Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘news’

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HuffPo Books!

by Celeste Ng

It was selected as one of Time magazine’s Top 25 Blogs of 2009. The Observer (UK) went one step further and named it the most powerful blog in the world. According to Technorati, it’s the most linked-to blog on the Internet. And its founder, Arianna Huffington, came in at #12 in Forbes ‘ 2009 list of the most influential women in the media. Now the Huffington Post is starting–drumroll please!–a book section. Last Tuesday the New York Observer announced that HuffPo’s new book section would launch October 5th under the editorship of Amy Hertz, an editor-at-large for Penguin’s Dutton division. […]


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short story bubble?

by Anne Stameshkin

On the Virginia Quarterly Review blog, Michael Lukas worries that AWP’s heightened emphasis on the short story is a contributing factor to what he calls the “Short Story Bubble”–and its eventual burst. I’m not sure I entirely buy his argument, but hey, it’s worth discussing… All around the country, thousands of young fiction writers are scribbling furiously, focusing their creative and psychological energies on producing and publishing short stories, not necessarily because the short story is their favorite form. But, rather, because it’s the form best suited to the workshop, because they think it’s the easiest way to get published, […]


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apostrophes banned in Birmingham

by Anne Stameshkin

This sounds like an Onion article. It’s not. From now on, no sign produced by Birmingham City Council will contain the punctuation mark. Debates over whether Kings Norton really should be King’s – or even Kings’ – Norton may rage on, but they will be useless. And nearby Druids Heath – which was never actually home to one, let alone many, druids – will never take on the possessive, no matter how furious local apostrophe advocates become. The council said the move had been taken for the purposes of consistency and to avoid costs and confusion over whether place names […]


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Harper Perennial celebrates the short story

by Anne Stameshkin

Harper Perennial is already building buzz for its upcoming Summer of the Short Story campaign, declaring that “it’s high time to celebrate the much-loved, but oft-overlooked, short story form.” The publisher will promote six new collections (due to publish this summer and fall)—along with six collections of classic shorts. The festivities will begin in earnest this May, but in the meantime, Perennial is featuring a new story every week in 2009 on a site called Fifty-Two Stories. According to Cal Morgan: Some of them will be new stories from our original collections, or from upcoming hardcovers; some original contributions never […]


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Washington Post to discontinue stand-alone Book World

by Anne Stameshkin

Sadness. Book World was one of the last remaining stand-alone book review sections in the country, along with the New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post’s move comes as the company, like most other newspaper businesses across the country, has been hobbled by a protracted downturn in advertising. […] “This is disheartening,” said Jane Ciabattari, president of the NBCC, after hearing that the section was indeed being closed. “The only good news is that books coverage continues and that the section is intact online. But the print edition of the stand alone Book World was cherished by readers throughout […]


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Rabbit at Rest

by Anne Stameshkin

Sad news: John Updike succumbed to lung cancer today at the age of 76. William Pritchard has drawn up a list of what he considers the author’s most important works here. I remember hiding the Rabbit books under my bed as a teenager, loving how Updike could write even the dirtiest moments so beautifully. His prose is always alive, startlingly specific, full of those little truths we seek in literature. The first time I read “A&P,” I was 16 and bowled over by descriptions like this: Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the […]


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gimme fiction!

by Anne Stameshkin

According to a new report by the NEA (“Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy”), the percentage of US adults reading fiction is growing for the first time in a quarter-century (chart borrowed from the NY Times). But I’m not ready to hit the street with pom-poms and a marching band just yet: a higher percentage of Americans were reading literature in the late 20th century–and it kind of blows my mind that only 50.2% of my fellow citizens have read even one novel, short story, poem, or play in the past year…


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publishing fiction as fiction

by Anne Stameshkin

I swore I wasn’t even going to blog about the whole Angel at the Fence debacle, but then I saw this: that York House Press hopes to publish this so-called “fake memoir” by a Holocaust survivor as a work of fiction; this book certainly contains some fictional (or, it could be argued, mis-remembered) details–including the one its title refers to–but author Herman Rosenblat really is a death camp survivor, and he hardly deserves to be viciously attacked as the next Margaret B. Jones. Here’s the publisher’s official statement, which defends, quite convincingly and movingly, their decision to publish the book […]


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new novel from Lorrie Moore

by Anne Stameshkin

According to the Bookseller, Lorrie Moore’s new novel — her first in over a decade — is coming out in 2009. Stephen Page at British publisher Faber gushes that A Gate at the Stairs “is a masterpiece for our times and only re-enforces her as one of the great writers of our age,” and Vicky Wilson at Moore’s US publisher, Knopf, calls the novel “a stunner.” The UK edition is due to publish next autumn; I’m not sure about the US-release date. What I am sure about is how excited I am to pick up A Gate at the Stairs. […]




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