded and remains co-published by Maria Gagliano and Celia Blue Johnson. The two launched their Brooklyn-based literary magazine in 2007, back when they were both twenty-three-year-olds working long hours in the demanding publishing industry and dreaming big dreams about running a magazine. Today, Gagliano and Johnson are both accomplished editors, publishers, and writers. The current issue of Slice features work by two of FWR’s Contributing Editors: Joshua Bodwell and Steve Wingate. So FWR’s editors sat down with Gagliano and Johnson to chat. In response to a question about the diversity of the […]




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