Validation is the Curse: an Interview with Christopher Hebert
“I was more interested in it as a book exploring characters just going about their lives. For me that’s the part of the Rust Belt narrative not often told.”
“I was more interested in it as a book exploring characters just going about their lives. For me that’s the part of the Rust Belt narrative not often told.”
“I think that this was a moment where I had to figure out, what’s the book?”: Stephen Schottenfeld answers Ralph Black’s questions about Bluff City Pawn, his debut novel.
“Every character in this book works,” writes Ellen Prentiss Campbell in her review of this new book. “Among the greatest pleasures of reading this novel is Freud’s detailed and well-integrated research into the truly labor-intensive life of a seaside village in 1914.”
J.A. Bernstein says of Michael Pitre’s Fives and Twenty-Fives: “It would not be an exaggeration to say that this might be the best novel to come out of the current carnage in Iraq.”
Ellen Prentiss Campbell says of Robert Hellenga’s new novel: “The greatest charm of this book is Frances herself, her tart, funny voice. Hellenga’s characters are flawed, striving, likeable. Frances Godwin may be my favorite of the whole tribe.”
“. . .these two groups of women are indeed sisters under the skin, and these authors are sisters as well.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell on connecting Nesbit and Otsuka through their use of first-person plural.
This week’s feature is Jesmyn Ward’s new memoir, Men We Reaped, which was published this week by Bloomsbury. Ward is also the author of the National Book Award winning novel Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury, 2011) and the novel Where the Line Bleeds (Agate, 2008), which was an Essence Magazine Book Club selection, a Black Caucus of the ALA Honor Award recipient, and a finalist for both the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan in 2005, was a Stegner Fellow from 2008-2010, and served as the 2010-2011 John […]
Last week we featured Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: stacey said, (@staceysaid) Leila N (@LeiNili) joann spears (@JoAnnSpearsRN) Brett Wilcox (@wilcoxworks) Donna Bailey (@DBailey_GirlInk) Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us! Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!
This week’s feature is Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award winning novel, Salvage the Bones, which was published last year by Bloomsbury. Ward is also the author of Where the Line Bleeds (Agate, 2008), which was an Essence Magazine Book Club selection, a Black Caucus of the ALA Honor Award recipient, and a finalist for both the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan in 2005, was a Stegner Fellow from 2008-2010, and served as the 2010-2011 John and Renée Grisham Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of […]
The imagined Hungarian village of Zavitar is home to the indomitable Valeria, a single lady of a certain age, given a second chance at love and excitement in the arms of the local potter. Marc Fitten’s debut novel, Valeria’s Last Stand, explores how the fall of Communism effects a memorable cast of characters, all through the lens of fable.
