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Book-of-the-Week Winners: Monstress

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Lysley Tenorio’s debut collection Monstress, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Joshua Duke (@joshmduke) Meaghan Mulholland (@Meagho) Kathryn McGowan (@comestibles) 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!


Ode to the Bromance

by Shawn Andrew Mitchell

Friends say they saw our bromance bloom. I took them aside and said, admiringly, “that Nick Ostdick is alright.” Nick took them aside and said, wistfully, “Shawn seems like a cool dude.” There was a beer here, a beer there, always with chaperones. Then mano-a-mano happy hours that spilled into dinners that spilled into the manliest of frozen desserts that spilled into more happy hours. His fiancé called me his man-wife and warned me not to take him away. I was a groomsman in his wedding; he listened to my unnecessary dating life bemoanings. When I left for a semester […]


Stories We Love: "Nephilim"

by Lee Thomas

Most stories we read, hear, even tell — we forget. A scant few haunt us across years. The best ones never leave. I still remember the first time I read One Story issue #141 on the F train. Early November in New York, when wet, bare branches foreshadow winter. It begins: Freda weighed eighteen pounds when she was born. Her feet were each six inches long. At ten, she was taller than her father. Five feet eleven and one-half inches standing in her socks. I can’t keep you in shoes, her mother would say, and they went to Woolworth’s for […]


Thoughts on Shorts: Valerie Laken

by Celeste Ng

“With short stories, you never really expect the World at Large to care one way or the other. It’s a labor of love, and no one disputes that, and I think the purity of that endeavor is very liberating.” ~ Valerie Laken Further Reading: Read more about Valerie Laken on Fiction Writers Review Looking for something to read? Check out the Stories We Love Need inspiration? Try our Get Writing exercises


Stories We Love: "To Build a Fire"

by Erika Dreifus

Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (1908) is one of those stories—paralleled by certain films—that I always return to with an odd yearning. Each time, despite myself, I hope that the story (or film) will somehow end differently. That Connie won’t leave with Arnold Friend. That Christopher Reeve won’t discover that penny from 1979. Or, in the case of London’s story, that “the man” won’t break through the ice—and that the fire won’t go out. Perhaps part of the story’s great appeal is how very different it is from my own lived experience and writerly tendencies. My version of the […]


Get Writing: Be Authentic

Write what you know without simply writing what you know … Write What You Know. I’ve never felt wholly comfortable with this phrase. I tell my students to abandon the literal idea of it on the first day of class. How bored and boring we’d all be if that were all any of us ever wrote. There needs to be an imbalance—more fiction than fact. Be Authentic. I ask my students to be authentic on the page instead, to create relatable characters navigating real stories. Our goal as storytellers is to engage our readers and spark a reaction in them […]


Book of the Week: Monstress, by Lysley Tenorio

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Lysley Tenorio‘s debut collection, Monstress (Ecco). His short fiction has appeared in such places as The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Manoa, and The Best New American Voices and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He lives in San Francisco, where he is an associate professor at Saint Mary’s College of California. In our upcoming interview with Tenorio, the author speaks with Quan Barry about identity politics: While Monstress is full of Filipino and Filipino-American characters, I see them first as individuals caught up in weird, sometimes ridiculous, and always (I hope) emotionally complex circumstances that have nothing to do […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: Arcadia

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Lauren Groff’s new novel Arcadia, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Patricia Selbert (@HouseofSixDoors) Helen Page (@bulkarn) Heather Galaska (@heatherlgalaska) 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!


It's Short Story Month!

by The Editors

Happy Short Story Month 2012! Once again, we’ll be celebrating short stories all month here at Fiction Writers Review: Reviews of fantastic story collections Interviews with short story writers like Lysley Tenorio, Ben Fountain, and Laura Maylene Walter The return of our popular “Stories We Love” blog posts: writers on the stories that inspire them—and why Book of the Week giveaways highlighting short story collections Writing prompts to get you started on pieces of your own The 2012 Collection Giveaway Project—chances to win FREE short story collections from writing blogs all over the internet And more! We think short stories […]


SSM 2012: The Collection Giveaway Project

by Lee Thomas

Welcome to Fiction Writers Review‘s third annual Collection Giveaway Project: a community effort by lit bloggers to champion great short story collections. The brainchild of Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus, 18 bloggers participated in the CGP 2011, giving away dozens of collections. Instructions on how to participate in The Collection Giveaway Project 2012. Note: Bloggers, please feel free to copy and borrow the CGP banner from this post for use on your own site. CGP 2012 Participants (updated daily!) David Abrams / The Quivering Pen: with Friday Freebies – Fires of Our Choosing, by Eugene Cross, This Will Be Difficult to […]


Cooking from writing about eating

by Celeste Ng

When I was in elementary school, I used to read at the dinner table (my parents were just happy I was at the table!) and I’d always save particular books for mealtime perusal. Specifically, they were books that made me hungry with their descriptions of food. There was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, in which even a meal of yesterday’s bread with a smear of salt pork fat was treated as a feast. There was Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family, which was my introduction to foods I wouldn’t taste until years later: hamentaschen, challah, latkes. And in Jean Craighead George’s […]


Books in the… tub?

by Celeste Ng

Here at the FWR blog, we have a thing for books: as furniture, as clothing, even in the bathroom. But this might just take the proverbial cake: a bathtub made of books. Neatorama pointed me to the above amazing art project/feat of book-engineering by artist Vanessa Mancini, at Who Cares About That?: This bath is made entirely out of books which Vanessa cut and fitted together over a metal frame to form a bath of books, which is suspended by four antique bath tub, lion-shaped feet. She intends to later cover it in layers of resin and has already applied […]




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