Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

Texts from famous authors (and characters)

by Celeste Ng

I get a childish delight out of anachronistic mashups, so the Paris Review’s drunk texts from Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, and more are right in my wheelhouse: Read the full set on the Paris Review‘s site. Meanwhile, on The Hairpin, Mallory Ortberg imagines texts from Jane Eyre–the character: JANE WHERE HAVE YOU GONE I AM BEREFT AND WITHOUT MY JANE I SHALL SINK INTO ROGUERY i am with my cousins WHICH COUSIN IS IT THE SEXY ONE Please don’t try to talk to me again IT IS YOUR SEXY COUSIN “ST. JOHN” WHAT KIND OF A NAME IS […]


tl;dr? Not for a semicolon lover.

by Celeste Ng

If you’re a semicolon kind of guy (or gal), you’re not alone: Ben Dolnick, writing in the New York Times, tells the story of his love affair with that much-misused punctuation mark: My disdain for semicolons outlasted my devotion to Vonnegut. Well into college I avoided them, trusting in the keyboard’s adjacent, unpretentious comma and period to divvy up my thoughts. I imagined that, decades hence, if some bright-eyed teenager were to ask me for advice, I’d pass Vonnegut’s prohibition right along, minus the troublesome bit about transvestites and hermaphrodites. By now I’d come across Isaac Babel’s famous description of […]


Book of the Week: The Boiling Season, by Christopher Hebert

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Our new feature is Christopher Hebert‘s debut novel, The Boiling Season (Harper). Hebert graduated from Antioch College, where he also worked at the Antioch Review. He has spent time in Guatemala and taught in Mexico, and he worked as a research assistant to the author Susan Cheever. He earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and was awarded its prestigious Hopwood Award for fiction. He is Jack E. Reese Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee Libraries, and lives in Knoxville with his son and his wife, the novelist Margaret Lazarus Dean. In Michael Shilling’s introduction to […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: Albert of Adelaide

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

For the last two weeks we’ve been featuring Howard L. Anderson’s debut novel Albert of Adelaide, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Janna McMahan (@JannaMc) anna sutton (@bridgetjonesish) Marisa Birns (@marisabirns) 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!


And Now for Something Completely Different: Electronic Literature

by Steven Wingate

Going to writers’ conferences like AWP, I usually know what to expect: I’ll go to panel discussions and readings, meet friends I haven’t seen in years, and listen to my fellow fictionistos talking about agents, and publicity. Not so with the recent conference of the Electronic Literature Organization, hosted this June by the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University. The ELO, co-founded by metafictionist Robert Coover, is one of a handful of organizations working to study and produce literary projects designed for (and frequently created by) computers. I came to the conference armed with nothing but curiosity and […]


Shout Out |

Shout-Out: Erika Dreifus on remembering the Munich Olympics

by Celeste Ng

Over at The Jewish Daily Forward, FWR Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus has written a moving piece about the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics of 1972 and how this event found their way into her fiction. Erika writes about how her classmates challenged her use of this history: When I workshopped “Homecomings,” several classmates thought that my inclusion of the 1972 Munich Olympics was extraneous. The story of Jewish refugees returning to their homeland was “powerful enough,” they argued. My story “didn’t need” the added layer of history I’d given it. Incredulous, I broke the cardinal workshop rule […]


"I can't send this to a random house…"

by Celeste Ng

Author Maureen Johnson went to the FedEx store to mail a package to her publisher. Absurdist comedy ensued: FEDEX GUY spins package around, examines label, frowns. FEDEX GUY: I can’t send this. MAUREEN stares, waiting for further explanation. When none is forthcoming, she spins the package back around and looks at the label, because apparently she is going to have to figure out what it is that she didn’t put on it. Because it’s not just a delivery service-it’s a TEST OF WITS. Finding no blank spaces, she feels like a bit of a FedEx failure. MAUREEN: Why? FEDEX: (very […]


What your favorite punctuation mark says about you

by Celeste Ng

A friend of mine once admitted to being obsessed with dashes. She said it like she was admitting to a clandestine affair–bashfully yet boldly: “I LOVE the dash.” When she said that, I felt a pang of jealousy. For I, too, love the dash, and I am not good at sharing things I love. Perhaps you, too, adore a particular piece of punctuation: the workhorse comma, the sophisticated semicolon, the much-maligned interrobang. Author Leah Petersen (via) offers a humorous guide to what this favorite punctuation mark says about you: Period (.): Type A personality. You are decisive and clear. You […]


On author crushes

by Celeste Ng

While talking with a fellow writer–call her A—I described a friend—call him B—as looking like “a young Charles Baxter.” A’s eyes lit up. “Really?” she said. “So he’s really hot?” This was not precisely what I had meant, but the truth is that Charles Baxter is the kind of writer who inspires serious literary crushes—which I think might be the most powerful kind of crush in existence. Adoration of a story well told, and all the emotions that the best writing stirs up, combines with adoration of the prose itself—the signature stylistic quirks that are as idiosyncratic as a beloved […]


First Looks, July 2012: Requiem, A Cupboard Full of Coats, and Summer Lies

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. Requiem, by Frances Itani: We try to spotlight emerging authors here at FWR, and I thought I was living up to that mission when I began looking into Requiem, by the Canadian […]


Book of the Week: Albert of Adelaide, by Howard L. Anderson

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Our new feature is Howard L. Anderson’s debut novel, Albert of Adelaide (Twelve). As described on his author page on the publisher’s website, “Howard L. Anderson has had a varied life: He flew with a helicopter battalion in Vietnam, worked on fishing boats in Alaska, in the steel mills of Pittsburgh, as a truck driver in Houston, and a scriptwriter in Hollywood, and, after gaining a law degree, became legal counsel for the New Mexico Organized Crime Commission. He is currently a defense attorney in New Mexico, where he defends Mexican nationals charged with crimes north of the border.” His […]




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