Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Anne Stameshkin’

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Reviewlet: The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier

by Anne Stameshkin

Once there was a city where everyone had the gift of song. Once there was a city where people did not look one another in the eye. Once there was a man who happened to buy God’s overcoat. The View from the Seventh Layer is a rich, ethereal collection: here are fables, ghost stories, romances (among them a sci-fi adaptation of “The Lady with the Pet Dog”), personal histories, anxieties of influence, and spiritual bursts — even a choose-your-own-adventure for the soul. These stories unfold in worlds just shy of our own, where metaphors take literal form. Each explores the […]


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fiction as social grace

by Anne Stameshkin

According to this recent study, fiction makes you more empathetic–and therefore less socially awkward. If you’re British, you can even use those bookish charms to find love on PenguinDating, “where book lovers meet.” From the Penguin Blog: Sure, some of us might be trapped in joyless, loveless relationships with people who get upset because we were looking at online dating websites, even though it’s for PERFECTLY REASONABLE reasons like fabricating a picture of a King Penguin with a match.com profile KATE. But there are others out there yet to find that special joyless, loveless relationship in which to get trapped. […]


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Tin House shout-out

by Anne Stameshkin

Pick up the current issue of Tin House and read “Fresco, Byzantine,” a story by FWR contributor Natalie Bakopoulos. They had come of age in such places, those island prisons—during the Nazi occupations, during the civil war, throughout the fifties, and now—and now some were growing old there. This issue, “Political Future,” also features fiction, nonfiction, or political-literary commentary from the likes of José Saramago, Thomas Franks, Francine Prose, Wallace Shawn, Cynthia Ozick, Dorothy Allison, Charles Baxter, John Barth, Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Lydia Millet, and others.


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Reviewlet: Instant Love by Jami Attenberg

by Anne Stameshkin

At the FGIBI party, I had the chance to meet Jami Attenberg, whose novel-in-stories Instant Love I recently read and admired. Instant Love follows an ensemble of vivid characters whose lives intersect as they stumble upon, after, or away from romance. Whether the passion in question is fleeting or fundamental, each story sharpens to a fine narrative point–a moment of connection or dissolution. The effect of reading these stories together satisfies more than merely sampling one. Attenberg makes me believe in her characters’ lives beyond the page by offering scenes across shared history (spanning high-school romances to hasty marriages and […]


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Reviewlet: Away by Amy Bloom

by Anne Stameshkin

This beautiful novel by one of my favorite short-story writers follows the adventures of 22-year-old Lillian Leyb, a recent survivor of a Russian pogrom, from New York’s Lower East Side to Seattle to the remotest parts of Alaska, where she hopes to get a boat to Siberia. (The story is set in the 1920s.) After her husband and parents were murdered before her eyes and her small daughter lost in the fray (and sought for some time), Lillian emmigrated, hoping to escape her haunted past and carve out a life for herself in New York. But just as Lillian’s getting […]


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Fiction Writers Review is born

by Anne Stameshkin

Welcome to the world, FWR. And welcome, world, to the booksite. Here’s hoping we can shine some love on that oft-misunderstood genre called fiction. You can read about our mission here and check out reviews, interviews and essays. We welcome ARCs from publicists and submissions from writers. This blog is going to be a hodge-podge of book news, recommendations, links, reviewlets, and discussions. I make no promises about being fair, balanced, consistent, or completist, but I hope to keep things interesting. Here’s to the lovely and fearless Marissa, who made this site possible, and to all FWR contributors for suspending […]




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