Suspend Your Disbelief

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Book of the Week: Arcadia, by Lauren Groff

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Lauren Groff‘s new novel, Arcadia (Voice/Hyperion). Groff’s past works include a collection, Delicate, Edible Birds and Other Stories (2009), and a novel, The Monsters of Templeton (2008). Her short stories have appeared in a number of journals, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Subtropics, as well as in the 2007 and 2010 Best American Short Stories , Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best New American Voices 2008. In her recent review of Arcadia, Founding Editor Anne Stameshkin writes: In Lauren Groff’s second novel, Arcadia, the community of this same name […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: A Land More Kind Than Home

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Wiley Cash’s debut novel A Land More Kind Than Home, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Zohreh Ghahremani (@SkyOfRedPoppies) Diane Dunning (@diane_dunning) Braden King (@braden_king) 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!


The Collection Giveaway Project 2012

by Lee Thomas

Short Story Month countdown: 7 days to May! Fiction Writers Review will host the 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. How to participate in The Collection Giveaway Project: (1) Blog about a recently published short story collection (or two, or three). Long or short, review or rave. Only rule: you, the blogger, read and loved the book(s). (2) Offer a copy (or copies) as a giveaway to one lucky commenter. […]


Verb your authors

by Celeste Ng

Click on over to Urban Dictionary and you’ll soon be Faulknering.  At least, according to one of that dictionary’s definitions of “Faulkner,” which is “To go from being a nerd to getting all the hot girls.” Apparently, kids these days are giving authors’ names new meanings, and Urban Dictionary—the mass-edited compendium of language as it’s popularly used—is capturing them.  The New York Daily News has a roundup (via): Keats: One who has much intelligence, yet is reclusive and worryingly geeky. Enjoys exercising excessive control over friends and family. Wears leggings. Eats pizza only. Bronte: A girl of her own sexiness, […]


No Pulitzer for Fiction

by Charlotte Boulay

Soooo…this is awkward, no? For the first time since 1977, no Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction. Ann Patchett says this means we all lose, and I agree. I’ve never thought very carefully about how books are selected for these kinds of big awards. I guess I imagined a bunch of really smart people passionately arguing with each other, but that doesn’t seem to be what happened here. The voting committee members filled out ballots, and no book got a majority of the votes, so nobody won. Look, we already have a completely dysfunctional Congress that operates on those principles, […]


I, He… We?

by Celeste Ng

We writers gravitate towards a few particular points of view: we love the first person singular, the ultra-personal “I”; we adore the third-person limited and its inside-outside-blurring stance; we even use the omniscient and look down on our characters as if we were gods.  Now and then, we’ll try the second person to switch it up—we’ve all read Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help and thought about it, haven’t we? But what about the first person plural?  Why haven’t we, as writers, embraced this viewpoint and its potential?  A few of us—Jeffrey Eugenides, Steven Millhauser—have tackled it, but most of us just shrug […]


Book of the Week: A Land More Kind Than Home

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Wiley Cash’s debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, released this week by William Morrow. Cash’s stories have appeared in such places as the Crab Orchard Review, Roanoke Review and The Carolina Quarterly. He holds a B.A. in Literature from the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He and his wife currently live in West Virginia where he teaches fiction writing and American literature at Bethany College. He also teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Fiction […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: Let the Birds Drink in Peace

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Robert Garner McBrearty’s Let the Birds Drink in Peace as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Bonnie Jo Campell (@bonniejocampbel) LorenaBathey(@LorenaBathey) Theresa Lemieux (@mama_theresa) 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!


First Looks, April 2012: Goliath and HHhH

by Erika Dreifus

Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the third installment of our new blog series,  “First Looks,” 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. Susan Woodring and I are graduates of the same low-residency MFA program. Although we overlapped for a couple of semesters, we were never assigned to the same workshop. Still, I’ve […]


Birth of a Book

by Charlotte Boulay

Remember that old Sesame Street video that shows how a steel factory makes an I-beam? I love that. I also love the crayon factory. This book-making video is a gorgeous descendent. I have no idea how many places still make books this way, but I hope some always do. Enlarge so it fills your screen—it’s worth it. Birth of a Book from Glen Milner on Vimeo. A short vignette of a book being created using traditional printing methods. For the Daily Telegraph. Shot at Smith-Settle Printers, Leeds, England. The book being printed is Suzanne St Albans’ ‘Mango and Mimosa’ published […]


"You can’t take an adult seriously when he’s debating you over why Twilight vampires are O.K. with sunlight."

by Celeste Ng

What to make of Joel Stein? He’s a humor writer who (sometimes) makes serious points, and as a result, his readers sometimes miss the argument beneath the humor, or miss the humor on top of the argument. His latest essay, “Adults Should Read Adult Books,” in the New York Times, is causing quite a kerfuffle: I have no idea what “The Hunger Games” is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character. Maybe there are Pynchonesque turns of phrase. Maybe it delves into issues of identity, self-justification and anomie that would make David Foster Wallace […]


Book of the Week: Let the Birds Drink in Peace, by Robert Garner McBrearty

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Robert Garner McBrearty’s new collection, Let the Birds Drink in Peace, which was published last fall by Conundrum Press. McBrearty is the author of two previous collections of stories: A Night at the Y (John Daniel & Company, 1999) and Episode (Pocol Press, 2009). He received his MFA in creative writing from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, was the winner of the 2007 Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award, and has received fellowships from the Macdowell Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He teaches at […]




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