Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘novel’

Shop Talk |

From TV Screen to Novel and All the Wines and Teryaki Bowls in Between

It was October 2005, and professionally and personally, I was rudderless. Where had I gone wrong? In the preceding two years, I’d finished serving my grad school sentence and been released from Boulder. Back in Chicago, the city in which I’d grown up, I’d taken a one-bedroom apartment in a baseball-sodden neighborhood with scant street parking. I was halfheartedly teaching some community college comp and developmental reading courses (my sole qualification for getting the unclaimed developmental reading assignment: my willingness to take the teacher’s edition and my vow to learn something in the days before I’d have to face the […]


Shop Talk |

The Very Good, The Breaking Bad and The Cuddly: Books Loved in 2013

by Brian Bartels

Hey, Park Rangers. Echoing the bold everlasting words of narration in Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love, “What a Midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on his sleeve, in plain sight,” I wanted to share some stories I loved from last year. There’s quite a bit of corny, unapologetic and Hallmark-y content in mid-February, and it can make any toiled romance feel heightened for unnecessary reasons. I know you’re smart enough to not place all your chips in the same stack. Of course I’m getting at sleeping around. It can’t be just […]


Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: Everything Happens As It Does

by The Editors

This week’s feature is Albena Stambolova’s new novel, Everything Happens As It Does, translated from the Bulgarian by Olga Nikolova. Stambolova’s novel, which was published this month by Open Letter Books, was the 2013 winner of the Contemporary Bulgarian Fiction Contest from Open Letter Books at the University or Rochester, a project that is supported by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. She is also the author of two other novels: Hop-Hop the Stars, and An Adventure, to Pass the Time. She has also published a collection of short stories, Three Dots, and a psychoanalytical study on Marguerite Duras, Sickness in Death. […]


Interviews |

Finding the Authenticating Narrator: Part I of a Conversation with Russell Banks

Back in the fall of 2012, Sebastian Matthews hosted Russell Banks as Visiting Writer for Warren Wilson College’s Harwood-Cole Lecture Series. Knowing he’d be in town for a few days, Matthews arranged to interview Banks, who is a long-time family friend, on Jeff Davis’ radio show Word Play. What follows is Part I of their conversation.


Reviews |

The Pure Gold Baby, by Margaret Drabble

by Ellen Prentiss Campbell

“The real estate in North London Drabble-land has appreciated and her cast of bohemian academics has aged over the fifty years since her first novel, A Summer Bird Cage (1963),” Ellen Prentiss Campbell reports, reviewing Dame Margaret Drabble’s newest novel, The Pure Gold Baby, “but she’s back, in fine form.”




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