Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘novel’

Shop Talk |

Book of the Week Giveaway: Rich Boy, by Sharon Pomerantz

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week, Fiction Writers Review launched a Fan Page on Facebook. The goal is threefold: to introduce new readers to FWR, to create an informal place for conversation about books and writing, and also to give away lots of free books. Each week we’ll give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. All you have to do to be eligible for our weekly drawing is to be a fan of our Facebook page. No catch, no gimmicks. And once you’re a fan, you’ll be automatically entered in each subsequent drawing. […]


Interviews |

Imagined Landscapes of History: An Interview with David Ebershoff

Brian Bartels talks with David Ebershoff–author, editor-at-large for Random house, and Columbia professor–about such topics as the role research plays in his writing, writing the book you want to read, the advice his gives his students about drafting, and how he approaches revision.


Interviews |

The Truth About Fiction: An Interview with Peter Selgin

by JT Torres

Peter Selgin’s debut novel, Life Goes to the Movies, is based in large part on his experiences growing up in New York in the 1970s. JT Torres talks to the author about bringing fact to fiction, strategies for the revision process, why identity is so important in his work, and more. Following the interview is an exclusive excerpt from Selgin’s novel-in-progress, Hattertown.


Interviews |

Consumed by the Country: An Interview with Tatjana Soli

Tatjana Soli’s debut novel, The Lotus Eaters, takes place during the Vietnam War and focuses on a female combat photographer. Tyler McMahon talks with the author about how we choose our subject matter, the challenges of writing about well-documented history, the role research plays in her process, and why novels matter in an era increasingly dominated by nonfiction.


Shop Talk |

The World's First (Really) Commercial Novel

by Celeste Ng

Ever wonder what would happen if the plotline of a novel were up for sale? Commercial Novel aims to find out. By commenting on the site—and making a donation to the site via PayPal—you can influence what happens in the next chapter of the novel. The comment with the highest donation shapes the next segment of the book. It’s sort of a three-way cross between an improv show, an exquisite corpse, and a charity auction. The site’s authors explain the motivation behind the project: We are fictional writers who lost our fictional middle-class lifestyle with the onset of the recession.* […]


Shop Talk |

Percival's Planet Launches Today

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

We’re pleased to announce that Percival’s Planet, the most recent novel by FWR Contributor Michael Byers, was released today. The book was inspired by the true story of the discovery of Pluto and takes place during the late 1920s. Told from multiple perspectives–a farm boy in Kansas who grinds his own telescope lenses, a young woman losing her grip on reality, a Harvard-educated scientist trying to work through Percival Lowell’s mathematical equations to find Planet X, and the heir of a chemical company fortune who’s decided to become a paleontologist in the hopes of establishing his own reputation–the novel explores […]


Reviews |

The Quickening, by Michelle Hoover

Every work of fiction is grown from at least one seed of truth, whether it’s an emotional truth, an actual event, or a fact of nature. For Michelle Hoover, author of the elegant debut novel The Quickening, this seed was a fifteen-page document that her great-grandmother typed out in the final year of her life. In it, “broken hearted and sick in mind and body,” she recounted her seven decades as an Iowa farmwoman. Loosely based on this document and family oral histories, The Quickening follows the journeys of two Iowan families trying to build their lives amid the hardships of the Great Depression.


Reviews |

Sarah/Sara, by Jacob Paul

Jacob Paul’s debut, Sarah/Sara, is not a joyful read, but it is a deeply moving one. The novel unfolds as the journal of Sarah Frankel, an American-born Jew who, shortly after finishing college, moved to Israel, where she took the Hebrew version of her name (“Sara,” pronounced Sah-rah) and became far more ritually observant than she was raised to be. After her visiting parents are killed in a suicide bombing in the café below her Jerusalem apartment, Sara embarks on a six-week, solo kayaking trip through the Arctic. Throughout the beautiful yet dangerous trek, Sarah’s thoughts turn not only to her past—memories—but also to an imagined future, one that challenges her faith.


Shop Talk |

Reviewlet: An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell

An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell Unbridled Books, April 2010 256 pp Concert violist Suzanne Sullivan is preparing dinner when she hears on the radio that her long-term lover Alex—a well-known conductor—has perished in a plane crash. Living with her husband (a composer), her best friend Pertra (a concert violinist) and Petra’s deaf daughter Adele, Suzanne is forced to grieve in secret. With one foot in a dysfunctional marriage and one hand in the rearing of a child not her own, she comes to realize that it was during her stolen moments with Alex that she felt most whole. But […]




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