Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘debut novel’

Interviews |

“Plot is a Blueprint of Human Behavior”: An Interview with Natalie Bakopoulos

Natalie Bakopoulos’s debut novel, The Green Shore, is just out in paperback in the US, and has been recently released in Bulgaria as Зеленият бряг. Bistra Velichkova talks with Bakopoulos about her recent time in Bulgaria as a Sozopol Fiction Seminar Fellow, and the historical events of the military dictatorship of Greece (1967-1973) that inspired her novel.


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: We Need New Names, by NoViolet Bulawayo

This week’s feature is NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names, which was just published by Reagan Arthur Books. Bulawayo’s stories have won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing and were shortlisted for the 2009 SA PEN Studzinsi Award, judged by J.M. Coetzee. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, she earned her MFA at Cornell University, where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship, and, most recently, a lecturer of English. Bulawayo is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. In the introduction to Rebecca Scherm’s review of We Need New Names, she writes: NoViolet Bulawayo’s […]


Shop Talk |

Book-of-the-Week Winners: The Death of Fidel Pérez

Our most recent feature was Elizabeth Huergo’s debut novel The Death of Fidel Pérez, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Writer Chick (@writerchick17) Leslie C. Ferdinand (@ferdinandleslie) Brenna Gomez (@BrennaGo) 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!


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: The Death of Fidel Pérez, by Elizabeth Huergo

Our newest feature is Elizabeth Huergo’s debut novel, The Death of Fidel Pérez, which was published this month by Unbridled Books. Elizabeth Huergo was born in Havana and immigrated to the United States at an early age as a political refugee. Her work has been published in such places as Diaspora and Potomoc Review, as well as anthologized in such collections as I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights and Gravity Dancers: Even More Fiction by Washington Area Women. She teaches at George Mason University and lives in Virginia. Huergo can be found […]


Interviews |

The Histories We Tell: An Interview with Elizabeth Huergo

“When you live in a nation that has been politically destabilized by outside forces, anything is possible. I know what it’s like firsthand for a government to fall, for a system to collapse. If you’ve lived in a society where that has happened, there is nothing ‘magical’ about that ‘realism”: Elizabeth Huergo talks with Melissa Scholes Young about her debut novel, The Death of Fidel Pérez.


Shop Talk |

Book-of-the-Week Winners: The Office of Mercy

Our most recent feature was Ariel Djanikian’s debut novel The Office of Mercy, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Lito Velasco (@litovelasco) sharon millar (@ChutneySharon) Heather Montford (@FaerieKnight) 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!


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: The Office of Mercy, by Ariel Djanikian

Our newest feature is Ariel Djanikian’s debut novel The Office of Mercy, which was just published by Viking. Djanikian was born in Philadelphia and attended the University of Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA degree from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of a Fulbright grant. She’s also lived in Madison, Wisconsin, and Irvine, California. Her newly adopted city is Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband and daughter and hopes to stay for a long time. Her writing has appeared in The L Magazine and The Paris Review Daily. Visit her Website for more information […]