Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

Play it again, Sam

by Lee Thomas

Recently a friend turned me on to Ravens & Chimes, whose first album happens to be titled “Reichenbach Falls”—which, of course, is a reference to the famous site where Sherlock Holmes “died” only to be resurrected by Arthur Conan Doyle after years of reader heckling. This sparked a bit of my own sleuthing on the interwebs. Bookride has a pretty comprehensive list of band names inspired by literature, including: The Grateful Dead (originally a book by Gordon Hall Geroud, though the band claims it was ‘the outcome of a night of stoned lexicology’) Steppenwolf (Holla, Herr Hesse!) Tears for Fears […]


Doodles of Famous Authors

by Celeste Ng

Perhaps it’s pure nostalgia, but here on the blog we’ve been keeping a running list of things we lose when a book moves from physical object to digital file: the dedications and notes on the flyleaf, the deckle edges, careful typesetting, artistic covers. Here’s something else to add to the loss column: marginal doodles. Flavorwire has compiled a gallery of the idle squiggles of famous writers, offering an amusing and fascinating glimpse into the authors’ minds. For instance, Sylvia Plath depicted a nightmare of being chased by a hot dog and a marshmallow (this just cries out for Freudian interpretation), […]


A bad time for writers? Not if you're a "debutant."

by Celeste Ng

True or false: It’s harder now to get published than ever. Answer: It depends. In the Financial Times, Adrian Turpin argues that the picture for debut novelists isn’t as bleak as you’d think: For most literary authors, the not-so-brave new world of publishing by numbers is terrible news. But there is one type of writer exempt from its strictures: the first novelist. Unsullied by inconvenient sales figures, the debutant exists uniquely in a state of prelapsarian grace, a blank canvas on which publishers can dream. […] Even recession has failed to dent the perennial desire for the new. While the […]


Book of the Week: The Oracle of Stamboul, by Michael David Lukas

by Anne Stameshkin

Each week Fiction Writers Review gives away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Alison Espach’s debut, The Adults, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Annie Angelides, Vanessa Heng, and Jackie Reitzes. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed copy of Espach’s novel. This week we’re pleased to feature Michael David Lukas’s debut novel The Oracle of Stamboul (Harper). Lukas has been a Fulbright scholar in Turkey, a late-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and a Rotary scholar in Tunisia. His writing—fiction and nonfiction—has been published in the […]


The (semi-)mobile workspace

by Celeste Ng

Most writers have special workspaces in their homes, but how many can shift their space to suit their moods? Liu Ming, a feng shui teacher in Oakland, CA, has outfitted his loft apartment with a mobile, 8-foot cube that functions as a mediation area, study, and sleeping area. The New York Times reports: “In feng shui, we talk about the harmony in the place that you live in,” Mr. Liu says. “The cube evolved out of wanting cozy with the option of keeping a big, open space at the same time. And we added wheels for feng shui purposes. Now […]


Flipbook: "Influence"

by Lee Thomas

Every few weeks, we launch a new Fiction Writers Review “Flipbook.” During the past two and a half years, we’ve featured more than 50 interviews with authors established and emerging. They’ve had such valuable insights into the writing life – from thoughts on process and craft to ideas about community and influence – that we wanted to find a way to further these conversations within our community. Each Flipbook highlights some of the very best of the conversations on our site, centered around a particular topic. Our latest Flipbook is now up on the FWR Facebook page, with an exclusive […]


U.K. vs. U.S. covers

by Celeste Ng

When British books are published in the United States, and vice versa, publishers don’t generally change the text to cater to their audiences across the pond. Okay, they often adjust the spelling of a few words, like “realise”/”realize” and “practise”/”practice.” And some small punctuation changes occur—British writers tend to put their periods and commas outside quotation marks, Americans within. But these changes are quite minor. There’s one major thing that changes when a book crosses the Atlantic, though: the cover. The Millions has an interesting analysis of the UK and US covers of the books involved in the 2011 Tournament […]


Critics on Criticism

by Celeste Ng

Criticism has never been an easy field, but now there’s a new risk: legal action. New York University law professor Joseph Weiler is being sued for running an negative book review. Writes Weiler: Last week, for the first time I found myself in the dock, as a criminal defendant. The French Republic v Weiler on a charge of Criminal Defamation. […] As Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law and its associated Book Reviewing website, I commissioned and then published a review of a book on the International Criminal Court. It was not a particularly favorable review. You may […]


Thursday morning candy: Storyglossia

by Lee Thomas

In honor of the online literary community, which we discussed this week in Celeste’s blog post about Virtual Book Tours and my interview with flash fiction maven Meg Pokrass, we’d like to feature online literary journal Storyglossia this Thursday morning. “Storyglossia” is a term coined by Editor Steven J. McDermott, with an impressive etymological explanation on the Storyglossia site, which you can read here. Their first online issue debuted in March 2003, and since then 41 issues of the journal have gone up – every one of which you can peruse on their easily-navigable site. In addition to Meg Pokrass, […]


Harder than walking and chewing gum at the same time…

by Celeste Ng

Serious bookworms don’t read just on the train. They read anytime they have a minute—sometimes at their peril. The father of a certain Fiction-Writers-Review-editor-who-shall-not-be-named has been known to read the newspaper while driving. And in high school, I knew a girl who read books while walking: down the hallway AND down the sidewalk. I was never quite able to master this skill. As usual, technology has come to the rescue. Inkstone Software has added the “Walk N’ Read HUD (Heads-Up Display)” feature to their e-reader MegaReader—and it does just what it says on the box. Explains the company’s press release: […]


AWP in photos

by Lee Thomas

This week we’re revisiting the 2011 AWP Conference in more ways than one. Yesterday we posted Jeremiah Chamberlin’s introductory talk for the AWP panel he moderated, “The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com.” This morning, we posted Charles Baxter‘s discussion of “Owl Criticism” from the same panel. Stay tuned for two more essays by the panelists Stacey D’Erasmo (tomorrow) and Keith Taylor (Friday). Seeing so many contributors, and connecting with writers, teachers, publishers, agents and lit journals who share our enthusiasm for FWR, was amazing. It also reminded us of the vital role you, dear […]


Book-Length Sentences: The Antidote to Twitter? (And does Twitter need an antidote, anyway?)

by Celeste Ng

That basic unit of literature, the sentence, has been getting a lot of attention lately thanks to Stanley Fish’s new book How to Write a Sentence. In it, Fish makes an argument that sentences are to writing what paint is to painting: But wouldn’t the equivalent of paint be words rather than sentences? Actually, no, because while you can brush or even drip paint on a canvas and make something interesting happen, just piling up words, one after the other, won’t do much of anything until something else has been added. […] Before the words slide into their slots, they […]




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