Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘debut story collection’

Reviews |

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, by Laura van den Berg

by Liana Imam

“I imagine the seasonally unspecified stories in Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us must be set in spring because spring is a time that makes me feel young, young as girls and in as much danger. And then there’s always this odd moment of realization that I am young and a girl and in some dangers. I’m still in too-close contact with boys I once loved, still prone to crying in public, still not aware of the dynamic personal lives of adults. Spring in the Midwest is about babies and hope and vitality, but it’s also about knowing that eventually a late frost is going to swing in out of no place and kill everything you haven’t collected in the shed. And I wanted the people in these stories locked up safe.”


Shop Talk |

Win a copy of Laura van den Berg's What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Bob Dylan turned sixty-nine today. And regardless of how you feel about the man’s music, or how you feel about the different incarnations of his work—pre/post electric, pre/post born again, pre/post Victoria’s Secret—you’ve got to give him credit for knowing how to put together an album, which is a lot different than just writing a great song. My favorite is his 1976 album Desire. Maybe it’s the story writer in me, but the narrative quality of “Hurricane” and “Isis” and “Oh, Sister” just knock me out. More importantly, there’s a unity to the songs—in tone, in subject, in approach—that gives […]


Reviews |

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, by Kevin Wilson

by Brian Short

If Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (HarperPerennial, 2009) were a child, it would be the kind who held your hand until you reached the road and then insisted—slapping at your grasping fingers without taking his eyes off the road—on crossing the street without help. If Kevin Wilson’s debut collection were a car, it would be the kind of bubble-topped, shark-finned future-car that you see on footage of old World’s Fairs, but you would see it out in the world, cruising the miracle mile. If this book were a friend, it would be the kind who goes with you […]


Shop Talk |

Win a copy of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, by Robin Black

Before I recommend or send any book to one of FWR’s reviewers, I always read a sample story or two, a chapter, or maybe the first fifteen pages. If I fall in love, I order a copy of the book for myself. But sometimes there’s a novel or collection that demands to be read immediately. If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Random House, April 2010) made me forget I had a job, a website, friends, a boyfriend waiting for me to pick him up, dinner burning on the stove. And even after finishing this book (and sending […]


Shop Talk |

Short Story Month 2010: The Collection Giveaway Project

Inspired by the Emerging Writers Network—who dubbed May as Short Story Month again this year–and the Poetry Book Giveaway for National Poetry Month, Fiction Writers Review is excited to propose a community effort by lit bloggers to raise attention for short story collections: Short Story Month 2010: The Collection Giveaway Project. Warm thanks to Erika Dreifus (The Practicing Writer), who suggested FWR as a home for this project, and who will be joining the cause. To participate in Short Story Month 2010: The Giveaway Project: (1) This month, post an entry on your blog recommending a recently published short story […]


Essays |

The Magical, Dreadful First Hundred Pages: From the 2010 AWP Panel "From MFA Thesis to First Novel"

by Valerie Laken

“For those of you who have yet to publish your first book, I can predict with about 96% certainty how it will go: It won’t happen when you want it to, or in the way you expect. Of course it’ll take longer than you want — you know that. It’ll take so long you could grow a tree, learn forestry and paper-making, then print and bind it yourself and carry it by hand to every last remaining independent bookstore in the country. That is, if you don’t succumb first to addiction, poverty, despair, humiliation, or suicide. In short, it will take longer than you think you can stand, and yet, in the end, as you struggle to make your last-chance, oh-my-God-this-is-going-out-in-the-world? revisions, you’ll inevitably feel rushed and wonder where all that time went.”


Shop Talk |

Andrew's Book Club: April 2010 Picks

There’s still a week left in April: spend it reading one of these new collections recommended by Andrew Scott. INDIE PICKS: – Strange Weather (Press 53), by Becky Hagenston. Winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Praise from Antonya Nelson: The sensibility overseeing these fine stories is curious, clever, quick, hilarious, and heartbreaking. The world contained between the covers of Strange Weather is both realistic and magical, silly and sublime, ‘romance and raunch. Just like real life.’ When a character working a desk job in a toxic chemical plant announces wistfully that ‘nothing’s blown up,’ the reader completely understands […]


Shop Talk |

Andrew's Book Club: March 2010 Picks

This month, Andrew Scott — our Oprah of story collections, long may he reign! — recommends the following books: Big House Pick: Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, by Brad Watson (Norton) “The dark and brilliant tales of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives capture the strangeness of human (and almost-human) life. In this, his first collection of stories since his celebrated, award-winning Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson takes us even deeper into the riotous, appalling, and mournful oddity of human beings. In prose so perfectly pitched as to suggest some celestial harmony, he writes about […]


Reviews |

A Little Bone of Crazy, or This is Your Brain On Snowbroth: Leni Zumas’s Farewell Navigator

by John Madera

Most of Leni Zumas’s stories in her exceptional (and stylistically exciting) debut, Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008), are compact studies of paralysis in the tradition of Beckett and Ioensco. Sherwood Anderson could have been describing Zumas’s characters as they, too, are “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.” In “Farewell Navigator,” one character envies a group of blind schoolchildren for having teachers “to pull them. Nobody expects them to know where to go.” And in “Leopard Arms”—a story told from the perspective of a gargoyle—a father fears “of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand.”


Interviews |

The People We Know: An Interview with Donald Ray Pollock

Donald Ray Pollock, author of the 2008 collection Knockemstiff, left high school at seventeen to work at a meatpacking plant. A year later, he landed a union job at the Mead Paper Mill in Chillicothe, where he worked for the next thirty-two years. He didn’t start writing until his forties, and even then he kept his day job—writing mornings, nights, and weekends. Lydia Fitzpatrick and Kate Levin talk with the author about coming to writing late, getting an MFA, and making disreputable characters empathetic.




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