Suspend Your Disbelief

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Book-of-the-Week Winners: The Peripatetic Coffin

by The Editors

Last week’s feature was Ethan Rutherford’s debut collection, The Peripatetic Coffin, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Will McClure (@WillMcClure) Elizabeth Eaves (@ElisabethEaves) Trisha Ellen (@TrishaEllen1) 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!


Stories We Love |

Stories We Love: "Revenge," by Ellen Gilchrist

by Rebecca Scherm

“Raised on Southern manners, I thrill at the way Gilchrist foxtrots through tea-sipping customs while exposing all manner of prejudice through her narrator, ten-year-old Rhoda, who absorbs the language of the adults around her and then spits it back at them indiscriminately”: Rebecca Scherm explores the power of child narrators through Ellen Gilchrist’s story “Revenge.”


The Unsaid Meaning of Writing: Don’t Write

by Urban Waite

On a recent trip out of New York, headed home to Seattle, where my wife and I share a house and also where much of my writing is done, I found myself on the jet-way leading from the terminal to the airplane. The passengers were backed up single-file along the tunnel, not in any uniform way, but in that impatient, lean to the right then lean to the left then look down the row toward where they should have been five minutes before kind of way. It’s intimate in a way only elevators are intimate. Everyone so close you can […]


Stories We Love |

Stories We Love: "A Voice in the Night," by Steven Millhauser

by Lee Thomas

“Somewhere by the second page, I realized my early questions hardly mattered. Something marvelous and magical had begun to unspool across the page and hang-ups about structure or how much autobiography a reader could assume were wholly irrelevant”: Lee Thomas on the rules Steven Millhauser’s “A Voice in the Night” defies.


Book of the Week: The Peripatetic Coffin, by Ethan Rutherford

by The Editors

This week’s feature is Ethan Rutherford’s debut collection, The Peripatetic Coffin, which was published earlier this month by Ecco. Ethan Rutherford was born in Seattle, and now lives in the Midwest. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, New York Tyrant, Esopus, Five Chapters, and The Best American Short Stories. He received his MFA from the University of Minnesota, and has taught creative writing at Macalester College, the University of Minnesota, and the Loft Literary Center. He is the guitarist for the band Pennyroyal. He is currently at work on a novel set […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: What You Are Now Enjoying

by The Editors

Last week’s feature was Sarah Gerkensmeyer’s debut collection, What You Are Now Enjoying, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Carabella Sands (@CarabellaSands) Mary Weber (@mchristineweber) E.B. Wilkes (@WilkesPoetry) 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 Story Sung: Why Fiction Writers Should Read Poetry

Any writer who desires to get at the truth of human experience should read poetry, because it contains a multitude of possibility. Poetry is the mud that grows the seed that becomes the forest. It is the clay that makes the brick that forms the building. It is the blood that moves the body that holds the spirit. Poetry has the essence of life in it. Poets voice that which has no voice in this world. They speak in tongues, and hope their words reach the ears and touch the hearts of those who know what it means to live. […]


First Looks, Buzz Books: May 2013

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the latest installment of “First Looks,” which highlights soon-to-be (or just) released books that have piqued our interest as readers-who-write. We publish “First Looks” here on the FWR blog around the 15th of each month, and as always, we’d love to hear your comments and your recommendations of forthcoming titles. So please drop us a line with buzz-worthy titles you’re anticipating: editors(at)fictionwritersreview(dot)com. Thanks in advance! Though we devote the entire month of May to celebrating short stories, there are still plenty of great collections that slip through the cracks. I guess it’s a good […]


Book of the Week: What You Are Now Enjoying, by Sarah Gerkensmeyer

by The Editors

This week’s feature is Sarah Gerkensmeyer’s debut collection, What You Are Now Enjoying, which was selected by Stewart O’Nan as winner of the 2012 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize and has been longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. A Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and the Italo Calvino Prize for Fabulist Fiction, Sarah has received scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Ragdale, Grub Street, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her stories have appeared in Guernica, The New Guard, The Massachusetts Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Cream […]




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