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Posts Tagged ‘Celeste Ng’

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new review on FWR: The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker

by Celeste Ng

an excerpt: Tiffany Baker’s debut novel, The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, contains an apparent contradiction in its title: a little giant? Truly Plaice, the character so dubbed, is no Paul Bunyan: she doesn’t tower over rooftops or create canyons with her feet. But she’s plenty big enough to cause a stir: at five, she’s two inches taller than her seven-year-old sister, and she just keeps growing bigger and heavier. So she becomes known as Aberdeen’s “little giant,” a position that shapes her fate. And that oxymoron encapsulates this whimsical novel, which is, at its heart, about the yoking together […]


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The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, by Tiffany Baker

by Celeste Ng

Tiffany Baker’s debut novel, The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, contains an apparent contradiction in its title: a little giant? Truly Plaice, the character so dubbed, is no Paul Bunyan: she doesn’t tower over rooftops or create canyons with her feet. But she’s plenty big enough to cause a stir: at five, she’s two inches taller than her seven-year-old sister, and she just keeps growing bigger and heavier. So she becomes known as Aberdeen’s “little giant,” a position that shapes her fate. And that oxymoron encapsulates this whimsical novel, which is, at its heart, about the yoking together of opposites.


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Short Story Month rec: "Bullet in the Brain"

by Celeste Ng

Recently, I was at Grub Street’s Muse and the Marketplace writers’ conference here in Boston, and in one session we looked at Tobias Wolff‘s “Bullet in the Brain.” I was surprised at (1) how many people had not read the story–of a group of 30 people, I was one of maybe 5 who had, and (2) how amazing this story really is. So compressed and so focused: crystalline. Perfect for teaching yourself, or others: you can take it apart, sentence by sentence, and figure out why each word is there and exactly how the story is working. And yet, even […]


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The First Person and Other Stories, by Ali Smith

by Celeste Ng

The dozen stories in The First Person, Ali Smith’s latest collection, are deceptively simple: no verbal pyrotechnics, no otherworldly setting, no last-minute epiphanies, and most of the time, no traditional rising action or climax. They’re told in a simple, conversational tone, often by a narrator who could be Ali Smith herself. But they stay with you long after you’ve finished reading them. They sneak up on you, camouflaged as innocuous little anecdotes about innocuous little interactions and misunderstandings, and only later do you realize they’re asking the most fundamental questions that fiction, or life itself, can ask.


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The Mayor's Tongue, by Nathaniel Rich

by Celeste Ng

Near the beginning of Nathaniel Rich’s debut novel, The Mayor’s Tongue, a young man named Eugene reads a novella by his idol, the legendary author Constance Eakins. “[It] was typical Eakins,” Eugene reflects, “a strange reality that bordered on fantasy, an exotic locale, larger-than-life characters.” He might have been describing The Mayor’s Tongue itself, a book so dizzyingly rich with surprises that no review could—or should—describe them all.


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How Fiction Works Discussion Review: Telling vs. Untelling Details

by Celeste Ng

In his chapter on “Detail,” Wood takes on a standby of Fiction I: the telling detail. Details, we’re usually told, should be significant, not gratuitous; they should give us some particular insight into the character or the setting. If there are telling details, Wood suggests, there must be untelling details as well. But do “irrelevant” or “untelling” details really exist?


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Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, by Xiaolu Guo

by Celeste Ng

In Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, the most sharply drawn, most enticing character is contemporary Beijing itself, its “cramped side streets where the walls were like the scales of fish–tall shelves tightly packed with pirated discs.” The city and the promise behind it sparkle in Guo’s descriptions, which are sharp, fresh, and free of clichéd exoticism.


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shout-out: Celeste Ng on Apostrophe Cast

by Anne Stameshkin

Apostrophe Cast, a bi-weekly online reading series, currently features work by FWR contributor Celeste Ng. Listen to Celeste read one of her fantastic short stories, “We Are Not Strangers.” Then read an off-beat interview with the author to find out why this one-time Best Easter Bonnet champion avoids hairless cats and wishes you’d call her Ish.




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