Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Blog’

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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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Dispatch from Bread Loaf #2: On Lushness, Irony, and Honesty

by Celeste Ng

At Bread Loaf, the first thing people asked–after “What’s your name?”–was often “What genre do you write?” There wasn’t any great divide between poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers, but somehow it seemed important to know. Maybe this is because we tend to think of our genres as very different forms with very different concerns and goals. I can’t count how many times I heard fiction writers say, “But I don’t know anything about poetry…” and poets say, “Well, I don’t get plot.” But actually, I think that poets and fiction writers have more overlap than they often believe. A […]


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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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DISPATCH FROM BREAD LOAF #1: What I (Heard) Read This Summer

by Celeste Ng

I was lucky enough to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont this summer, as a tuition scholar, and I’m still processing all that I learned. In the 12 days I spent on the mountain, I heard 101 people read in 24 separate readings. I attended 5 workshop sessions, 5 lectures, 3 craft classes, and countless cocktail hours. And I’m still kicking myself for not doing more. But I guess that’s part of the experience. Bread Loaf is an exercise in excess: a positive glut of new ideas and voices and inspirations. I left completely overstimulated, with a stack […]


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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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Miles from Nowhere's Paperback Tour

by Anne Stameshkin

The paperback edition of Nami Mun‘s Orange Prize-nominated debut novel-in-stories, Miles from Nowhere, will publish Tuesday, September 1, 2009. And Chicago magazine just named Nami Best New Novelist in their “Best of Chicago” feature. Here’s my own reviewlet of the hardcover: Miles from Nowhere began as a collection of linked stories (two of which I had the pleasure to read in workshop at Michigan). As a novel, the chapter-stories work together beautifully; Miles remains episodic, but breaks between chapters feel hauntingly like lost years…perfect for this particular story. Set in New York City in the 1980s, the book follows a […]




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