Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Blog’

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The Great Geek Giveaway Contest

by Anne Stameshkin

On Monday, FWR will publish Sophie Powell’s review of Ethan Gilsdorf‘s memoir-adventure hybrid Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. In the meantime, this contest on the author’s website sounds fun. Click on that link for all the details, but here’s a snippet: What is your geekiest secret? Your freakiest fandom moment? Your most embarrassing gaming gaffe? In a brief essay, photo or video, we want you to spill the beans. The folks at Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks Headquarters want to know about that time you stalked your favorite Star Trek celebrity to a coffee shop, made a pilgrimage to a […]


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Margaret Atwood's book tour / fundraiser / theatre piece

by Anne Stameshkin

To promote her new novel, The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood will be touring five countries and thirty-five cities, performing staged readings with trios of local actors who will also sing some of the book’s original hymns (set to music). A number of these events will also serve as fundraisers for BirdLife International. Here’s the author’s own take on the project (via the Times Online), and you can follow the tour’s progress on her blog and Twitter. Atwood gracefully owns “book tour overkill,” joking that “[t]wittering, or is it tweeting?” is actually quite “appropriate for a bird-saving project!” In […]


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Jeffrey E. Smith Editor's Prize

by Anne Stameshkin

The Missouri Review‘s Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize Three winners, one per genre (poetry, fiction, and nonfiction) will each receive $5,000 and publication in the journal. Finalists will receive $100 and be considered for publication. Submission info: You can enter online or by mail. There is a fee of $20 per submission, but this includes a one-year subscription to the journal, and entrants can choose between the print edition or the new digital format; the latter offers additional audio content and leaves a smaller carbon footprint. Submissions should be no longer than 25 pages of poetry or prose. Deadline: October […]


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while we're talking book clubs…

by Anne Stameshkin

Politico.com is calling Obama “the next Oprah.” The president’s widely circulated summer reading list seems to have given every book on it a huge bump in sales, as indicated by these Amazon rankings (stats are via Politico) BEFORE = on Monday, before Obama’s list was released / AFTER = as of Wednesday): – The Way Home by George Pelecanos — BEFORE: no. 33,349 / AFTER: no. 328 – Lush Life, by Richard Price — BEFORE: no. 74,289 / AFTER: no. 10,295 – Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman — BEFORE: no. 231 / AFTER: no. 41 – John Adams […]


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[rumors] Might Say You're One of Them be the next Oprah pick?

by Anne Stameshkin

This is strictly gossip at this point, but another FWR contributor whispered in my virtual ear that the debut collection by our friend and former classmate Uwem Akpan has a shot at being the next Oprah’s Book Club selection. Others across the blogosphere are also betting on Say You’re One of Them as a strong possibility: Thom Geier at Entertainment Weekly (who named the debut collection the top fiction title of 2008), Gwen Dawson at Literary License, and Ron Hogan at Media Bistro, who points out that Oprah has never picked a short story collection before. (On Twitter, Oprah’s clues […]


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co-muse-ing: We Are the Friction

by Anne Stameshkin

Lee just sent me this link (from DesignSponge) about We Are the Friction, a new book featuring stories by twenty-four authors and illustrations by twenty-four artists. But this is no typical collection: its contributors were paired up specifically to inspire work from each other…to illustrate a writer’s story or put words to an artist’s illustration. This is the second book project from UK-based Sing Statistics‘ co-editors (and contributors) Jez Burrows and Lizzy Stewart, who describe We Are the Friction as “an erratic, eclectic collection of work that takes in space travel, Japanese deities, monster husbandry, and the Marx Brothers. We […]


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when writers stop drinking (or start taking meds, or start reading Peter Kramer)

by Anne Stameshkin

While doing research for his debut novel, In the Rooms (about a literary agent named Patrick Miller who feigns, in the tradition of Dexter and Fight Club, an addiction as a means to an end…in this case, signing a literary legend), Tom Shone studied the effects of sobering up (or not) on some famous writers, as well as their widely differing attitudes toward recovery, rehab, and programs like AA. Here are some of his findings in this essay for Intelligent Life magazine. A couple of, er, tastes: Cheever emerged from rehab a different man, 20 pounds lighter, feeling 20 years […]


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Writing Regimen from the Southeast Review

by Anne Stameshkin

The Southeast Review‘s Writing Regimen is a 30-day writing project for poets, essayists, and fiction writers who crave some motivation and structure for a concentrated period of time. Another session (for adults) starts on October 1. (If you’re interested in the Young Writers’ Regimen, the next one begins August 31.) For $15, writers will get the following: daily writing prompts; a daily reading-writing exercise; a “riff word” of the day; a podcast of the day from an editor or writer; a quote of the day from a famous writer; weekly craft talks from established writers; a free copy of the […]


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introducing Cerise Press, a new lit journal

by Anne Stameshkin

Cerise Press has just launched their debut issue, which features artwork and photography as well as poetry, prose, translations, interviews, and reviews by writers such as Tess Gallagher, Ray Gonzalez, Laura Kasischke, Robert Kelly, Pura López-Colomé (translated by Forrest Gander), and Hai Zi (translated by Ye Chun). Click here for a full list of contributors and here for the Table of Contents by genre. This new online journal is a collaborative effort between three French and American editors (writer-translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain [Greta Aart] in Paris, poet Sally Molini in Nebraska, and poet Karen Rigby in Arizona) who aim to (per […]


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hey, you've got to hide your work away

by Anne Stameshkin

Kathryn just sent me this article by Joseph Epstein (for In Character). From the first few paragraphs of “Blood, Sweat, and Words,” I thought the piece might explore how much of the effort behind an author’s work shows in the work itself (and what impact this has on said work’s overall effect); instead, it focuses more on how writers choose to talk, outside of actually making art, about the work that goes into doing so. As a writer yourself, how do you feel about authors who, when they talk about the craft of writing or their personal process, make it […]




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