Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

Shout-out: Daniel Wallace on Air Schooner

by Celeste Ng

We were delighted to learn that FWR contributor extraordinaire Daniel Wallace made an appearance on Prairie Schooner‘s podcast, Air Schooner, this past week. Along with travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Daniel reads from his work on his traveling to Syria and living in the Old Quarter of Damascus under the Assad regime. You can listen to Air Schooner #9 on the Prairie Schooner website. Congratulations, Daniel! Further Reading: Like what you heard?  Read more of Daniel Wallace’s work on FWR, and visit Daniel’s blog to learn more about him.


Thoughts on shorts: Danielle Evans

by Celeste Ng

“[T]he value of a short story is the same as the value of all literature—that it allows a person to confront the world in a new way, that at its best it has the power to act as a transformative experience, and to leave the reader changed—smarter and more empathetic. I think there’s something especially lovely about being able to have a complete, meaningful emotional experience in the time it takes to read ten to twenty pages.” ~ Danielle Evans Further Reading: Read more about Danielle Evans on Fiction Writers Review Looking for something to read? Check out the Stories […]


Stories We Love: "The Showrunner"

by Celeste Ng

I’ll be totally honest: I really did not expect to like Frankie Thomas’s “The Showrunner” at all. It starts off at a casting session for a fictional Disney-esque tween series, and not only am I biased against stories that saturate themselves in current pop culture—I tend to like a little patina on my cultural references—I expected the story to be as flimsy as the TV show at its center. I was completely wrong. Within half a page, I was unable to put the piece down. (No joke: I was late to pick up my son from daycare, I was that […]


Get Writing: The Backwards Telescope

by Celeste Ng

When I was in high school, I took a playwriting class, and we’d sit there–all of us sixteen, seventeen, eighteen–reading our work aloud around the table. Our teacher, who was about thirty, would give us pointers: that speech is clunky; this character hasn’t said anything for ten minutes. But sometimes he wouldn’t say a word: he would look at us, hold his palm in front of his face for a moment, then let it drop to the table, as if he were offering us an invisible treat. We didn’t really understand this Zen gesture at the time, but I can […]


Book of the Week: Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain, by Lucia Perillo

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Lucia Perillo‘s debut story collection, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain (W.W. Norton). She is also the author of six books of poetry, most recently On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), and a collection of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing (Trinity University Press, 2007). Her fifth book of poems, Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. In her recent reviewlet of this collection, Alison Espach writes: Perhaps the collection is best described in my […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: This Will be Difficult to Explain

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Johanna Skibsrud’s collection This Will be Difficult to Explain, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Kathy Jambor (@kathyjambor) Genevieve Chan (@gcanceko) Laura Hauther (@trebuchet) 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!


Stories We Love: American Masculine

by Shawn Andrew Mitchell

Fresh from a relationship with a feminist scholar, I was on guard against Shann Ray’s American Masculine before I even cracked its spine. With a title like that, I thought, you’d better have a gay man in Chelsea, a drag queen in Flint, a straight man watching a hired man wash his yacht, a man living out of the back of a Volvo in a Wal-Mart parking lot, a Hispanic man washing dishes, a Hispanic man climbing the corporate ladder; you’d better provide one heckova Whitmanian catalog of Masculinity in the U.S. of A. My suspicions only deepened as I […]


First Looks, May 2012: The Last Hundred Days and The Innocents

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. This month’s First Looks picks take us in a decidedly international direction. Let’s begin with The Last Hundred Days, Patrick McGuinness’s debut novel, which was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize […]


Thoughts on shorts: Wells Tower

by Celeste Ng

“I think the best stories start from something tiny. […] A short story can easily destroy itself through metastasis. I think if you start a story with more than two scenes in mind, you may be doomed. At least you have a hell of a lot of work ahead of you. If I start off trying to get at this one little moment, that’s all I want to do. And then I have to build the world that makes that moment happen.” ~ Wells Tower Further Reading: Read more about Wells Tower on Fiction Writers Review Looking for something to […]


Stories We Love: "A Change of Fashion"

by Carolyn Gan

Yesterday, I saw a woman wearing a garment that straddled the line between shorts and panties. Her outfit was revealing, and it made me ask questions like, “how far will fashion go?” and “what was she thinking?” Perhaps author Steven Millhauser had a similar experience at some point, and that led him to write “A Change of Fashion,” a short story that originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine, May 2006. What would happen if next season’s fashions did not favor a slightly shorter hemline or a higher heel, but hiddenness? What if dresses took on shapes larger than Victorian hoop skirts […]


Get Writing: On Desire

Desire is the writer’s best friend. When you know what your main character wants, you have your entire story. When someone wants something–badly–he or she will get up off the couch and try to attain it. The object of desire might be a new winter coat (“The Overcoat” by Gogol), a boy (“City of Boys” by Beth Nugent), money for a family member’s medicine (“King of the Bingo Game” by Ralph Ellison), a business contract (“Like a Bad Dream” by Heinrich Boll)–it doesn’t matter, as long as the desire is concrete and the character can pursue it. The character’s desire […]


Book of the Week: This Will Be Difficult to Explain, by Johanna Skibsrud

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Johanna Skibsrud‘s debut story collection, This Will Be Difficult to Explain (W.W. Norton). She is also the author of a novel, The Sentimentalists (2011), and two collections of poetry: I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being (2010) and Late Nights With Wild Cowboys (2008). She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she is at work on another novel. In his recent reviewlet of this collection, Ben Pfeiffer writes: This Will Be Difficult to Explain is a slim, lime-colored book with a picture of a lackadaisical girl on the cover. It holds nine […]




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