The Flyleaf
by Tom Toro
When to be suspicious of a walrus bearing manuscripts …
Well, friends, the numbers have been crunched and the checks are in and I’m happy to report that you helped us raise nearly $15,000 last week during The Great Write Off. We can’t thank you enough for your generosity. Truly! Thanks also to the Undergraduate English Association (UEA) and the Undergraduate Opportunity Program (UROP) here at the University of Michigan. These students helped orchestrate the write-a-thon at Espresso Royale for three days, and they were our ambassadors at The State of the Book last weekend–ushering, welcoming our guests, staffing the information table, and making sure that audience surveys were completed […]
Summers, my dad took his two weeks’ vacation from the bank and drove our family southeast through corn and tobacco fields to Emerald Isle, North Carolina. We stayed on the sound-side of the island, in a small cottage on stilts, and each morning we hauled our chairs, coolers, and my mom’s heavy beach bag through a vacant lot, spiked with sandspurs, to the ocean. While dad unfolded our chairs and cracked open his day’s first beer, mom rummaged through her bag and passed out library books she’d picked for the family. I remember entire vacations spent reading, moving only with […]
Our new feature is Scott Hutchins’s debut novel, A Working Theory of Love, published this month by Penguin. Hutchins is a former fellow in the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Michigan, and his work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Five Chapters, The Owls, The Rumpus, the New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, and Esquire. He is the recipient of two Hopwood Awards and the Andrea Beauchamp Prize in Short Fiction. In 2006 and 2010, he was an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. He lives in San Francisco with […]
Our most recent feature was Steve Alomond’s God Bless America, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Eugene Cross (@EugeneCross1) Linley McCord (@linleyrae) Carole Anzolletti (@CAnzolletti71) 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!
Just after noon on Friday, the typewriters in Ann Arbor’s Espresso Royale quieted. It was Day Three of The Great Write Off, but the pause had nothing to do with fatigue. Philip Levine, former Poet Laureate of the United States, had just walked in the door! I don’t know who was smiling more as I rose from my table to greet him–him, me, or the students writing in the coffee shop. We’d been anticipating his arriving in Ann Arbor for The State of the Book the following day, but we hadn’t expected him to drop in on the write-at-thon itself. […]
According to our official press release, the goal of The Great Write Off is to bring attention to the important work that the non-profit literary organizations partnering for The State of the Book are doing for and on behalf of young writers, and to raise much needed funds for their operation. But we also wanted it to be fun! And perhaps just as importantly, we wanted to give people the permission to write. As a writer who also loves teaching and editing and working for FWR, I know how easily my creative work can end up taking a backseat. To […]
Day One of The Great Write Off dawned cool and foggy here in Ann Arbor. My wife and I had had to turn the furnace on for the first time this weekend, and the leaves have already started to turn on our block. For the past week the students in my Michigan Lit course here at the University of Michigan have been reading Charles Baxter’s Feast of Love, in anticipation of his arrival for Saturday’s The State of the Book symposium. And we’ve been talking a lot about the Midwest and weather. (After all, who captures the subtlety of Michigan […]
Fiction Writers Review’s first-ever fundraiser, The Great Write Off, is starting TODAY! It’s not too late to help. You can sign up to write on FWR’s team or make a donation yourself (even $5 goes a long way). Proceeds will go to a revamped website and to pay our all-volunteer staff and contributors. Need more incentives? How about PRIZES? Any FWR participant who raises $50 or more will get a Great Write Off T-shirt. Any FWR participant who raises $100 or more will be eligible to win one of twenty copies of Natalie Bakopoulos’s debut novel The Green Shore, generously […]
I could easily make the case that Absolutely Normal Chaos by Sharon Creech changed my life forever. I read it some time in early middle school. It was the first book that made me want to be a writer. For the next decade, yes even through college, I reread Chaos — diary novel about one 13-year old girl’s exciting summer and her first crush — once a year. It was the first book to inspire the writer inside, but hardly the last. It was followed by a 28-book series about a group of teenagers living in a close-knit community off […]
Although Fiction Writers Review’s contributors come from many different states and countries around the world, the idea for the site started in Michigan. In 2008, Anne Stameshkin, a University of Michigan MFA grad, started a simple blog for reviewing books. As it become more popular, she recruited a few friends from her MFA program to help her. Fast forward four years, add about 100 contributors, and here we are, a community of readers and writers—thank you for being a part of our journey! We’re thrilled to announce that we’re having our first big in-person event in the place we started. […]
