Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘debut novel’

Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: The House on Salt Hay Road, by Carin Clevidence

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

We’re pleased to announced that this week’s featured title is Carin Clevidence’s debut novel The House on Salt Hay Road. Clevidence is the recipient of such accolades as a Ronna Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Last summer she was also a fellow at the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, in Bulgaria, which she chronicled in a photo essay for Fiction Writers Review with fellow participants Kelly Luce, Charles Conley, and Paul Vidich. Her short fiction has appeared in such places as Story, The Indiana Review, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. In a […]


Reviews |

The House on Salt Hay Road, by Carin Clevidence

Carin Clevidence’s debut novel, The House on Salt Hay Road, tells the story of three generations of the Scudder family living on Long Island in the 1930s just before a catastrophic hurricane moves in. This novel’s careful balance of happiness and tragedy, success and failure, leads Dana Staves to consider how the writing achieves this alchemy.


Reviews |

My Name is Mary Sutter, by Robin Oliveira

Robin Oliveira’s debut novel, My Name is Mary Sutter, tells the story of a woman hell-bent on becoming a surgeon at a time when no woman in this county had been admitted to medical school—during the Civil War. The novel’s richly described world both helps us imagine the setting and leads reviewer Helen Mallon to this question: How can research best represent a world in historical fiction?


Shop Talk |

A bad time for writers? Not if you're a "debutant."

by Celeste Ng

True or false: It’s harder now to get published than ever. Answer: It depends. In the Financial Times, Adrian Turpin argues that the picture for debut novelists isn’t as bleak as you’d think: For most literary authors, the not-so-brave new world of publishing by numbers is terrible news. But there is one type of writer exempt from its strictures: the first novelist. Unsullied by inconvenient sales figures, the debutant exists uniquely in a state of prelapsarian grace, a blank canvas on which publishers can dream. […] Even recession has failed to dent the perennial desire for the new. While the […]


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Book of the Week: The Oracle of Stamboul, by Michael David Lukas

by Anne Stameshkin

Each week Fiction Writers Review gives away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Alison Espach’s debut, The Adults, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Annie Angelides, Vanessa Heng, and Jackie Reitzes. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed copy of Espach’s novel. This week we’re pleased to feature Michael David Lukas’s debut novel The Oracle of Stamboul (Harper). Lukas has been a Fulbright scholar in Turkey, a late-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and a Rotary scholar in Tunisia. His writing—fiction and nonfiction—has been published in the […]


Reviews |

The Oracle of Stamboul, by Michael David Lukas

Lee Thomas calls Michael David Lukas’s debut novel, The Oracle of Stamboul, an antidote to mid-winter malaise with “sun-drenched marble, the heat and clamor of the bazaar, and a warm, salt breeze off the Sea of Marmara.” The book features a precocious prodigy, eight-year-old Eleonora Cohen, as a guide through Lukas’s tale of political intrigue in late 19th-century Stamboul.


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: The Adults, by Alison Espach

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each week we give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Lori Ostlund’s The Bigness of the World, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Susan Kleinman, David Northington, and Dan Cafaro. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed copy of this novel. This week we’re featuring Alison Espach’s debut novel The Adults. Espach received her MFA in Fiction from Washington University in St. Louis and now lives in New York City. Her short fiction has appeared in such places as McSweeney’s, Five Chapters, Del Sol Review, […]


Reviews |

American Rust, by Philipp Meyer

Philipp Meyer sets his debut novel, American Rust, within a landscape of retired warehouses, rattling railways, prisons and Wal-Mart. The crumbling underpinnings of American industry provide the backdrop for human catastrophe. Meyer made The New Yorker‘s “20 Under 40” list on the strength of a book in which Hanna Pylväinen finds echoes of Mark Twain, Frank O’Hara and Cormac McCarthy.


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: The Terror of Living, by Urban Waite

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each week we give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Erika Dreifus’s story collection Quiet Americans, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Steve Woodward, Marianna Taylor, and NancyKay Shapiro. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed copy of this new collection. This week we’re featuring Urban Waite’s The Terror of Living. Waite grew up in Seattle and studied writing at Western Washington University and Emerson College. His short fiction has appeared in such places as The Best of the West Anthology, The Southern Review, Gulf […]


Interviews |

The Art of the Chase: An Interview with Urban Waite

Debut novelist Urban Waite enjoys a character-driven thriller, which is exactly what he delivers with The Terror of Living. In conversation with Cam Terwilliger, Waite reveals how the selfish characters of Graham Greene shaped his idea of the perfect book, how an editor who understands the writer’s vision can only help a book, and how flexibility can be the novelist’s best friend.




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