Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Anne Stameshkin’

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Buy a book for a public school library!

by Anne Stameshkin

Via Jeffrey Rotter: ReadThis is a great organization “devoted to promoting access to books and reading wherever needed.” Among other projects, they helped create a library last spring for the public middle/high school Brooklyn Collegiate. Now you can help stock this library by clicking here and buying a book (chosen by the school to fill gaps) from Book Culture for for its collection. ReadThis will pay shipping, and the bookstore will donate 15% of sales for each book back to the school as a donation. In one swoop you’ll be supporting a library and an independent bookstore. Geri Ellner, Library […]


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Sirenland 2010: workshop your writing in Italy

by Anne Stameshkin

So…who wants to spend a week with One Story magazine at this hotel in Positano, Italy, engaging in a series of advanced fiction- and memoir-writing workshops with Dani Shapiro, Jim Shepard, and Ron Carlson; giving and attending readings; and dining with a view of the Tirreno Sea? Submissions are open from now through October 31 for the third annual Sirenland Writers Conference (March 21-27, 2010). As someone lucky enough to have been workshopped by Shepard once, I urge other writers to jump at any chance to discuss work with him! Visit the Sirenland website to learn more about the conference […]


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at the cocktail party, with the birds

by Anne Stameshkin

As you can see on the left sidebar, FWR is now Twitterpated (name: “fictionwriters”). Come follow us… I had mixed feelings at first about tweeting. It’s one thing to offer readers detours and chances to read more about an author, book, or issue via hyperlinks, but as an all-volunteer labor-of-love site, did we really need to maintain multiple online presences? There seemed something homey and focused — and time-efficient — about just being and not tweeting about it. But ultimately, we’d love to let more readers know about us, to reach out to new potential writers, and to establish more […]


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recommended event: short plays by Brian Bartels

by Anne Stameshkin

NYC-based writers: On Tuesday, September 22 at 7 PM, head to the Rattlestick Theater to see a one-night only reading of Mulletfingers: Short Plays on Hands and Fingers by FWR contributor Brian Bartels. I was lucky enough to attend another night of Brian’s hilarious yet thought-provoking plays, Versus, in March, and the short pieces resonated together like a stories in a thematically linked collection. The Rattlestick is located at 224 Waverly Place (2nd Floor). Break a leg, Brian and company!


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recommended event: The Brooklyn Book Festival

by Anne Stameshkin

This Sunday, I’ll sadly be driving away from Brooklyn, but if you’re lucky enough to live in or near King’s County, check out this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival. Where: Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza When: Sunday, Sept. 13 from 10 AM – 6 PM What: A book fair surrounded by a variety of wonderful events — readings, panels, interviews, tributes, literary quiz games, film screenings, a comics jam, and workshops in book-making and cartooning. All events are free, but some require that you reserve space by picking up tickets one hour before the event at one of the info booths […]


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recommended site: Lit Drift

by Anne Stameshkin

New on the lit blog scene is the very fun Lit Drift, a self-described “resource and community dedicated to the art & craft of storytelling in the 21st century.” Our name is a nod to how traditional forms of storytelling are, well, drifting into forms wholly new and unexpected. We’re interested in sifting through the palimpsests known as the Internet, the arts, and the in-between to uncover those new forms and techniques in constructing fiction. We believe that literature should be fun in an age when it’s only too easy to turn on the TV and watch shitcoms instead. We […]


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impulse buy: Gourmet Rhaposdy by Muriel Barbery

by Anne Stameshkin

On Thursday I emerged from a fog of editing work and serious reading in need of a pick-me-up, so I headed to Borders, hoping to get my hands on that much-hyped smeary deliciousness known as “Me and Mrs. Palin.” Alas — it’s in the October, not September, issue of Vanity Fair, and since I’m no longer a New Yorker, I’ll have to wait until Sept. 8 to buy a copy. To assuage my (embarrassing) disappointment, I reminded myself that I was in a bookstore, a struggling one at that. Never mind the towering to-read pile of books on my nightstand: […]


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Reading Rainbow snuffed out by short-sighted, phonics-loving imagination killers

by Anne Stameshkin

Apparently getting kids excited about books isn’t worth funding. It’s better to focus on the “mechanics” of reading because, you know, that will definitely instill the next generation with a passion for it. **head explodes** Via NPR: The show’s [26-year] run is ending, Grant explains, because no one — not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights. Grant says the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in […]


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writing time

by Anne Stameshkin

J. Robert Lennon, whose story collection Pieces for the Left Hand will be reviewed on FWR later this fall–and who was recommended highly to our readers by Lydia Davis–recently made this fantastic confession on behalf of all writers. We don’t spend much time writing. There. It’s out. Writers, by and large, do not do a great deal of writing. We may devote a large number of hours per day to writing, yes, but very little of that time is spent typing the words of a poem, essay or story into a computer or scribbling them onto a piece of paper. […]


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Andrew's Book Club: September Collections

by Anne Stameshkin

This month, Andrew’s UP pick is Triple Time (U of Pittsburgh Press), Anne Sanow‘s debut collection of linked stories about life in modern Saudi Arabia and 2009 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Via the author’s website: For Jill, a young American living in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, life is in “a holding pattern” of long days in a restrictive place—”sandlocked nowhere,” as another expat calls it. Others don’t know how to leave, and try to adopt the country as their own. And to those who were born there, the changes seem to come at warp speed: Thurayya, […]




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