Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘publishing’

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Graphic Classics

by Celeste Ng

Vernerable publisher Penguin has quietly been putting out a series of “Graphic Classics”–classic novels such as Moby Dick and The Three Musketeers with snazzy covers by prominent graphic artists. Over at his blog, illustrator Michael Cho discusses designing the cover for the recent reissue of Don Delillo’s White Noise: The first thing I did, of course, was read the book again. It had been over 10 years since I last read it, so I needed to re-familiarize myself with it. After reading it though this time, I skimmed it again but with an eye toward the major concepts and images. […]


Reviews |

How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead, by Ariel Gore

I haven’t read a book on writing nearly as useful as Ariel Gore’s How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead: Your Words In Print and Your Name in Lights since I bought a copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. This is a must-have DIY how-to for any writer interested in success, whether that means starting with homemade zines, jumping straight into big-time publishing, or working part-time on that novel while slaving away at your day job. Gore’s advice will help writers get the word out, get noticed, and get famous—without being a colossal jerk, fame whore, or media spammer.


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at the cocktail party, with the birds

by Anne Stameshkin

As you can see on the left sidebar, FWR is now Twitterpated (name: “fictionwriters”). Come follow us… I had mixed feelings at first about tweeting. It’s one thing to offer readers detours and chances to read more about an author, book, or issue via hyperlinks, but as an all-volunteer labor-of-love site, did we really need to maintain multiple online presences? There seemed something homey and focused — and time-efficient — about just being and not tweeting about it. But ultimately, we’d love to let more readers know about us, to reach out to new potential writers, and to establish more […]


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the used book wars

by Celeste Ng

An agent once told me that if I wanted to support my fellow writers, I should never buy used books, because the author gets no royalties on re-sold copies. And while that is certainly true, this editorial in the Guardian makes an eloquent argument for why secondhand bookshops are important: [T]he best have stock that is old – an out-of-print Penguin on Imagist poets, or a Fontana reader bringing news (at least it would have been in 1981) from the sociological front – and temptingly affordable. They contain treasure, however dusty. Several commenters point out that this editorial makes no […]


Interviews |

Type type type: A Conversation with Mimi Smartypants

I don’t generally read personal blogs, partly out of an allergy to the twee self-consciousness that so easily results from self-chronicling. But when I stumbled across Mimi Smartypants’s diary a few years ago, I found that I was looking at something different from the typical navel-gazing blog. Rather, what I experience sometimes when I read her diary is that strange phenomenon that first brought me to fiction as a child, and has kept me here all these years.


Shop Talk |

The Big-Box Retailer Book Clubs

by Anne Stameshkin

Three Percent, a site dedicated mostly to international lit, recently featured two must-read posts — “Predatory Pricing Practices” (which includes a clip from the Colbert Report featuring Douglas Rushkoff) and “Anti-Fixed Book Price Essay” — about the predatory pricing practices that stores like WalMart are using to drive down book prices. In short, they’re employing books as loss leaders to sell other products. See also: the NY Times‘ recent article about big box retailers pushing a HUGE proportion of booksales these days and creating “bestsellers”. Could Target really be the next Oprah’s Book Club? It’s interesting to think that a […]


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"Restoring" A Moveable Feast

by Celeste Ng

Scribner caused a stir earlier this year by announcing it would publish a “restored” edition of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Why? Because the original edition was edited after the author’s death by Hemingway’s fourth wife and literary executor, Mary, who reordered parts of Hemingway’s unfinished manuscript and included parts he had wished to exclude–including a chapter that that portrays his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in a negative light. Scribner claims the new edition is what Heminway actually intended: Since Hemingway’s personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now, […]


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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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four ways of looking at a novel

by Anne Stameshkin

To answer the personal question “Do I love books, or do I love reading?” — and the larger question “In which format(s) is the book most likely to endure?” — author Ann Kirschner (Sala’s Gift) tried Dickens’s Little Dorrit in four formats: paperback, audio, iPhone, and Kindle. She discusses her impressions of each in this Chronicle of Higher Education article. Among them: the particular pleasures of audio books, why the iPhone e-reader is “a Kindle killer,” and the power of story to transcend any device. Read Little Dorrit in paperback. Listen to Little Dorrit as an audio book Read Little […]


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Center for Fiction Writers' Conference

by Anne Stameshkin

Fiction super-hero Ron Hogan (editor of Beatrice and senior editor of GalleyCat) and the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction have been in cahoots, and I am thrilled to announce that in just a few weeks, they will launch an exciting event: the first ever Center for Fiction Writers’ Conference. This day-long symposium is specifically intended for writers who already have a finished book and an agent, but who want to learn more about how the publishing world works–and how best to navigate it. In this post on Buzz, Balls, and Hype, Ron Hogan blogs about why this conference is important […]




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