Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘illustration’

Shop Talk |

A little bird told me

by Lee Thomas

Every month, new and no-doubt worthy literary magazines are launched. Many seek to fill a particular niche in the literary landscape, a place to assemble writers concerned with, say, the intersection of the Southern Gothic and SciFi traditions in flash fiction (that actually sounds like a magazine I’d like to read). New on the scene this month is Carrier Pigeon Magazine (my initial search turned up trade magazines targeted to pigeon enthusiasts). The brainchild of a group of artists and illustrators, who view fiction as a natural partner to their visual work, Carrier Pigeon is a quarterly publication that seeks […]


Shop Talk |

1,000 Words Are Worth a Picture

by Celeste Ng

Here’s something I hope becomes a trend: illustrated short stories. The Creative Company produces illustrated versions of classic short stories, each bound as its own beautiful mini-book. With titles that recall 11th-grade English, like Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger,” Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” these books are geared towards in-school use. Writes The School Library Journal: Each book contains the story itself with various sections written in different colored fonts. Then there is a series of thoughts on the story, and finally a biography of […]


Essays |

Hobbling Up The Magic Mountain

I just read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The whole thing. Starting on page one and ending on page 706. The events in the book span seven years, and reading it seemed to take almost as long. When I embarked on this project, I was recovering from orthopedic surgery … Why, then, would I want to read a lengthy book packed with intellectual digressions set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps prior to the start of World War II? Hadn’t I been through enough? How about something light, or at least short? A Carol Goodman murder mystery, or something by Nick Hornby? As it turned out, The Magic Mountain was a choice so perfect I’m thinking a copy should be handed out with every pre-admission packet given to surgical patients…


Shop Talk |

co-muse-ing: We Are the Friction

by Anne Stameshkin

Lee just sent me this link (from DesignSponge) about We Are the Friction, a new book featuring stories by twenty-four authors and illustrations by twenty-four artists. But this is no typical collection: its contributors were paired up specifically to inspire work from each other…to illustrate a writer’s story or put words to an artist’s illustration. This is the second book project from UK-based Sing Statistics‘ co-editors (and contributors) Jez Burrows and Lizzy Stewart, who describe We Are the Friction as “an erratic, eclectic collection of work that takes in space travel, Japanese deities, monster husbandry, and the Marx Brothers. We […]



Literary Partners