Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Anne Stameshkin’

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2008 Whiting Prize winners / recommended website: Brevity

by Anne Stameshkin

The Whiting Prizes are annual honors bestowed on emerging writers who show “exceptional talent and promise.” Congratulations to fiction writers Mischa Berlinski, Laleh Khadivi, Manuel Muñoz, Benjamin Percy and Lysley Tenorio. Click here to see a full list of winners. Whiting-winning essayist Donovan Hohn got a nice shout-out from Harper’s Wyatt Mason, who invites us to make Hohn’s work our “Weekend Read.” For a sampling of exquisite “concise creative nonfiction,” FWR highly recommends a detour to a website mentioned in said shout-out, Brevity. The site also features book reviews.


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adaptations forecast at Powell's blog

by Anne Stameshkin

I recently discovered this frequently updated string of Powell’s posts called “Read It Before They Screen It”. Among the most intriguing adaptations-in-the-making is Jim Crace’s Being Dead. Another fun fact: film rights to The Story of Edgar Sawtelle will be bestowed based on the quality of proposals pitched in person to author David Wroblewski.


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new novel from Lorrie Moore

by Anne Stameshkin

According to the Bookseller, Lorrie Moore’s new novel — her first in over a decade — is coming out in 2009. Stephen Page at British publisher Faber gushes that A Gate at the Stairs “is a masterpiece for our times and only re-enforces her as one of the great writers of our age,” and Vicky Wilson at Moore’s US publisher, Knopf, calls the novel “a stunner.” The UK edition is due to publish next autumn; I’m not sure about the US-release date. What I am sure about is how excited I am to pick up A Gate at the Stairs. […]


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recommended: cover contest at Bookninja

by Anne Stameshkin

Falling behind on Google Reader, I almost miss awesome things like this contest by Bookninja. The premise is to “rebrand” literary titles with covers and quotes that make them more mass marketesque. If you click nowhere else today, click here to behold the finalists and here to see Bookninja’s own offerings, including Beloved-as-apocalypse. The entires will make you laugh and think about the more serious repercussions of rebranding. Voting is still open; email editors@bookninja.com with your top three picks by Friday. One of my favorite contenders is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road “as parenting book.” (For a higher-res version, check out […]


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recommended interview: Meeting House talks to Kelly Link

by Anne Stameshkin

“I really loved reading books when, at some point, I got the feeling I wasn’t supposed to be reading them.” My love for Kelly Link just grows and grows. That quote is from a great interview with her from Meeting House, a self-described “weekly journal of New England Literature and the Arts” whose site I will definitely be returning to. Another Link-able quote: “I don’t trust people who seem trustworthy, at least not in fiction. I’ve read too many mystery novels. In real life I think I’m more often gullible than not, easily disarmed or charmed by people I shouldn’t […]


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the book isn't dead yet, but fiction "needs all the help it can get"

by Anne Stameshkin

Happily, not everyone predicts an imminent doomsday for the book (or book publishing). David Ulin at the LA Times urges publishers to stop panicking and “focus on the writing rather than the noise.” And Amelia Atlas at the New York Observer talks to some industry insiders who think the book might do OK in a recession: reading is, after all, a form of escape. She herself suggests: “There are only so many times, it would seem, that the industry can hear the sound of its own death knell and still worry.” Still, she quotes Sonny Mehta as saying that “Fiction […]


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a section of one's own?

by Anne Stameshkin

Earlier this week, a friend asked me what I thought about questions raised in this article about urban fiction. To sum up: libraries’ urban fiction (mostly African-American fiction) sections are growing, as are the numbers of enthusiastic black readers who borrow from them. Some writers and readers within the African-American community find the genre (also sometimes called street lit or black literature) “embarrassing” and feel that it perpetuates stereotypes. Others worry that segregating blacks to a specific section in the library or bookstore recalls uglier times and promotes the idea of separate cultures, separate literatures. But other writers, readers, and […]


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the invisible library

by Anne Stameshkin

Visit The Invisible Library, where fictional books — those that exist only in fictional worlds — are chronicled. Can you think of a book not included here? If so, enter Book Maven’s Invislble Library Contest; the prize is a grab-bag of five real books.


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the re-reading has begun

by Anne Stameshkin

FWR’s first “You’ve Got to Re-Read This” is up on our Reviews page. Charlotte Boulay tells us why the Moomin books, including Moominsummer Madness, fascinated her as a kid and why we should read them today. Writer-readers: Submissions (blog posts, essays, reviews, what-have-you) for this series remain open; send queries to fictionwritersreview@gmail.com.




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