Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘novel’

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DISPATCH FROM BREAD LOAF #1: What I (Heard) Read This Summer

by Celeste Ng

I was lucky enough to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont this summer, as a tuition scholar, and I’m still processing all that I learned. In the 12 days I spent on the mountain, I heard 101 people read in 24 separate readings. I attended 5 workshop sessions, 5 lectures, 3 craft classes, and countless cocktail hours. And I’m still kicking myself for not doing more. But I guess that’s part of the experience. Bread Loaf is an exercise in excess: a positive glut of new ideas and voices and inspirations. I left completely overstimulated, with a stack […]


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Margaret Atwood's book tour / fundraiser / theatre piece

by Anne Stameshkin

To promote her new novel, The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood will be touring five countries and thirty-five cities, performing staged readings with trios of local actors who will also sing some of the book’s original hymns (set to music). A number of these events will also serve as fundraisers for BirdLife International. Here’s the author’s own take on the project (via the Times Online), and you can follow the tour’s progress on her blog and Twitter. Atwood gracefully owns “book tour overkill,” joking that “[t]wittering, or is it tweeting?” is actually quite “appropriate for a bird-saving project!” In […]


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How I Became a Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely

What aspiring novelist doesn’t dream of early fame? Granted, it’s a willfully suppressed narrative—unwritten, unspoken, and perhaps for a noble few, unimagined—but most writers have contrived versions of a meteoric rise to literary success along with more prosaic early fictions. And, given the chance, who would shunt the regard of established authors, modest financial gains, and possible tenured teaching position that await? How I Became A Famous Novelist (Grove/Atlantic, July 2009), Steve Hely’s debut novel, uses this condition as pretext for rollicking satire.


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Nothing but a Smile, by Steve Amick

Steve Amick’s superb second novel, Nothing But a Smile (Pantheon, 2009), opens in June of 1944, with Winton (“Wink”) S. Dutton, a promising young cartoonist in civilian life, walking the streets of Chicago. Wink is home from the war early, his drawing hand having been mangled when, hung-over while doing an assignment for Yank Magazine, he misheard an ensign’s instructions and touched a submarine flywheel that he should have simply drawn. But prior to shipping back home, Wink had promised his buddy, Bill (“Chesty”) Chesterton, to look up his wife, Sal, in Chicago, so he might tell her how faithful Chesty has been to her, and how much he loves her. And right away, Amick has readers worrying over their meeting; the bleached bones of an affair have been set out in a row…


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Doghead, by Morten Ramsland

Hundehoved. See, it sounds a little more haunted, a little more rhythmic, a little more intense in Danish. But the English “Doghead” sounds good, too: blunt and pragmatic, both mysterious and common as dirt. Come to think of it, mystery and the commonplace both pervade Doghead(Thomas Dunne Books, 2009, trans. Tiina Nunnally), a Scandinavian saga obsessed with the convoluted telling of what goes awry in the gnarled branches of the Erikkson family tree.


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The Lovely Bones trailer

by Celeste Ng

Paramount has just revealed the trailer for the film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. The film, directed by Peter Jackson, stars Mark Wahlberg, Susan Sarandon, Rachel Weisz, and Saoirse Ronan (Briony in the movie version Atonement, and no stranger to literary adaptations). I had a hard time imagining how this book would be made into a movie, and the trailer reminded me–strangely enough–of the Harry Potter films: a human world and a magical world running in parallel; fantastical CGI effects, like a giant rose blooming underwater; scary woods, and the hunt for a Very Bad Man. Meanwhile, the […]


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I Do Not Come to You By Chance, by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

I had to go four or five pages into my junk email folder to find one. It was from a Dr. Obadiah Maliafia of the Central Bank of Nigeria. The email says that my $10.7 million in overdue inheritance funds: “HAS BEEN GAZZETED TO BE RELEASED TO YOU VIA THE FOREIGN REMMITANCE DEPARTMENT OF OUR BANK.”

After reading Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s debut novel I Do Not Come to You By Chance (Hyperion, May 2009), the missive from Dr. Maliafia read like a finely tuned piece of art: the formal language, the capital letters, the amount of money – a perfect example of the 419 email scam.


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The Song is You, by Arthur Phillips

by Katie Umans

The Song is You, by Arthur Phillips, is a book about music and love – the grand, sweeping stuff. So you might be surprised at how controlled the writing is. Not that I was expecting the book to play a cloying tune when I opened it, like one of those oversized Hallmark cards, but I did somehow expect it to be more… well, musical. The 2006 movie Once is an example – one I thought of often while reading this – of how music can surge viscerally through a love story and vice versa, though of course a film has certain advantages in evoking song that a book does not.


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The Status Galleys Book Club

by Anne Stameshkin

In the New York Observer, Leon Neyfakh recently named this summer’s “status galleys,” the ones you get pick-up lines and publishing cred for reading on the subway. And over at Neyfakh’s former home, Gawker‘s Foster Kamer sprays the mystique off one of them, Joshua Ferris‘s The Unnamed (due to publish in January 2010), in this first installment of the Status Galley Book Club. He gives the novel a very positive review, but notes that the mainstream buzz anticipating its publication is too loud (and its galleys too widely distributed) for its status to be Truly Hip. Silly as it may […]


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Good Things I Wish You, by A. Manette Ansay

Can men and women ever really be just friends? The infamous, troubling question. It never truly goes away. Probably because it never truly gets answered, despite the fact that the modern novel has tried, over and over again, if not explicitly, or even self-consciously, to do so. But the characters in A. Manette Ansay’s latest novel, Good Things I Wish You (Harper, 2009), are not ashamed to ask such questions or speak boldly, not even to each other on their first, blind date.




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