Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Brandon Bye’

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Fiction Writers Review Guilty Pleasure Reads Confessionals

by The Editors

Airports. Vacation spots. Subway commutes. Sunday. For whatever reason, even into the most well-read literary life a little twaddle reading does fall. At the risk of surrendering any and all professional credibility, the Fiction Writers Review editorial staff kindly confessed to their favorite guilty pleasure reads. And they don’t plan on giving them up for their New Year’s resolution. Brandon (Assistant Editor): Slog comments. Someone from NPR once said, “online comments are the digital equivalent of the loudest drunk in the bar.” The Slog, Seattle’s cleverly vulgar news and culture blog, gets pretty surly around closing time (especially when race […]


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Stories We Love: "Christmas Eve"

The afternoon I sat in a lawn chair on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street in front of my house reading Maeve Brennan’s “Christmas Eve” a gang of basketball players wearing flashing neon onesies, singing “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” could have committed an armed robbery on my neighbor’s house—and if we’re to venture further down the path of hyperbole, their get away car would have been a hot air balloon—and I would have failed to notice the entire event. It was August 8, 2009, my mother’s birthday. She would have been 60, my […]


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Thoughts From the Hopwood Room: David Mitchell, Bird Migration, and the Writing Process

The Hopwood room roundtable is a weekly event in which established writers discourse with the University of Michigan’s student body, faculty, and anyone in the area who is interested in writing and reading. Last week David Mitchell was in town as the University of Michigan Zell distinguished writer in residence. As the writer in residence, Mitchell sat in for a roundtable discussion in the Hopwood room, a room he described endearingly as a Harry Potterish, cult leader’s den. For an hour, he fielded questions from writers, teachers, and academics, and one kid interested in infanticide in literature. Mitchell, all charm […]


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Five Winter Reads

Summer reading lists get all the attention, but with the days getting shorter and the nights getting colder you’ll need something to crack open fireside, that cozy Afghan wrapped around your legs, the warmth of your hot toddy working your bloodstream like a magician working a Vegas showroom. Here, Five Winter Reads “The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol In truth, Gogol’s immortal short story, which positions the popular 19th century Russian lit trope “the little man” in the face a coldhearted, crushing bureaucratic system, is most effective with a certain level of Russian studies under the belt. But don’t that dissuade […]




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