Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘controversies’

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it's okay to be scary…and scared

by Celeste Ng

One last take on Where The Wild Things Are: its author, Maurice Sendak, has some advice for parents who think the book is too scary for kids: “I would tell them to go to hell,” Sendak said. And if children can’t handle the story, they should “go home,” he added. “Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it’s not a question that can be answered.” In a bracingly unsentimental interview with Newsweek, Sendak, director Spike Jonze, and screenwriter Dave Eggers discuss why Max’s dinner is “still hot” and not “still warm,” why he believes Disney is bad for […]


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Rolling back prices, indeed—Wal-Mart and Amazon in preorder price war for this season’s new hardcovers

In the Arts section of today’s New York Times, Motoko Rich reports on the “tit-for-tat price war between Wal-Mart and Amazon [that] accelerated late on Friday afternoon when Wal-Mart shaved another cent off its already rock-bottom prices for hardcover editions of some of the coming holiday season’s biggest potential best sellers, offering them online for $8.99 apiece.” Originally the company had intended to sell these selected books at $10, but Amazon, perhaps feeling threatened by Wal-Mart’s foray into the online retail market, retaliated by lowering their prices on the same titles to a mere $9. So Wal-Mart responded in kind, […]


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Banned Books Week = An Act of Censorship? Say what?

by Celeste Ng

It’s currently Banned Books Week, an event sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA), the American Booksellers Association, and other book- and writing-related organizations. The purpose, according to the ALA website, is “highlighting the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.” To celebrate Banned Books Week, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece by Mitchell Muncy entitled “Finding Censorship Where There Is None,” which asserts that Banned Books Week is, basically, a time for overzealous First-Amendment freaks to […]


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at the cocktail party, with the birds

by Anne Stameshkin

As you can see on the left sidebar, FWR is now Twitterpated (name: “fictionwriters”). Come follow us… I had mixed feelings at first about tweeting. It’s one thing to offer readers detours and chances to read more about an author, book, or issue via hyperlinks, but as an all-volunteer labor-of-love site, did we really need to maintain multiple online presences? There seemed something homey and focused — and time-efficient — about just being and not tweeting about it. But ultimately, we’d love to let more readers know about us, to reach out to new potential writers, and to establish more […]


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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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the used book wars

by Celeste Ng

An agent once told me that if I wanted to support my fellow writers, I should never buy used books, because the author gets no royalties on re-sold copies. And while that is certainly true, this editorial in the Guardian makes an eloquent argument for why secondhand bookshops are important: [T]he best have stock that is old – an out-of-print Penguin on Imagist poets, or a Fontana reader bringing news (at least it would have been in 1981) from the sociological front – and temptingly affordable. They contain treasure, however dusty. Several commenters point out that this editorial makes no […]


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admissions

by Celeste Ng

Erika Dreifus at the Practicing Writer posted about this recently, and it was too interesting not to discuss here. Admission to college is getting tougher ever year, and as the New York Times reported, highschoolers hoping for an edge can now seek help from independent college counselors. But what about applicants to MFA programs? Well, now there’s help for them too: Abraham Leslie Consulting, which bills itself as “the first-ever consulting firm designed exclusively for applicants to Master of Arts (M.A.), Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.), and doctorate (Ph.D) in Creative Writing Programs.” The consultants, all of whom are recent […]


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"Restoring" A Moveable Feast

by Celeste Ng

Scribner caused a stir earlier this year by announcing it would publish a “restored” edition of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Why? Because the original edition was edited after the author’s death by Hemingway’s fourth wife and literary executor, Mary, who reordered parts of Hemingway’s unfinished manuscript and included parts he had wished to exclude–including a chapter that that portrays his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in a negative light. Scribner claims the new edition is what Heminway actually intended: Since Hemingway’s personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now, […]




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