Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

Book-of-the-Week Winners: Separate Kingdoms

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Separate Kingdoms as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Alex Carrick (@Alex_Carrick) Jenny Shank (@JennyShank) Amy Silverberg (@AmySilverberg) To claim your signed 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!


One book review? That'll be $99.00, please.

by Celeste Ng

What’s wrong with these two sentences? We will keep the book in our stacks for another two weeks. If you decide to order a review after that time, we will ask you to send another copy. That’s from an email Chad Post of Three Percent received recently from ForeWord Reviews. Yes, you read that right: “if you decide to order a review.” ForeWord Digital Reviews, as the email explained, charges authors to have their books reviewed: Digital Reviews is our new review service for books that meet our standards for worthy books, but which we can’t cover in our print […]


Journal of the Week subscription winners: Flyway

by Celeste Ng

We’re delighted to announce the winners of our Flyway Journal of the Week giveaway, chosen at random from our Twitter followers. Congratulations to: Tom Ryan (@crossroadskcmo) Diane Cook (@TheDMC) Jason Renshaw (@englishraven) You’ll each receive a complimentary one-year subscription to Flyway! Please email us at winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com with your contact information, and we’ll coordinate the rest. If you missed the profile of Flyway and the exclusive interview with Managing Editor Brenna Dixon and Fiction Editor Genevieve DuBois, you can read the whole thing in our blog archives. And remember: if you’d like to be eligible for future journal giveaways, […]


"Jersey Shore" Gone Wilde!

by Celeste Ng

That’s the title of a hilarious video series by the cast of “The Importance of Being Earnest” on Broadway at Roundabout Theatre Company. They ask an important question: What if the characters of Broadway’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” traveled through a time warp and woke up on the beach with Snooki, The Situation and the rest of the gang of MTV’s “Jersey Shore”? In an exclusive video series created for Playbill by “Earnest” stars Santino Fontana and David Furr, the Roundabout Theatre Company cast puts “Jersey” in the mouths of Oscar Wilde’s famed Britons. Think of it as a […]


More powerful than a locomotive…

by Celeste Ng

Not a poet? Perhaps you are. David Brooks points out that we all use metaphors in our daily speech, all the time, without even knowing it: When talking about relationships, we often use health metaphors. A friend might be involved in a sick relationship. Another might have a healthy marriage. When talking about argument, we use war metaphors. When talking about time, we often use money metaphors. But when talking about money, we rely on liquid metaphors. We dip into savings, sponge off friends or skim funds off the top. Even the job title stockbroker derives from the French word […]


"The Call of the Domestic" and other Less Interesting Books

by Celeste Ng

For the past few weeks, book-loving Twitterers have been amusing themselves by coming up with Less Interesting Books. Here are a few of my favorites: The Devil Wears Hush Puppies (@TheJaneChannel) To Give a Mockingbird a Stern Talking To (@andrewvanorden) A Farewell to Arms: Coping with Amputation (@waltonky) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Glendale Galleria (@peteFweiss) The At-Times-Slightly-Unpleasant-But-Altogether-Perfectly-Manageable Lightness of Being (@mattmclowry) A Couple of Years of Solitude (@joefi) The great thing about hashtags like this is people keep coming up with more. Search for the #lessinterestingbooks tag on Twitter for more, and tell us yours in the comments. Via. […]


Book of the Week: Separate Kingdoms, by Valerie Laken

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s featured title is Valerie Laken’s story collection Separate Kingdoms, which we’re pleased to announce has recently been longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award! Laken was born and raised in Rockford, Illinois. She majored in English and Russian at the University of Iowa, then worked and studied in Moscow, Prague, Krakow, and Madison, before moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan. There, she received an MA in Slavic Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, where she taught for several years. Her first novel, Dream House, was published in 2009. She is currently […]


Blurb translation guide

by Celeste Ng

We all know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But now, with Ward Six’s handy Literary Blurb Translation Guide, you can judge it quickly and easily by the blurbs on that cover. Some examples: “luminous prose” = too many goddam words “unflinching artistry” = lots of boobs and stabbing “taut” = limited vocabulary “incredible range and breadth” = all over the place “trenchant satire” = poop jokes The commenters on the original post have added more, as have the folks at MetaFilter. Got more to contribute? Tell us in the comments.


When is it fiction… and when is it just a lie?

by Celeste Ng

Last week, news sources everywhere reported that the popular blog “Gay Girl in Damascus” was not, in fact, written by a Syrian lesbian named Amina Arraf. Nor, as the blog claimed recently, had Amina been arrested by Syrian police. In fact, the blog was written by a 40-year-old American grad student, Tom MacMaster, who is living in Scotland. Amina does not exist. According to NPR, in his apology post on the blog, MacMaster defends himself by claiming he was writing fiction: I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs […]


Elevator Repair Service @ NYPL

by Celeste Ng

A while back, we wrote about Elevator Repair Service’s performance of Gatz, in which The Great Gatsby is read in its entirety onstage. Recently, Elevator Repair Service took on a different lit-meets-theatre project, which they called “Shuffle”: to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the New York Public Library, the group performed three great works of literature—The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, and The Sound and the Fury—simultaneously. According to the New York Times, the library was temporarily transformed into a piece of performance art. Visitors wandered in and out, some fascinated, others apparently dumbfounded. No, they couldn’t get the […]


Journal of the Week: Flyway

by Carolyn Gan

I recently moved back to Los Angeles after many, many years away. Having left soon after my high school graduation for places beyond, I am pretty much a newcomer to my own hometown.  More than once, I’ve thought I was lost only to come across something startlingly familiar: a beloved restaurant, an old friend’s driveway, the cemetery where my grandmother was buried. Lucky for me, one of the first boxes I unpacked included the Spring 2010 issue of Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment.  Founded in 1993 at Iowa State University by Stephen Pett, Flyway showcases writing that considers how […]




Literary Partners