Suspend Your Disbelief

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How to write a book–or how to return to one

by Celeste Ng

Forget New Year’s Day: I think fall might be the time that writers make all their resolutions. As the summer winds to a close, students prepare for a new school year. Teachers polish old syllabi and draw up new ones. Publishers, editors, and agents return from the Hamptons. And writers everywhere make themselves promises to buckle down and get back to work. If you’re one of the latter, you may find these practical tips on writing a book helpful. Culled from 22 established writers, the list has lots of ideas for making THIS the year you finish your book at […]


BookPig rents books, Netflix-style

by Celeste Ng

Netflix revolutionized the movie-rental industry when it launched, allowing subscribers to have movies sent to their homes and keep them as long as they wanted, all for a monthly fee. (Okay, until recently.) The site BookPig aims to do the same for children’s books, which are (1) expensive and (2) quickly outgrown. Says the site: When you are ready for more books, just return the first set in the pre-paid mailer provided and we’ll “swap” them for the next set of books from your queue! For faster turnaround, we recommend that you log in and use the “Instant Return” feature […]


Book of the Week: The Swan, by Jim Cohee

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Jim Cohee’s novel The Swan. Cohee, a retired editor for Sierra Club Books, lives in San Francisco. This is his first book. This novel is also one of the first titles to be released from Break Away Books, an imprint of Indiana University Press. Edited by Susan Neville and Michael Martone, this series will focus on “fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction, and poetry with a Midwest connection.” Like Switchgrass Books, the imprint of Northern Illinois University Press, which launched in the fall of 2009, the goal of this series is to feature work that is rooted in […]


Book-of-the-Week Winners: The Family Fang

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured The Family Fang as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Kristin Costa (@antaram310) Monique Nerestan (@modiva70) Jonny Zine (@interrobangzine) To claim your signed copy of this novel, 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!


Quit your day job

by Celeste Ng

Recently Chip Cheek, a writer and the administration coordinator at Grub Street in Boston, quit his job—even though he loved it. He explains why in an essay on Grub Street’s blog: I have always had a full-time job, even while I was getting my MFA. It has seemed the prudent thing to do: keep a steady, reasonably well-paid job, so you can dedicate all your worrying to writing. It’s a good idea; Flaubert said something similar, although Flaubert didn’t have to worry about actually having a job. Also he took forever to write his books. Over time, in this multitasking, […]


The Games Writers Play

by Celeste Ng

So you’re hanging out with some writer-friends on a Saturday night.  Perhaps you’re gathered your salon sipping absinthe, or–let’s be realistic, here–snuggled up on hand-me-down sofas drinking Yellowtail and arguing about why people don’t read short stories.  (Uh, just me?) Anyway, at some point you call a truce in the debate on whether “chick lit” is a useful term, or  you call a halt to the V.S. Naipaul-bashing.  How to occupy yourselves now? By playing a literary board game, of course. In the New York Times, Dwight Gardner outlines something he calls “the paperback game“: One player, the “picker” for […]


"Work with the puppy that is your brain"

by Celeste Ng

It’s easy to be hard on yourself when you’re a writer. But does beating yourself up really help? For 99.9% of us, the answer is no. How do you learn to go easier on yourself? The Rejectionist is here to help: So imagine you have a new puppy, and your new puppy does the things that new puppies do, which are: pee on the floor, eat your favorite shoes, poop in your laundry hamper, chew on your plants, chase the cat. Right? Bad things. Now, how do you deal effectively with the misbehaviors of the new puppy, which does not […]


Literature, drop by drop, on dripread

by Celeste Ng

For those of us trying to sneak reading into our busy lives, DailyLit is a great resource: choose any of its 1000ish titles, and it will email you a snippet a day until you finish the book. (See our blog archive for more details.) But what if you want to read something that’s not in DailyLit’s library–or if you’ve already read all of DailyLit’s titles, you speed-reader, you? Enter dripread, which functions in much the same way but, in addition to a library of titles, allows you to upload a book of your own choosing in ePub format. Says the […]


We're going to miss almost everything

by Celeste Ng

NPR commentator Linda Holmes has a beautiful essay on how we’re going to miss almost everything—and why that’s okay: Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It’s the sorting of what’s worth your time and what’s not worth your time. It’s saying, “I deem Keeping Up With The Kardashians a poor use of my time, and therefore, I choose not to watch it.” It’s saying, “I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep six times, so I’m not going to read this one.” Surrender, on the other hand, is the realization that you do not have time […]


Journal of the Week Subscription Winners: NANO Fiction

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

We’re delighted to announce the winners of our NANO Fiction Journal of the Week giveaway, chosen at random from our Twitter followers. Congratulations to: Jesse the Mutt (@MutteringMutt) Lively Words (@livelywords) Marilyn G (@nocommentry) You’ll each receive a complimentary one-year subscription to NANO Fiction! Please email us at winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com with your contact information, and we’ll coordinate the rest. If you missed Carolyn Gan’s profile of NANO Fiction and her exclusive interview with founding editor Kirby Johnson, you can read the whole thing in our archives. And remember: if you’d like to be eligible for future journal giveaways, please […]


Book of the Week: The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson. Published this month by Ecco, the book is Wilson’s first novel. He is also the author of the award-winning story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, which was selected as a favorite and included in our “Books We Loved in 2009” Valentine’s Day special feature. Wilson’s writing has appeared in such places as Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, PANK, Mid-American Review, and dozens of other publications. His short fiction has also been anthologized in four volumes of the New Stories from the South: The […]


What Makes Gatsby Great

by J.T. Bushnell

When I heard The Great Gatsby had been rewritten for intermediate readers, I did what many lovers of the novel probably did—checked the online version to see how my favorite passage had been changed, shook my fist, and then re-read the original, penciling all kinds of ecstatic remarks into the margins. In case you missed Celeste’s post, Macmillan has released a simplified version of the novel as “retold by Margaret Tarner.” Essentially, it relates the events of the Gatsby story without all the big words and elaboration. And so my favorite passage, two beautiful paragraphs of imagery and movement and […]




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