Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘awards’

Shop Talk |

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 […]


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And the winner is ….

by Lee Thomas

Tonight, the National Book Award will be announced. The National Book Foundation – who awards the prize each year – will be live tweeting the event “from pre-show setup to post show celebration.” Anne shared an interesting piece from Salon that posted on Monday. In the aptly-titled essay, “Who will win the National Book Award for fiction?“, Tom LeClair breaks down the five books in the running – Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey; Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon; Great House by Nicole Krauss; So Much for That by Lionel Shriver; and I Hotel by Karen Tei […]


Interviews |

Talking with the Dead: An Interview with Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li (Gold Boy, Emerald Girl) discusses with Angela Watrous what it means to be an American writer; the elusive process of revision; the art of transforming stories into screenplays; and the act of talking aloud to famous dead writers.


Reviews |

Best of the Web 2010, edited by Kathy Fish and Matt Bell

Our history with print’s first-rate publications can be a comforting force, a grid of familiar local streets against the sand-swept dunes of online. And it’s this lack of familiarity with digital’s landscape that makes Dzanc’s anthology so incredibly necessary: for new and old writers alike, it’s a guidebook as much as it is a book-book.


Shop Talk |

The Wonder of translation

by Lee Thomas

Translation gives those of us who are not linguistic polymaths access to the great books being written all over the planet. A good translation doesn’t simply convey the story being told – it pays attention to original voice of the author, picking up on nuance and subtleties. The judges of the 2010 PEN Translation Prize found just those shades of meaning in Michael Henry Heim’s translation from the Dutch of Hugo Claus’s Wonder (Archipelago Books). They write: Michael Henry Heim’s outstanding translation has succeeded masterfully in mirroring Hugo Claus’s many voices in this novel that reflects a complex, complicated vision […]


Interviews |

Starting with Small Moments: An Interview with Andrew Porter

by Polly Stewart

Polly Atwell talks with Andrew Porter about how crafting stories is like editing film, what particular advantages peripheral narrators can afford, and why it’s “completely surreal” to hear actors read from your work.


Reviews |

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, by Laura van den Berg

“I imagine the seasonally unspecified stories in Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us must be set in spring because spring is a time that makes me feel young, young as girls and in as much danger. And then there’s always this odd moment of realization that I am young and a girl and in some dangers. I’m still in too-close contact with boys I once loved, still prone to crying in public, still not aware of the dynamic personal lives of adults. Spring in the Midwest is about babies and hope and vitality, but it’s also about knowing that eventually a late frost is going to swing in out of no place and kill everything you haven’t collected in the shed. And I wanted the people in these stories locked up safe.”


Interviews |

Notes on Paying Attention: An Interview with Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett’s 2002 story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. His first novel, Union Atlantic, which focuses in part on unregulated trading, unethical banking, and the prospect of a massive economic collapse, was published this spring by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. Kate Levin talks with the author about fiction meeting reality, the psychology of power, the responsibility of writers to capture the social and political context of an era, and exposing ourselves in our characters.


Shop Talk |

O. Henry Launch Party at Idlewild Books this Saturday

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

For those of you in New York, Idlewild Books will be hosting a launch party for the 2010 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories Anthology this Saturday from 6-8pm. FWR is pleased to have two of its contributors represented in this year’s collection: Preeta Samarasan, whose story “Birch Memorial” was published in A Public Space, and Natalie Bakopoulos, whose story “Fresco, Byzantine,” was published in Tin House. Come join us for the reception with several of the authors featured in the anthology. Idlewild is located at 12 W. 19th street (near 5th Avenue).


Interviews |

New Ways of Looking at Old Questions: An Interview with Heidi Durrow

by Mary Westbrook

“I don’t mind that when I’m interviewed I am speaking as a representative of biracial women. I’m heartened that people are interested. I do wonder, though, when the book is critiqued as being not enough about the biracial experience. To that criticism I say, Well, okay, but it’s not a position paper. It’s a story. … I have had a number of people “come out” to me, for lack of a better word, about their blended families, or about their grief, or about simply being a young person struggling against the labels, like geek or nerd, that they’d been assigned by peers. … They’ve connected their own stories to the stories I’ve told and suddenly feel empowered to talk about it.”




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