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Dispatch from AWP 2011: An Intern-Eye View, Part II

The following post was written by Josie Keenan, Emily VanDusen, and Drake Misek, all interns at Fiction Writers Review through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) at the University of Michigan. Emily, on the pros and cons of the transmedia: To start off our second, and regrettably final, day of the conference, the three of us attended the panel discussion “From the Page to the Small Screen: What the Information Age Means for Us.” Although the panelists were all involved with poetry, the main goal of the discussion was to make sense of the transition from printed literary journals and […]


Dispatch from AWP 2011: An Intern-Eye View

The following post was written by Josie Keenan, Emily VanDusen, and Drake Misek, all interns at Fiction Writers Review through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) at the University of Michigan. Josie, on the keynote speech: After arriving in DC Thursday evening for the 2011 AWP Conference and adjusting to the big-city lights, we three interns trekked over to attend the conference’s keynote address by Pulitzer prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri delivered her first-ever keynote with all the quiet confidence and deep thoughtfulness that emanates from her stories. In it, she explored the question: Did she always want to be […]


So you're NOT in DC right now…

by Celeste Ng

Maybe the holidays left you broke. Maybe you couldn’t take vacation days off work. Or maybe you got stranded by the SnOMG! XVIII that snarled flights from the Midwest to the east coast. Whatever the reason, you’re not at AWP this weekend. What to do instead? Well, if you’re in Brooklyn, there’s always the first annual Fake AWP. Slice Magazine has the scoop: To provide a haven for those either too broke, too busy, or too disillusioned (with the fact that really it ought to be AWWP, jeez) to attend the massive four-day conference in Washington, D.C., an assortment of […]


Thursday morning candy: The Drum

by Celeste Ng

Those who take public transportation get to read during their commutes every day. But what about those who have to drive? Here’s one solution: The Drum, an online audio literary magazine, which bills itself as “a literary magazine for your ears.” Issues feature short stories, essays, and novel excerpts, all available to stream or to download to the device of your choice. Most content is free access; individual pieces are available for purchase after they’ve been on the site for three months. Recently, The Drum also formed a partnership with audio publisher Iambik: Being in the business of audio literature, […]


FWR at AWP

by Lee Thomas

It’s here – AWP 2011! If you’ll be in D.C. for the conference, please come see Fiction Writers Review at Table B-18 in the bookfair. Quick reminder: our Editor, Jeremiah Chamberlin will be moderating a panel on criticism, we’ll have two book signings at our table, and a number of our contributors are featured speakers this year. Here again, are some highlights: Friday, February 4 9 am:“The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com” Panelists: Jeremiah Chamberlin, moderator; Charles Baxter; Stacey D’Erasmo; Gemma Sieff; Keith Taylor. This panel examines how criticism is changing in a literary […]


Best. Literary Cameos. Ever.

by Celeste Ng

GalleyCat reports the mashup of two of my favorite things: literature and The Simpsons. Sometime in the upcoming season, novelist Neil Gaiman will be an animated guest star on the long-running TV show. In a blog post, Gaiman notes: I play myself. I play a very different version of myself to the me I played in Arthur, though. For a start, I do not appear in anyone’s falafel. Also, I expect I will be yellow. The Simpsons has a long history of literary references, from a rendition of Poe’s “The Raven” to a spoof of Lord of the Flies in […]


Book of The Week: Quiet Americans, by Erika Dreifus

by Lee Thomas

Each week we give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Jacob Paul’s Sarah/Sara, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Eileen Pollack, Emma Kate Tsai, and Ana Maria Velasco. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed copy of this new novel. This week we’re featuring Erika Dreifus’s story collection Quiet Americans. Erika, a Contributing Editor at Fiction Writers Review, wrote a lovely review of last week’s Book of The Week, Sarah/Sara for the site last year, which you can find here. Her other reviews for FWR […]


Bookworm Dating Hits the New York Times

by Celeste Ng

Last summer, FWR reported on Alikewise, a free dating site based on your taste in books. Only five months later, the New York Times has picked up the story, including Alikewise in a roundup of “niche dating sites.” Compared to some of the other sites, in the list—matchmaking sites for senior citizens, Apple lovers, virgins seeking other virgins, and mustache fetishists—finding a date based on shared literary tastes is hardly weird. Is this a sign, maybe, that literary dating is ready for the mainstream?


Flipbook: "Research"

by Lee Thomas

Two weeks ago we launched a new feature, the 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. Our second Flipbook is now up on the FWR Facebook page, with an exclusive slide right here on the blog. Every few weeks we’ll post a Flipbook that highlights some of […]


A Barbaric yAWP

by Lee Thomas

While nearly every writer knows the uplift that community interaction provides – not only to the words on the page, but to a career, to a new collaboration, to every aspect of the literary life – not everyone has the ability or means to travel to the AWP Conference. So what’s a community-craving writer to do? Enter Meg’s Barbaric yAWP. Founder Meg Pokrass, writer – newly minted author! – and member of the FWR community – began “A Barbaric yAWP” as an alternative, virtual way for writers and people in the biz to connect during the 3-day period of AWP. […]


Save Harper's Magazine

by Natalie Bakopoulos

For the last several months, Harper’s staff, recently unionized, has been in conflict with the magazine’s publisher, John R. “Rick” MacArthur. The disagreements stem from various sources, which have been outlined in two recent articles in New York Magazine, here and here. In short: MacArthur is resistant to other avenues of revenue, including fund raising. Instead, having already cut the size and payroll of the editorial staff, which lost four senior editors and its web editor in 2010, MacArthur is now insisting that it’s necessary to lay off, immediately, two of the magazine’s most experienced editors, one of whom is […]


Evolution or Devolution: Where is literature taking us?

The following guest post is by Josie Keenan, an FWR intern and second-year student at the University of Michigan. More and more these days, I find myself bemoaning the fate of books. As Lee discussed in her recent blog “Let’s get digital”, downloadable books have been available for some time now. Digitization is one aspect of the way literature is changing, but what we are reading is also changing. Where novels were once belabored, deeply considered works in which every word of every sentence was deliberately placed, today it seems a more manufacturable task. One can write a novel just […]




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