Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘news’

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Blackout

by Lee Thomas

It was a wild night on the East Coast. For several hours, as late as yesterday afternoon, it felt on the ground like the threats and warnings and evacuations might be overblown, a product of a media hungry for Events and glued-to-the-television-worthy programming in the midst of election fatigue. Well. The power’s out on much of Manhattan south of 42nd street, which meant blackness last night as far as the eye could see, the dark hulking shadows of tall buildings. The images of houses along the Jersey shoreline with water to the second floor. The flooded subway tunnels. The several […]


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2011 PEN Literary Awards Announced

by Celeste Ng

The winners of the prestigious PEN Literary awards were recently announced–and we’re proud to have featured some of the winners and judges right here on Fiction Writers Review. Here are the main winners for fiction: PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize ($25,000): To a fiction writer whose debut work, published in 2010, represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise. This year, the judges have chosen two winners to share the award. Susanna Daniel, Stiltsville (FWR interview here) Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (FWR interview here) Runner up: Teddy Wayne, Kapitoil Judges: Susan Cheever, Paul Harding, and Yiyun […]


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Longlist for Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award announced

by Celeste Ng

The longlist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award has just come out, and here at FWR, we’re thrilled to have featured many of the writers on it in interviews, reviews, and essays, including: Anthony Doerr, for Memory Wall Danielle Evans, for Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Siobhan Fallon, for You Know When the Men Are Gone Alan Heathcock, for Volt Valerie Laken, for Separate Kingdoms Yiyun Li, for Golden Boy, Emerald Girl Offered by the Munster Literature Centre, the 35,000-euro prize is the largest for a short story collection.  The shortlist will be announced in July.  […]


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When to stop working for free …

by Lee Thomas

A few weeks back, I blogged about the AOL purchase of the Huffington Post and the questions and ethics of when writers choose to write for free. Yesterday, GalleyCat reported that Visual Art Source publisher Bill Lasarow has ceased to post his content for free on the HuffPo site and calls for a more general bloggers’ strike. In Lasarow’s original manifesto on why he feels strongly about this issue, he states: We think it is incumbent upon the many writers and bloggers to form a negotiating partnership with Huffington/AOL in order to pursue these and other important matters so as […]


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HuffPo, $315 mil, and when to write for free

by Lee Thomas

At 9 a.m. on the Saturday of AWP, I rallied for “When Should We Write for Free?” – a panel that, just like it sounds, featured writers discussing their own guidelines to answer that question. The panel gave insight into a marketplace that has rapidly grown accustomed to free content. There was much discussion during the audience Q&A about providing free content – mostly in the form of blogging – and folks mentioned the Huffington Post several times, since their bloggers are not paid. Fast forward to last week, when the Huffington Post announced that AOL would acquire it for […]


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Save Harper's Magazine

by Natalie Bakopoulos

For the last several months, Harper’s staff, recently unionized, has been in conflict with the magazine’s publisher, John R. “Rick” MacArthur. The disagreements stem from various sources, which have been outlined in two recent articles in New York Magazine, here and here. In short: MacArthur is resistant to other avenues of revenue, including fund raising. Instead, having already cut the size and payroll of the editorial staff, which lost four senior editors and its web editor in 2010, MacArthur is now insisting that it’s necessary to lay off, immediately, two of the magazine’s most experienced editors, one of whom is […]


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Haiti: Remembering Her Stories

by Lee Thomas

Jaunary 12, 2011 marked the 1-year anniversary of the 7.0 earthquake that rocked Haiti. The news this past week has been filled with scenes of the temporary camps set up to house the one million Haitians left homeless by the quake – largely unchanged a year later. Just yesterday, police arrested Jean-Claude Duvalier – the controversial Haitian politician who fled Haiti in 1986 – from a Port-Au-Prince hotel. Duvalier has lived in self-imposed exile for nearly a quarter century, after a popular uprising overthrew his regime. Haitian Literature Is a Living Art: Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour and Thomas […]


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Let's get digital

by Lee Thomas

This post stems from a conversation with my brother – who recently moved to Chile – about what he’d loaded onto his Kindle. As a recent college grad, with limited disposable income, he was pretty stringent in choosing the books he bought. But he’s a voracious reader. His solution: he loaded up his e-reader with a clutch of classics that have entered the public domain. Let them read (old) books! Though beautiful books draw my eye, the trump card for me will always be the words on the page. I love books for the story, which means I keep reading […]


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Sad Scribblers?

by Lee Thomas

GalleyCat reported a few weeks back that a piece in Health magazine listed writers on a list of 10 careers with high rates of depression. The original Health list says, of artists, entertainers and writers: These jobs can bring irregular paychecks, uncertain hours, and isolation. Creative people may also have higher rates of mood disorders; about 9% reported an episode of major depression in the previous year. This is by no means new territory, there’s long been a body of study around the artistic teperment and depression, including Kay Redfield Jamison’s article “Manic Depressive Illness and Creativity” from Scientific American […]


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The Story Behind Storyville

by Michael Rudin

Don’t call Paul Vidich the Mayor of Storyville. He prefers Matchmaker. That’s because Storyville is less about Vidich, its creator, than his application’s ambitious plan to “bring together writers and readers.” As you might imagine, Storyville is focused solely on the short story. Exclusive to owners of iPhones and iPads, the application promises to deliver one story every week, for which subscribers must pay $4.99 for a six-month subscription. In the end, this means Storyville’s residents will end up paying less than a quarter per story. Vidich promises they won’t be just any stories. The Storyville editorial team is focused […]




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