In Meg Pokrass’ debut collection of flash fiction, Damn Sure Right, each story gives the reader just enough to imagine a universe. Lee Thomas and Pokrass discuss first publication, the harmony between poetry and short short stories, and the soundtrack to the author’s creative process.
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 Urban Waite’s debut novel The Terror of Living, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: John Taylor, Jodi Paloni, and Michelle Hoover. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed copy of this novel. This week we’re featuring Lori Ostlund’s debut collection The Bigness of the World. Stories from this book have appeared in The Georgia Review, New England Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Bellingham Review, Hobart, and Blue Mesa Review. Additionally, “All Boy” was selected […]
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 Jacob Paul’s Sarah/Sara, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Eileen Pollack, Emma Kate Tsai, and Ana Maria Velasco. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed copy of this new novel. This week we’re featuring Erika Dreifus’s story collection Quiet Americans. Erika, a Contributing Editor at Fiction Writers Review, wrote a lovely review of last week’s Book of The Week, Sarah/Sara for the site last year, which you can find here. Her other reviews for FWR […]
J.T. Bushnell considers how Lori Ostlund’s debut story collection, The Bigness of the World, filled as it is with “godless homosexuals scattered across the globe” would have likely pleased Flannery O’Connor, whose own work is “unapologetically regional and almost dogmatically Catholic.” Ostlund, who won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction last year, writes of the mystery beneath our outer trappings, an underlying truth that binds the two writers in common cause.
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 Ben Spivey’s Flowing in the Gossamer Fold, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Sarah Comer, Maggie Bertucci Hamper, and Kendra Langford Shaw. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed copy of this new novel. This week we’re featuring Jacob Paul’s Sarah/Sara. The author, who is an Associate Professor at Utah State, where he recently received his PhD, was formerly in the finance industry. On the morning of September 11th of 2001, he was in Tower […]
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 Matt Bell’s How They Were Found, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Suzanne Buckman-Beach, Melissa Scholes Young, and Thomas Gagnon. Congratulations! Each will receive a copy of the book, signed by the author. This week we’re also featuring Matt Bell’s How They Were Found. No, it’s not Groundhog Day. As you may have noticed, FWR is getting a bit of a face-lift. Or, rather, we’re in the process of completing a range of digital […]
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 Brad Watson’s Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Leanne Shear, Jenn Ryu, and Nancy Rawlinson. Congratulations! Each will receive a copy of the book, signed by the author. This week we’re featuring Matt Bell’s How They Were Found (Keyhole Press, 2010). Bell’s stories have been published in such places as Conjunctions, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Willow Springs, Unsaid, and American Short Fiction. This collection also includes the story […]
For some reason, I don’t think of celebrity authors as emerging writers. After all, they’ve got well-established careers of their own acting, directing, or being beautiful/audacious/infamous. It’s hard to think of someone like James Franco—who seems to be everywhere this year—as an “emerging” anything. But Franco recently published his first collection of short stories, Palo Alto, which officially makes him an emerging writer. He seems to be taking it seriously: according to Wikipedia, Franco “simultaneously attend[ed] graduate school at Columbia University’s MFA writing program, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking, and Brooklyn College for fiction writing, […]
The yarn-like stories that make up this debut collection recount the life of an imagined town in northern Virginia. Unlike a traditional collection, Neofotis chooses an oral storytelling method to structure these stories, utilizing the conceit that the narrator is not just the vehicle through which we are relayed the narrative but an actual character himself, one who sits down beside us to spool out poignant stories, juicy pieces of gossip, and far-fetched legends from his small town.
Polly Atwell talks with Andrew Porter about how crafting stories is like editing film, what particular advantages peripheral narrators can afford, and why it’s “completely surreal” to hear actors read from your work.
