Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Jeremiah Chamberlin’

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Book of the Week: The Oregon Experiment, by Keith Scribner

This week’s featured title is Keith Scribner’s The Oregon Experiment. Published last month by Knopf, this book is Scribner’s third novel. His first, The GoodLife, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2000. He is also the author of the 2003 novel Miracle Girl. Scribner’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared in such places as TriQuarterly, American Short Fiction, Quarterly West, The North Atlantic Review, the San Jose Mercury News, the Baltimore Sun, and the anthologies Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton) and Sudden Stories: The MAMMOTH Book of Miniscule Fiction. He received both Pushcart and O’Henry Prize […]


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Book-of-the-Week Winners: Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

Last week we featured Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Valerie Suydam (@valeriesuydam) Chanel Dubofsky (@chaneldubofsky) Sara Habein (@sshabein) To claim your signed copy of this collection, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!


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Book of the Week: Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar, edited by Richard Ford

This week’s featured title is Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work, edited by Richard Ford. This anthology was created as a benefit for 826michigan, a non-profit organization located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that is dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. They offer drop-in tutoring, writing workshops, storytelling and bookmaking field trips, nighttime and weekend workshops, and various other community-related events and services. All are free of charge, always. Founded by Ann Arbor writer Steven Gillis, 826michigan is a chapter […]


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Book-of-the-Week Winners: Separate Kingdoms

Last week we featured Separate Kingdoms as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Alex Carrick (@Alex_Carrick) Jenny Shank (@JennyShank) Amy Silverberg (@AmySilverberg) To claim your signed copy of this collection, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!


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Book of the Week: Separate Kingdoms, by Valerie Laken

This week’s featured title is Valerie Laken’s story collection Separate Kingdoms, which we’re pleased to announce has recently been longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award! Laken was born and raised in Rockford, Illinois. She majored in English and Russian at the University of Iowa, then worked and studied in Moscow, Prague, Krakow, and Madison, before moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan. There, she received an MA in Slavic Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, where she taught for several years. Her first novel, Dream House, was published in 2009. She is currently […]


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Book-of-the-Week Winners: My American Unhappiness

Last week we featured My American Unhappiness as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Editura Litera (@edituralitera) Aubre Andrus (@aubreandrus) Naughti Literati (@NaughtiLiterati) To claim your signed copy of this collection, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!


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Book of the Week: My American Unhappiness, by Dean Bakopoulos

This week’s featured title is My American Unhappiness, by Dean Bakopoulos. Bakopoulos was born and raised in metro Detroit, which is the setting of his first novel, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (Harcourt, 2005), a New York Times Notable Book. He has lectured at Michigan, Cornell, UW-Madison, and other universities about the economic and environmental problems facing the post-industrial Rust Belt, and has published related essays and criticism in The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The Progressive, The Believer, and Real Simple. His one-act plays “Phonies” and “Wayside” have been produced […]


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Book-of-the-Week Winners: The New Valley

Last week we featured Josh Weil’s novella collection The New Valley as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Edward Jarrett (@Edwardjarrett) Daan Kogelmans(@TheVoidComic) J.L. Clyde (@ninsiana0) To claim your signed copy of this collection, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!


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Book of the Week: The New Valley, by Josh Weil

This week’s featured title is Josh Weil’s story collection The New Valley. Weil was born in Roanoke, Virginia, to a family of would-be “back-to-the-landers.” With an agronomist father and a mother “deeply attuned” to nature, it comes as no surprise that Weil pays such careful attention to the natural world in his writing. The New Valley (Grove Press, 2009) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. The book also won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the New Writers Award from the Great Lakes Colleges Association, and a “5 Under […]


Essays |

The Good Review

Earlier this month, Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin moderated a panel on criticism at the 2011 AWP Conference entitled “The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com.” Joining him were Charles Baxter, Stacey D’Erasmo, Gemma Sieff, and Keith Taylor. In this essay, adapted from his talk at that panel, he discusses why liking a book should have nothing to do with a review, and how this thoughts on criticism have changed since running an independent bookstore.