Suspend Your Disbelief

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How to Hatch a Novel

by Celeste Ng

Most writing classes revolve around the workshop—but the workshop format, in which participants usually read 25-30 pages of a student’s work and then critique it as a group, is ill-suited to the novel form, where 30 pages may not even be a full chapter. Is there a better way to give feedback on a novel-in-progress? Grub Street, Boston’s independent writing center, aims to find out with an experimental new course dubbed the “Novel Incubator.” (Disclaimer: I have taught for Grub Street, but have not been involved in the novel course.) Billing itself as a “year-long MFA-level course, team-taught by two […]


Robots Writing Novels?

by Celeste Ng

So a monkey typing into infinity will eventually produce Shakespeare—or so the theory goes. Maybe robots would be faster? The New York Times recently discussed the phenomenon of robots writing books. After an encounter with a robo-writer called Lambert M. Surhone—literally a computer churning out titles like “Saltine Cracker” and “Pagan Kennedy” from pasted-together online text—author Pagan Kennedy (yes) was fascinated and preplexed: Could robots ever be trusted to write original novels, histories, scientific papers and sonnets? For years, artificial-intelligence experts have insisted that machines can succeed as authors. But would we humans ever want to read the robot-books? Mechanized […]


Parsing the Percentages: Peeking Behind the Curtain of E-book vs. Print Book Sales

by Joshua Bodwell

When media outlets that cover the American publishing industry report on book sales and e-books “vs.” print books, they often cite percentages of sales increases and sales decreases as evidence of the current state of affairs. In reality, percentages don’t and can’t offer a full picture. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) recently released book sales data for November 2011. The e-newsletter Shelf Awareness had this to say about the AAP report: E-books yet again had the biggest gain, but the 65.9% increase marked a slowing of what had been triple-digit increases for most of the preceding several years. In […]


First Looks: Birds of a Lesser Paradise and The Edge of Maybe

by Erika Dreifus

Hello, FWR friends. I’m delighted to announce a new blog series: “First Looks.” This series, which I’ll be writing each month, will introduce you to soon-to-be released novels and short-story collections that have piqued my interest as a reader-who-writes. Consider it a public “to be read” announcement of sorts, a way for me to point out a new title (or two) every month and explain what about it has caught my eye. For the most part, we’ll be concentrating on books that fall within FWR’s chief interest: fiction by emerging authors. We’ll publish “First Looks” posts here on the FWR blog […]


Book of the Week: Wherever You Go, by Joan Leegant

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Joan Leegant’s debut novel, Wherever You Go, which was released by W.W. Norton and Company. Her first book, a collection of stories entitled An Hour in Paradise, was published when she was 53. Winner of the PEN/New England Book Award, the Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction, and the 2011 Nelligan Prize from the Colorado Review, Leegant was also a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. For eight years she taught fiction writing at Harvard. Currently she divides her time between Boston and Tel Aviv, where she is the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University. In her […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: Adios, Happy Homeland!

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Ana Menendez’s new collection, Adios, Happy Homeland!, as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Jen McConnell Doron (@jentheauthor) Christina Strynatka (@cstrynatka) Sasha (@sashasilverfysh) 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!


Imposter syndrome

by Celeste Ng

When I first got to college, I was pretty sure that I was an admissions mistake. My roommate was one of Glamour‘s College Women of the Year. Another girl downstairs played piano with the Philharmonic; the guy down the hall was almost sixteen. A guy on the first floor held two patents. You get the idea. Even now, I occasionally get the feeling that I am a complete fraud, and I have no idea how I managed to convince people I had anything worthwhile to say. In my worst moments I suspect I will get a phone call rescinding awards […]


A real page-turner

by Celeste Ng

Joseph Herscher reads—but his Rube-Goldberg-esque machine does all the heavy lifting. The New York Times has a schematic–but the video is much more fun: Further Reading Watching: Books cavort in a bookshop in “The Joy of Books“ Busby Berkeley meets bookshelf Book dominoes!


Book blog recommendations

by Charlotte Boulay

I love getting recommendations for blogs about reading. I love lists, year-end or otherwise, of people’s favorite books, and I love to dip into someone else’s reading list for a moment, to get a glimpse of great titles out there that I haven’t even heard of yet. And I also love snark. So while this post is a call for your book blogger recommendations, dear readers, I’ll recommend one of my own: Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews. The author, “Lazy” is a late 20-something Canadian woman who went to Harvard, made a bunch of money working for a hedge fund, and […]


Picture books for writers (and their kids)

by Celeste Ng

For a while now, I’ve been concerned about raising a kid who loves to read. Evidently I am not the only one, as shown by the BabyLit series of board books featuring Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre. These books bill themselves as “counting primers”—the “Little Miss Austen” version of Pride and Prejudice includes pages like “2 rich gentlemen” and “3 houses” (that would be Longbourne, Netherfield, and Pemberly)—but they’re clearly intended to introduce at least the elements of these classics to young children. The forthcoming Little Miss Bronte: Jane Eyre features quotes from the novel, like […]


Book of the Week: Adios, Happy Homeland!

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Ana Menendez’s new story collection, Adios, Happy Homeland!, which was published by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic. Her first collection of stories, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, was a 2001 New York Times Notable book of the year and the title story won a Pushcart Prize. In addition to her other books—Loving Che (2004) and The Last War (2009)—she’s worked as a journalist and prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald. Now Menendez is establishing a creative writing program at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. She lives in Amsterdam and Miami. In […]




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