Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘fiction matters’

Shop Talk |

Poets & Writers Subscription Deal

by Anne Stameshkin

As you know, we’re big fans of Poets & Writers Magazine around here. So we’re excited to announce that this magazine has generously agreed to offer our readers a special subscription rate of only $12. The reason for this offer is to help build support for a new series in P&W called “Inside Indie Bookstores,” written by our Associate Editor, Jeremiah Chamberlin. Each issue will feature an important independent bookstore around the country. The first to be profiled will be Square Books, of Oxford, Mississippi. We hope that you will take advantage of this great deal. You’ll not only be […]


Interviews |

Creative Writing and the University: an Interview with Mark McGurl

by Polly Stewart

McGurl, a professor of English at UCLA, is a literary scholar who actually likes writers. More amazingly, he likes MFA programs. In The Program Era, published by Harvard University Press, McGurl argues that the rise of the MFA program in the twentieth century made a uniquely significant contribution to the excellence of postwar American literature.


Essays |

Magic and Music Steer this Vessel: On Jorge Luis Borges’s This Craft of Verse

In This Craft of Verse, Jorge Luis Borges’s collected Norton Lectures, Borges diverges–with sparkling erudition–from conventional forms, offering lectures that are not arguments, but gentle provocations. Remarkably, these visionary pieces were composed at a time when Borges was nearly blind. By this time, as editor Calin-Andrei Mihailescu writes in the book’s postscript, Borges could see “nothing more than an amorphous field of yellow.” We quickly learn, however, that his mind’s eye was as sharp and discerning as ever.


Shop Talk |

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 […]


Shop Talk |

Wild Things Roundup

by Celeste Ng

Maurice Sendak’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are is nearly 50 years old, but the release of Spike Jonze’s film adaptation has sparked a resurgence of critical interpretations of the story. A sampling: On the Oxford University Press blog, philosophy professor Stephen T. Asma ties our love for Where the Wild Things Are to our fascination with other monsters–“zombies, vampires, and serial killers”: As the movie’s trailer reminds us, “Inside all of us is a wild thing.” And in our therapeutic era, we generally accept that it is good and healthy to visit our wild things –to let them […]


Shop Talk |

Apply for the 2009 Dzanc Prize – and spread the word

by Anne Stameshkin

The deadline to apply for the 2009 Dzanc Prize is rapidly approaching; be sure to get your work-in-progress manuscript and community service program proposal in by November 1, 2009. Here is a brief overview of what the submissions process and prize/service opportunity entail, via Dzanc’s website: In 2007, to further its mission of fostering literary excellence, community involvement, and education, Dzanc Books created the Dzanc Prize, which provides monetary aid in the sum of $5,000, to a writer of literary fiction. All writers applying for the Dzanc Prize must have a work-in-progress they can submit for review, and present the […]


Shop Talk |

Ralph Nader: Activist. Perennial presidential candidate/spoiler. Novelist?

by Celeste Ng

Seven Stories Press has just released Nader’s novel, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, in which Yoko Ono, Warren Buffet, Ted Turner, Bill-Cosby, Paul Newman, and other influential figures meet, Justice-League style, to defeat bad guys Lancelot Lobo, Brover Dortquist, and corporate CEOs. In an author’s note, Nader himself writes: This book is not a novel. Nor is it nonfiction. In the literary world, it might be described as “a practical utopia.” I call it a fictional vision that could become a new reality. Some known and not-well-known people appear in fictional roles. I invite your imaginative engagement. If that […]


Shop Talk |

why the genius grants are, well, ingenious

by Celeste Ng

Yesterday the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the 20 recipients for the 2009 Fellowships–popularly known as the “Genius” Grants. Each of the fellows learned in a single phone call that they will receive $500,000 with no strings attached. This year’s crop includes two fiction writers, novelist Edwidge Danticat and short story writer Deborah Eisenberg. Two things about this: First, the program’s stated mission is “to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society.” So as a fiction writer, I find it empowering that the MacArthur Foundation believes writers can benefit society […]


Shop Talk |

In Protest of Dullness, or Why I'm Glad Our President Reads Novels

by Anne Stameshkin

This nearly week-old David Brooks op-ed is infuriating for many reasons (such as its writer’s blatant scoffing at and outright denial of–despite the current economic disaster–the notion that to run a truly successful company or country, a leader should have the prescience to realize that the world around him or her is always changing, the ability to connect with and understand that world and the people in it, and the imagination and flexibility to adjust to that world’s advancements and its people’s diverse and changing needs), but in the name of this website and our shared passion for fiction, dear […]




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