Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Blog’

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recommended post: how an agent reads

by Anne Stameshkin

Agent Jessica Faust from BookEnds breaks down in this post how she reads each of the following: query letters, proposals, requested manuscripts, revised manuscripts from clients, and books for pleasure. This is helpful reading for anyone preparing agent submissions: Often when reading proposals I’m distracted. I’m reading at home, at night, and dinner is on, or the TV is on, or there is just chaos. A good three chapters is going to make that chaos disappear. Like most readers I don’t have the opportunity for a peaceful few hours to sit quietly and read. Instead I’m counting on the book […]


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Munro trivia

by Anne Stameshkin

Andrea Walker shares choice tidbits from Munro’s session at the New Yorker Festival earlier this month: ‘Things you may not know about Alice Munro’: She sees her stories visually before they become words. She often starts with an image of some incident and the people involved—a sense of some action, or some effect that the characters have created on each other. She doesn’t know at that stage exactly what’s happened to them or what they’re saying to each other, only that these people somehow belong in the story together. Now brace yourself: “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories” was […]


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Khaled Hosseini

by Anne Stameshkin

Kathryn forwarded me this Washington Post piece by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. Here’s an excerpt: I prefer to discuss politics through my novels, but I am truly dismayed these days. Twice last week alone, speakers at McCain-Palin rallies have referred to Sen. Barack Obama, with unveiled scorn, as Barack Hussein Obama…What I find most unconscionable is the refusal of the McCain-Palin tandem to publicly condemn the cries of “traitor,” “liar,” “terrorist” and (worst of all) “kill him!” that could be heard at recent rallies. McCain is perfectly capable of telling hecklers off. […]


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american writers and the nobel prize

by Anne Stameshkin

Like many, I bristled at recent remarks by Nobel Prize Committee head Horace Engdahl that American writers are “ignorant,” “isolated,” and “insular,” unworthy of consideration for the prize. Guaridan writer Jean Hannah Edelstein agrees that these remarks were offensive but wonders if particular limitations imposed on American writers might restrict our capacity for literary greatness. In this article, she argues that American writers “need support to reinvent the national literature. This will require a great deal of support and sympathy from US publishers: what the industry must do, in order to give American literati the license to unequivocally scoff at […]


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recommended reading: two short stories

by Anne Stameshkin

I teach in Connecticut on Wednesdays, so it’s the perfect excuse to shirk blogging duties and link to two of the best stories I’ve read this year: 1. “Nine” by Aryn Kyle, from the Atlantic‘s 2008 Fiction Issue. If it strikes your fancy, read Kyle’s debut novel, The God of Animals, now available in paperback and reviewed here on FWR. 2. “Face” by Alice Munro, from the September 8 New Yorker. What a fresh story! Who can “make it new” after more than a dozen collections? Alice Munro, that’s who.


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characters behaving badly

by Anne Stameshkin

I know I’d rather spend time with Becky Sharp than with that drip Amelia Sedley. — Juliet Annan Juliet Annan offers this post on The Penguin Blog – Little Dorrit deserves a smack – on readers who whine about “unlikeable” characters, including those in Zoe Heller’s The Believers. I, too, am tired of hearing people say a character is “unsympathetic,” though at least the term is more nuanced than “unlikeable.” But who is at fault when a character is unsympathetic? If we have not a single way in — if said character has a heart of ash and no desires […]


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game as worm?

by Anne Stameshkin

Celeste just linked me to this article. “You can’t just make a book anymore,” said Mr. Haarsma, a former advertising consultant. Pairing a video game with a novel for young readers, he added, “brings the book into their world, as opposed to going the other way around.” Celeste: Really? Isn’t falling into the world of a book one of the joys of fiction? But then, if a game *does* draw kids to reading, maybe it’s a good thing after all. We found the following scene disturbing — and not just because it transpired in our MFA Homeland: At a gaming […]




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