Brian Bartels sits down with Adam Rapp–prolific playwright, musician, director, and novelist–to talk about his latest book, Punkzilla, and the mysterious process by which the words we create are shaped by music. Click here to read the whole interview-essay, “Shadow Sounds: Music as Character.”
A preview: The first things you feel are joy and awe. The stories in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower’s first collection, are pieces that care, first and last, about telling a damn good story. Tower’s use of compression and summary to contextualize poignant or dramatic scenes is elegant and efficient. The granular and hilarious detailing of landscapes—North Carolina’s landscapes, in particular, are exuberantly and beautifully rendered in this collection—and of characters is solid, remarkable. The virtuosic moments in Tower’s prose make us gape, wince, laugh out loud: the hilarious or heart-rending one-liners, the hard-eyed endings, the way in which […]
a preview: Colson Whitehead’s fourth novel, Sag Harbor, is driven not by plot but by time, by the fleetingness of summer and its constant reminder of that fleetingness. The beginning is slow, with the sense of months ahead, time to digress and ponder and imagine and internalize, with the thickest, most dense prose socked in the middle of July, the more desperate, urgent bursts as we careen toward Labor Day. The writing is wonderfully languorous throughout, like summer itself, and a perfect match for adolescence: unrestrained and indulgent but wonderfully self-conscious as well. Click here to read the whole review […]
FWR will have a table at the 2009 Ann Arbor Book Festival (in the Writing Conference), which begins this Friday! Michigan-based writers, stop by and say hello to Jeremy, and also check out the Emerging Writers Network and Hobart. In addition to a book fair, this festival will feature an array of exciting panels (the one on the Future of the Book sounds especially interesting!), readings from authors like Colson Whitehead (Sag Harbor) and Sung J. Woo (Everything Asian), and other events, such as this exploration of how a play comes to life “from page to stage,” a breakfast with […]
A wonderful time was, indeed, had by all. We missed you, Anne. But thanks for sending all the great books! They found many good homes. Thanks also to Johanna Hines from Norton for review copies, and Karl Pohrt at Shaman Drum for some of the same. And, of course, a big thanks to everyone for coming. It was lovely to spend an evening in the backyard together, and a great excuse for me to barbecue a turkey. If only I’d remembered to have someone snap a photo of me in my Fiction Writers Review apron… Most importantly, though, here’s the […]
Just wanted to give a shout out to all those fine FWR folk in Ann Arbor; have a fabulous time tonight, and I hope you all leave with a book (or two or three) to review! Wish I could be there.
a preview: The Nightingales of Troy is renowned poet and critic Alice Fulton’s fiction debut. In this collection, she displays a knack for the ineffable, for creating stories that are more than the sum of their intricately assembled parts. Her best stories not only exhibit her architectural prowess, they also remind the reader of the near-magical capaciousness of the story form. Click here to read the whole review by Greg Schutz.
From now on, I’m going to announce here when we’ve posted a new review, interview, or essay to the site. For those of you who usually just read the blog, please stop by and check out our most recent features: (1) FWR’s first foray into erotica comes from our Canadian correspondent and Black Heart Magazine‘s editor-in-chief Laura Roberts, who spices things up with a review of Best Sex Writing 2009 by Rachel Kramer Bussel. (2) Contributing Editor Lee Thomas offers a glowing review of Chris Cleave’s second novel, Little Bee, the story of two women — a British journalist and […]
I’m going to waive the whole “all fiction, all the time” rule and devote some space to poetry on FWR. Fiction writers benefit enormously from reading poetry, and many of us (yours truly included) tried our hand at–or continue to secretly aspire to–being poets. At FWR, a number of our contributors and readers are poets (the out kind!), and I’m wondering if you’d take a few minutes to tell us: What poets or new, recent, or classic books of poetry are you reading? Poets (and fiction writers, too, if you’re game), please send any and all recommendations to either annestameshkin@gmail.com […]
Even if you haven’t read his interview with Tobias Wolff or Jeremy’s interview with him on FWR, I hope you’ve all read Travis Holland’s astoundingly good, non-debutish debut novel The Archivist’s Story–which is now on the Impac Dublin shortlist, chosen over the works of literary heavyweights like Coetzee and Roth. Courtesy of the Guardian, here’s the full shortlist; the winner (who wins an award of €100,000) will be announced on June 11, 2009. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz Ravel by Jean Echenoz The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid The Archivist’s Story by Travis Holland The […]
