Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

Writing without reading?

by Celeste Ng

Some frustrated soul on Facebook has started an “I Hate Reading” page. Even though–in keeping with the “I hate reading” theme–there’s nothing actually on the page, over 475,000 people “like” it. AbeBooks issued the following video, entitled “Long Live the Book,” in response: Okay, so some people hate to read. Some people aren’t book people. But some writers apparently also hate to read. On the New Yorker‘s Book Bench, Macy Halford writes: [William Giraldi] teaches writing at Boston University, and has been amazed at how many of the kids possess a passionate urge to write without also possessing an urge […]


Is there space for "GAY" in "YA"?

by Celeste Ng

What if an agent agreed to represent your book–IF you changed the main character from gay to straight? That’s what happened to writers Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown and their YA novel, Stranger, according to a post they wrote in Publisher’s Weekly: Our novel, Stranger, has five viewpoint characters; one, Yuki Nakamura, is gay and has a boyfriend. Yuki’s romance, like the heterosexual ones in the novel, involves nothing more explicit than kissing. An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us. The agent offered to sign […]


Write Place, Write Time

by Celeste Ng

Write Place, Write Time offers a peek into different writers’ workspaces. Above, the writing spot of novelist Heidi Durrow. Here’s the ridiculously cool workspace of writer Alan Heathcock (seriously, I can’t believe this exists–read the whole post; I promise it’s worth it): Heathcock writes: My writing studio is a 1967 Roadrunner travel trailer that for most of its life was an Idaho State Police surveillance vehicle, and is now packed with books and trophies and random oddities. Inside, there’s old beautiful wood paneling, which smells like woods and feels like wood and feels cozy and connects me with reality. […] […]


Desert Nights, Rising Stars: the Arizona State University writing conference

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Sponsored by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, the 2012 Desert Nights, Rising Stars conference will be held February 23-26 in Tempe.  The conference brings writers of all levels together for four days in Tempe to study fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. This year’s conference faculty includes Sally Ball, Robert Boswell, Bernard Cooper, Denise Duhamel, Carolyn Forche, Pam Houston, Adam Johnson, Mat Johnson, A. Van Jordan,  Antonya Nelson, Alix Ohlin, Jem Poster, Melissa Pritchard, Jeannine Savard, Eleanor Wilner and Xu Xi. Additional guests include: Norman Dubie, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Cynthia Hogue, T.R. Hummer, Tara […]


The Slow Cookers

by Celeste Ng

I’m now in year 5 of working on my (first) novel, which seems like a long time to me. But according to everyone I’ve heard, 5-7 years is average for a first novel. For some, though, novelists just work Too Damn Slow. At least, that’s what Dwight Garner suggested in a recent essay in the New York Times: There have always been prolific writers as well as slow-moving, blocked, gin-addled or silent ones. It’s worth suggesting, though, that something more meaningful may be going on here; these long spans between books may indicate a desalinating tidal change in the place […]


Stories We Love: "Irish Girl"

by Forrest Anderson

I don’t mind admitting that I get stuck as a writer—occasionally. Well, pretty often. Okay, I mean constantly. And I’m not talking about jamming up over a flowery paragraph or a pivotal scene. I’m saying that I’ll be four pages into a new story (on what I’ve come to imagine on my worst days as the road to hell, thanks to a willful misinterpretation of Ron Carlson Writes a Story) and I’ll not only forget how to write a sentence, but I’ll lose sight of how a short story should even look. I used to feel ashamed about my lapse […]


Book of the Week: Orientation, by Daniel Orozco

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Orientation, by Daniel Orozco. Published in May by Faber & Faber, this long-awaited and much-anticipated collection is Orozco’s first book. His stories have appeared in such places as Zoetrope: All Story, Ecotone, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, StoryQuarterly, Mid-American Review, Seattle Review, and Story. In 1995 the title story of this collection was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories, and in 2005 “Officer’s Weep” was anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories. He was a Scowcroft and L’Heureux Fiction Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Fiction in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. He has […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: Miracle Boy

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Miracle Boy as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Kate Thompson (@kateEthompson) Francesca Miller (@creoleimp) Angela Meyer (@LiteraryMinded) To claim your copy of this collection, 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!


Where's Alice Bliss?

by Celeste Ng

Earlier this summer, we looked at BookCrossing, a website that allows users to “catch” and “release” books around the world and track where their books have gone. Now author Laura Harrington is using BookCrossing in an unusual promotion for her novel, Alice Bliss. Writes Harrington: Where’s Alice Bliss? is a campaign to send copies of the novel Alice Bliss to as many countries and U.S. states as possible. Through bookcrossing.com, copies of Alice Bliss will be registered and tracked as they travel around the world, passing from one reader to the next. […] We want to send Alice to four […]


Help save the St. Mark's Bookshop!

by Celeste Ng

New Yorkers know and love the St. Mark’s Bookshop, a stalwart on the Lower East Side. But lately, the bookstore has been struggling to pay the market rent asked by its landlord, Cooper Union. The NY Daily News reports: The co-owners of the book shop, Terry McCoy and Bob Contant, are set to meet with the school’s officials Wednesday to discuss a rent reduction. The last time the two sides met, in early 2010, Cooper Union was unwilling to budge on the rent, which has increased to $20,000 a month. And the New York Times covers the deep sacrifices the […]


Morris Lessmore

by Celeste Ng

We’ve talked a lot about how technology can bring books to life in new and exciting ways, but I hadn’t seen an example of an ebook that got me really excited until someone pointed me to this one. The brainchild of William Joyce, The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore is a wonderful amalgalm of movie, book, and game. A story about a book-loving man who stumbles into a world inhabited by books, it’s at once a dramatization of the power of words and a meta-commentary on literature. Joyce was previously a designer for Pixar, and it shows in the […]


Get Writing: or rather, Getting (Back to) Writing

by Anne Stameshkin

Even the most dedicated writers go through “not-writing” phases, deliberate or accidental ones. And when we return to our writing desks after that week or month or year away, our fingers and voices may feel…rusty. How do we get back that indescribable “it,” the voice that drives our prose and compels us to write it? The following exercise has helped me get my groove back on more than one occasion. It’s adapted from an assignment used by my former teacher Blanche Boyd (Terminal Velocity, The Revolution of Little Girls), who designed it for beginning writers–yet its usefulness extends to writers […]




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