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Book of the Week: Little Raw Souls, by Steven Schwartz

by The Editors

Our current feature is Steven Schwartz”s newest collection, Little Raw Souls, which was published last week by Pittsburgh-based indie press Autumn House. Schwartz teaches in the residential MFA program at Colorado State University and the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Recently, he has become fiction editor at Colorado Review. He is the author of two story collections, To Leningrad in Winter (University of Missouri) and Lives of the Fathers (University of Illinois), and two novels, Therapy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and A Good Doctor’s Son (William Morrow). His fiction has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: Tell Everyone I Said Hi

by The Editors

Our most recent feature was Chad Simpson’s debut collection Tell Everyone I Said Hi, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Melanie Jennings (@mjennings26) Marisa Birns (@marisabirns) Turtleberry (@turtleberry) 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!


Fiction Writers Review Guilty Pleasure Reads Confessionals

by The Editors

Airports. Vacation spots. Subway commutes. Sunday. For whatever reason, even into the most well-read literary life a little twaddle reading does fall. At the risk of surrendering any and all professional credibility, the Fiction Writers Review editorial staff kindly confessed to their favorite guilty pleasure reads. And they don’t plan on giving them up for their New Year’s resolution. Brandon (Assistant Editor): Slog comments. Someone from NPR once said, “online comments are the digital equivalent of the loudest drunk in the bar.” The Slog, Seattle’s cleverly vulgar news and culture blog, gets pretty surly around closing time (especially when race […]


Stories We Love: "Christmas Eve"

by Brandon Bye

The afternoon I sat in a lawn chair on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street in front of my house reading Maeve Brennan’s “Christmas Eve” a gang of basketball players wearing flashing neon onesies, singing “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” could have committed an armed robbery on my neighbor’s house—and if we’re to venture further down the path of hyperbole, their get away car would have been a hot air balloon—and I would have failed to notice the entire event. It was August 8, 2009, my mother’s birthday. She would have been 60, my […]


Book of the Week: Tell Everyone I Said Hi, by Chad Simpson

by The Editors

Our current feature is Chad Simpson’s debut collection, Tell Everyone I Said Hi, which was the winner of the 2012 John Simmons Short Fiction Award from The University of Iowa Press. Chad was raised in Monmouth, Illinois, and Logansport, Indiana. His stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, The Sun, Esquire, Barrelhouse, American Short Fiction, and many other print and online publications. He also is the author of a chapbook of short fiction, Phantoms, published by Origami Zoo Press in 2010. A recipient of an Illinois Arts Council fellowship in prose, he teaches at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: The Beach at Galle Road

by The Editors

Our most recent feature was Joanna Luloff’s debut collection The Beach at Galle Road, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Abraham Hidalgo (@Abraham_Hidalgo) emmjae (@emmjaepenniman) KellyMHart (@KellyMHart) 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!


First Looks, December 2012: BBC International Short Story Award and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

by Erika Dreifus

Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the latest installment of our “First Looks” series, which highlights soon-to-be released books that have piqued my interest as a reader-who-writes. We publish “First Looks” here on the FWR blog around the 15th of each month, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments and your recommendations of forthcoming titles. Please drop me a line anytime: erika(at)fictionwritersreview(dot)com, and thanks in advance. I don’t recall when or where I first heard about Ayana Mathis’s debut novel, but it was well before Oprah anointed it as her latest book-club pick. Kirkus is describing it as a […]




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