Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Blog’

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authors v. editors v. agents: Slice's literary trivia showdown!

by Anne Stameshkin

Celebrate Slice Magazine‘s fourth issue launch with a Literary Trivia Showdown event tonight, March 23, from 6:30-9:30 at Dixon Place (161 Chrystie St, between Rivington and Delancey). This first-time event will pit three teams of five agents, five editors, and five authors (including Jonathan Lethem) against each other. The launch party will also feature craft ales, a raffle, and a silent auction. Tickets are $25 and include a copy of the magazine’s Issue 4.


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get workshopped, support writing programs for young students

by Anne Stameshkin

DZANC books and the Emerging Writers Network are offering a a great opportunity for writers seeking feedback on their work: the DZANC Creative Writing Sessions are online one-on-one workshops that you can purchase very cheaply by the hour. Have your work read and commented on by someone from this amazing list of authors–all of whom are volunteering their time to this project. 100% of the proceeds go to support DZANC’s Writers in the Schools program for kids grades 4-12.


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Uwem Akpan wins Africa regional for Best First Book!

by Anne Stameshkin

Warm congratulations to friend and former classmate Uwem Akpan, whose debut story collection Say You’re One of Them has won the Africa regional for the Commonwealth Writers’ Best First Book Award. Africa’s Best Book Award winner is South African writer Mandla Langa, for The Lost Colours of the Chameleon. The authors will each go on to compete for the overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in their respective categories.


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a walking tour of NYC's indie bookstores

by Anne Stameshkin

This is courtesy of The Millions, who gave us the first incarnation of this tour in 2007. This updated, expanded map and itinerary is also a eulogy for the bookshops we’ve lost and those that won’t be with us for much longer… And, as of today, you can edit and update the map to include the independent bookstores and bookish places you love anywhere in the world. Follow these instructions to help create The Millions’ Collaborative Atlas of Bookstores and Literary Places. Who will add Shaman Drum to the Atlas? Do so, let me know you did, and I’ll order […]


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Scibona wins NYPL's Young Lions Fiction Award

by Anne Stameshkin

Congratulations to Salvatore Scibona for winning the 9th annual Young Lions Fiction Award!! Sponsored by the New York Public Library, this $10,000 prize honors a writer who, at age 35 or younger, has made “an indelible impression on the world of literature” with a novel or story collection. The four finalists were: Jon Fasman, The Unpossessed City Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances (FWR’s review coming soon) Sana Krasikov, One More Year (see FWR’s review here) Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey And check out Fiction Writers Review this weekend for an interview with Salvatore Scibona; a review of The […]


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join the effort to save Shaman Drum and the GLLAC

by Anne Stameshkin

An Open Letter from Julie Ellison The following message was originally posted here and has been making the rounds as an email. Please refer other book lovers and writers, especially those in the Ann Arbor area, to this announcement and the letter it links to. Dear Friends and Colleagues, I am writing to let you know about a collective effort to save Shaman Drum Bookshop, now incorporated as the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center (GLLAC). The statement (click here to download the PDF) explains the reasoning behind a new coalition to preserve Shaman Drum. Those of us involved in this […]


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when will they ever learn?

by Anne Stameshkin

There have been scads of articles about the evils of high-stakes gambling by book publishers–the doling out of huge advances to one or two would-be-blockbusters while investing little in the rest of the list. The logic behind this impulse isn’t hard to understand: when a Big Book hits the jackpot, the publisher does, too–and in theory, the rest of a publisher’s list and personnel would reap the benefits. But even the glorious success of of one book can set unrealistic expectation for future titles–and rather than supplementing resources for less popular books, a Hit might wind up making those books […]


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NBCC Awards

by Anne Stameshkin

The National Book Critics Circle announced 2008’s award winners on Thursday: Fiction: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, trans. by Natasha Wimmer (FSG) Poetry: Sleeping It Off in Rapid City by August Kleinzahler (FSG) and Half the World in Light by Juan Felipe Herrera (U of Arizona Pr) Criticism: Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter by Seth Lerer (U of Chicago Pr) Biography: The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French (Knopf) Autobiography: My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar (Algonquin) Nonfiction: […]




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