Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

Book of the Week: The Beach at Galle Road, by Joanna Luloff

Our new feature is Joanna Luloff’s debut collection, The Beach at Galle Road, which was published this fall by Algonquin Books. Luloff received her MFA from Emerson College and her PhD from the University of Missouri. Prior to graduate school, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Baddegama, Sri Lanka. Her short stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Confrontation, Memorious, and New South. She is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Potsdam. In Tyler McMahon’s recent review of Luloff’s collection, the stories of which take place in Sri Lanka, he writes: The author lived and worked in […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: Dare Me

Our most recent feature was Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Peter Mountford (@PeterMountford) Alan Heathcock (@alanheathcock) Gina Ardito (@GinaArdito) 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!


Book of the Week: Dare Me, by Megan Abbott

Our current feature is Megan Abbott’s new novel, Dare Me, which was published earlier this year by Reagan Arthur Books. She is also the Edgar-winning author of the novels Queenpin, The Song Is You, Die a Little, Bury Me Deep, and The End of Everything. Dare Me is a crime novel set in the world of competitive high school cheerleading. It has been short-listed for the Steel Dagger Award for the Crime Writers’ Association and optioned for a feature film by Fox 2000. Abbott’s writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Believer, […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: The Lighthouse Road

Our most recent feature was Peter Geye’s The Lighthouse Road, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Benjamin Verdi (@BenjaminVerdi ) Jeremy Barker (@ZombieBarker) Fritz Swanson (@fritzswanson ) 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!


Thoughts from the Hopwood Room |

Thoughts From the Hopwood Room: David Mitchell, Bird Migration, and the Writing Process

The Hopwood room roundtable is a weekly event in which established writers discourse with the University of Michigan’s student body, faculty, and anyone in the area who is interested in writing and reading. Last week David Mitchell was in town as the University of Michigan Zell distinguished writer in residence. As the writer in residence, Mitchell sat in for a roundtable discussion in the Hopwood room, a room he described endearingly as a Harry Potterish, cult leader’s den. For an hour, he fielded questions from writers, teachers, and academics, and one kid interested in infanticide in literature. Mitchell, all charm […]


Alan Heathcock, Hanna Pylväinen win Whiting Awards

Between the hurricane and the election, perhaps you missed it–but the winners of the Whiting writing awards were recently announced, and we’re delighted to note that two writers we’ve covered here at FWR, Alan Heathcock and Hanna Pylväinen, were among the winners! Congratulations, Al and Hanna! Further Reading: Read our review of Alan Heathcock’s collection Volt, in which reviewer Tyler McMahon notes, The prose moves like an old flatbed down a one-lane road: with confidence, with wisdom, and with a trail of meaning drifting skyward in the mind’s rear-view mirror. It is the poetry of bowling balls through shop windows—of […]


Five Winter Reads

Summer reading lists get all the attention, but with the days getting shorter and the nights getting colder you’ll need something to crack open fireside, that cozy Afghan wrapped around your legs, the warmth of your hot toddy working your bloodstream like a magician working a Vegas showroom. Here, Five Winter Reads “The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol In truth, Gogol’s immortal short story, which positions the popular 19th century Russian lit trope “the little man” in the face a coldhearted, crushing bureaucratic system, is most effective with a certain level of Russian studies under the belt. But don’t that dissuade […]