Suspend Your Disbelief

Shop Talk

Thursday morning candy: Wigleaf

by Lee Thomas

There’s something to be said for simplicity. An afternoon spent at the park. Only what you can fit in your pocket. A bowl of fresh apricots straight from the tree (sorry, New York has me dreaming of summer already). Every time I visit Wigleaf, their clean design aesthetic, wide margins and punchy, brief stories of under 1,000 words feel like a cool drink of water on a hot day (even when I am looking at several inches of snow outside the window). Wigleaf started in 2008, and we have Scott Garson to thank for the design and main editing on […]


The Difference between the Lightning Bug and the Lightning

by Natalie Bakopoulos

New South Books, an Alabama publisher, plans to release a version of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn wherein the n-word is replaced by the word “slave.” 219 times. The professor who originally approached the publisher with the idea did so because he himself felt uncomfortable using the word in class. I, of course, feel uncomfortable even writing it out. And if I were teaching Huck Finn, I wouldn’t utter it either, though its presence certainly wouldn’t keep me from teaching the book in the classroom and discussing this discomfort with my students. Needless to say, the release of this […]


Book of the Week: Gryphon, by Charles Baxter

by Anne Stameshkin

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 Damon Galgut’s novel In a Strange Room, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Alex Boyles, Kara Candito, and Joanne Wong. Congratulations! Each will receive a copy of this new novel. This week we’re featuring Charles Baxter’s Gryphon: New and Selected Stories. Baxter is the author of more than a dozen books, including four previous collections of stories, five novels, and several books of nonfiction. His novel The Feast of Love was nominated for the […]


Bloggers: Give Quote, Get Promo

by Sarah Van Arsdale

I’m writing a chapter for a course on blogging, and I’ve been asked to collect quotes about writing from bloggers. So I’m turning to you, readers of the FWR blog, to help me keep my day job by making this great! To participate, you must have a blog, preferably one on writing, but it could be on something else. And you must send me a short quote – about 3-5 sentences – about writing. You can send more than one, but we’ll only use one from each blogger. If we use your quote, we’ll give you credit and likely ask […]


The World's Most Literary Rent Party Ever

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

On Sunday, February 6th, join literary greats such as Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders, Rick Moody, Amy Hempel, Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Hannah Tinti at PS 122 in New York’s East Village as they throw “The World’s Most Literary Rent Party Ever,” to raise money for Diana Colbert, wife of novelist Charles Bock (author of Beautiful Children). In 2009 Colbert was diagnosed with leukemia and had a bone marrow transplant. But in October of this year, the leukemia returned. So friends of the Bocks–writers Fiona Maazel, Mary-Beth Hughes, and Leigh Newman–decided to help by throwing this literary fund-raiser. As […]


A Room of Her Own

by Lee Thomas

Attention all ladies: A Room of Her Own (AROHO) has a trio of great awards coming up in January and beyond. The foundation for women writers & artists, whose mission encompasses empowering, educating, and encouraging women writers and artists, features their spring Orlando Prize, with submissions closing on January 31. AROHO writes: AROHO’s Orlando Prizes for unpublished poetry, short fiction, flash fiction and nonfiction celebrate Virginia Woolf’s title character’s liberation from the restraints of time and gender. AROHO’s new array of competitions is an invitation of women writers to manifest their own escapades “in gardens running down to the river, […]


Inspiration 2.011

by Lee Thomas

One of my favorite elements of FWR’s author interviews has got to be reading about what inspires other writers. Some of us get lost in years of research, some just get out into the world and make friends on the bus, some can’t say enough about delving into nonfiction, science journals, trips to the ballet – you name it. Writing is a passion that feeds off other passions. You can definitely feel this as a reader. Sometimes, sitting in front of blank document, I long for the days of the high school essay prompt. My English teacher senior year, Ms. […]


Save Time to Save Words

During the holidays, everyone seems to be rushing to get something or other done. If it’s not buying presents or attending parties, many of us are traveling to visit friends and family. And at least here in Michigan, where winter has set in, people are hurrying everywhere, trying to get from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible. But getting there is half the fun, right? Earlier this year, the Oxford English Dictionary launched its “Save the Words” campaign. It promises to make getting around (alas, only conversationally) more fun while saving words that are falling out of […]


Book of the Week: In a Strange Room, by Damon Galgut

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

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 Elegies for the Brokenhearted, by Christie Hodgen, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Brooks Rexroat, Kierstyn Lamour, and Kate Hill Cantrill. Congratulations! Each will receive a copy of this new novel. This week we’re featuring Damon Galgut’s novel In a Strange Room. Though this title came out in the U.K. from Atlantic Books last year, it’s only recently been released in the States, published here by EuropaEditions. In September the book was shortlisted for […]


United States Artists: Propelling America's Creative Potential

by Joshua Bodwell

United States Artists, the five-year-old philanthropic organization known for the fifty $50,000 fellowships it awards each year to “America’s finest artists,” has gotten into the Kickstarter business. Propelled by their mission to “invest in America’s finest artists and illuminate the value of artists to society,” United States Artists has started a Projects portion of their website, designed to help several of their fellows launch projects. The new initiative caught my eye when Wesley McNair, a Maine-based poet whose work I greatly admire, announced “Letters Between Poets.” McNair himself was a USA Ford Fellow in 2006, and is much-revered for penning […]


The next generation

by Lee Thomas

The San Francisco WritersCorps program places professional writers in community settings to teach creative writing to youth. Like the 826 programs around the U.S., Red Beard Press in Ann Arbor, or Voices Behind Walls in El Paso, TX and Las Cruces, NM, WritersCorps works with young people to hone their writing skills – poetry, fiction, memoir, song writing – as a means of creative power and self-expression. This year, WritersCorps won a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award for their work with young people. From their website: WritersCorps, a project of the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San […]


Thursday morning candy: Smokelong Quarterly

by Lee Thomas

Here’s where my November resolution to read War and Peace over the last two weeks of December begins to look like so much bluster and brim. I’ve never been a huge fan of New Year’s Resolutions for this very reason: the likelihood of failure feels like the hulking beast perched atop the crumbling overhang of the dainty little ledge where I contemplate things like “finish two stories a month.” BUT, have I got an easy resolution for you: in 2011, read more flash fiction. What’s not to love? You can finish reading it before your coffee gets cold, you can […]




Literary Partners