Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

You know what the classics need? Explosive sex.

by Celeste Ng

Poor Jane Austen. First there were the zombies. Now, reports the UK Huffington post, an adult publisher has been inspired by 50 Shades of Grey and plans to add “explosive sex” to the classics: Some original fans of Jane Eyre might be unhappy to discover that the female protagonist has “explosive sex with Mr Rochester” in the publisher’s erotic edition. In Wuthering Heights, heroine Catherine Earnshaw “enjoys bondage sessions” with Heathcliff while sleuth Sherlock Holmes has a sexual relationship with his sidekick Dr Watson in the new e-book. Claire Siemaszkiewicz, founder of Total-E-Bound Publishing, which is releasing the titles from […]


No fellowship? Make your own.

by Celeste Ng

So maybe you didn’t into MacDowell this year, or Bread Loaf, or [insert highly desired writer’s conference, residency, or program here]. You’ve got two options: Sit and mope. Make your own. Two fiction teachers from Boston’s Grub Street, Adam Stumacher and Jenn De Leon, describe how they decided to craft their own “writing fellowship”—and managed to write for an entire year: One afternoon last fall, we looked at each other over a kitchen table cluttered with self-addressed stamped envelopes and statements of purpose, and we reached a decision. This year, we were not going to wait for permission. This year, […]


First Looks, August 2012: Fobbit and Hold It 'Til It Hurts

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. Within the next few weeks, two debut novels with military connections will be published, one set within the context of the Iraq War and the other bonded to Afghanistan. Another commonality: Both […]


Book of the Week: Rise, by L. Annette Binder

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Our new feature is L. Annette Binder‘s debut story collection, Rise (Sarabande). Binder was born in Germany and grew up in Colorado. She has degrees from Harvard, Berkeley, and the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Rise received the 2011 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Laura Kasischke. Her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Pushcart Prize XXXVI, One Story, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, Third Coast, Fairy Tale Review, Bellingham Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and others. In Lee Thomas’s recent review of the collection, she writes: Pick up nearly any […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: The Boiling Season

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Our most recent feature was The Boiling Season, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: SamanthaBayarr (@SamanthaBayarr ) Carolyn West (@temysmom) Alexis Apfelbaum (@AlexisRachel ) 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!


99 problems but a blurb ain't one

by Celeste Ng

There’s an art to book blurbing, as anyone who’s tried to write one can tell you. Over at the Kenyon Review, Jake Adam York takes a stab at classifying them. For example, there’s the “Lavish” type: The genre of the recommendation letter, a friend once observed, is hyperbole. Everything has to be stated in the superlative, so one reads for degrees of overstatement, hyper- and hypo-hyperbole, becoming a progressively more sensitive seismograph, searching out quavers and tremors or microscopic proportion. The blurb is a clear cousin or sibling, at least in the most common form in which sparrows of adjectives […]


What Don Draper is reading…

by Celeste Ng

I am an unabashed Mad Men fan, and this past season was possibly the best—but I will admit that a few times, I was able to tear my eyes from Don Draper in PJs to look at the book in his hands. You know you’re a word-nerd when you watch TV and realize you’re scoping out what the characters are reading. Leave it to Flavorwire to compile the actual reading lists of Rory Gilmore, Don Draper, Daria (whoa ’90s flashback) and more. Rory reads The Bell Jar. Don reads The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Daria reads Being […]


And the gold medal in writing goes to…

by Celeste Ng

You read that right. Did you know the Olympics used to offer medals in the arts—including creative writing? Mental Floss has the story: The rules for the five [arts] events, which were far less restrictive than the original guidelines drafted for the 1908 Games, were published in September 1911. Among them: All works presented were required to be original and directly inspired by the idea of sport. Size didn’t matter, except for sculptors, who were required to submit “small models not larger than eighty centimeters in height, width, and length.” While there were no language restrictions, the jury—a multinational collection […]




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