Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘recommended places’

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The Second Pass, and life after print

Tonight I stumbled (for the first time, I’m ashamed to admit) upon The Second Pass. This fantastic lit site, edited by freelance writer and former Harper Collins editor John Williams, features a blog and an impressive range of features: essays, interviews, and reviews covering both new releases (Circulating) and backlist titles (Backlist). Another section, The Shelf, features reviewlets of recent titles, with links to and excerpts from other reviews across the bookosphere. To celebrate the site’s first year anniversary, twelve contributors (including the editor) wrote pieces on their favorite out-of-print books. Williams introduces the combined result, “Tales of the Unread,” […]


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Sirenland 2010: workshop your writing in Italy

So…who wants to spend a week with One Story magazine at this hotel in Positano, Italy, engaging in a series of advanced fiction- and memoir-writing workshops with Dani Shapiro, Jim Shepard, and Ron Carlson; giving and attending readings; and dining with a view of the Tirreno Sea? Submissions are open from now through October 31 for the third annual Sirenland Writers Conference (March 21-27, 2010). As someone lucky enough to have been workshopped by Shepard once, I urge other writers to jump at any chance to discuss work with him! Visit the Sirenland website to learn more about the conference […]


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Happy 30th Birthday, Square Books!

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Square Books, the famed independent bookstore in Oxford, Mississippi, celebrates three decades in business this month. Festivities began last Thursday, September 10th, with a special program on Thacker Mountain Radio, which broadcasts a live show made up of “literary readings and an eclectic mix of musical performances” each week from Off Square Books. This most recent one featured musical guests King Curly and Sanders Bohlke, as well as a reading by John Brandon, the current John Grisham writer in residence at Ole Miss. John received his MFA from Washington University, in St. Louis. His first novel, Arkansas, was recently published […]


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recommended site: Lit Drift

New on the lit blog scene is the very fun Lit Drift, a self-described “resource and community dedicated to the art & craft of storytelling in the 21st century.” Our name is a nod to how traditional forms of storytelling are, well, drifting into forms wholly new and unexpected. We’re interested in sifting through the palimpsests known as the Internet, the arts, and the in-between to uncover those new forms and techniques in constructing fiction. We believe that literature should be fun in an age when it’s only too easy to turn on the TV and watch shitcoms instead. We […]


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library of Awesome

These photos of the DOK Library Concept Center (Holland) by Jenny Levine, “The Shifted Librarian” on flickr, are like porn if you love libraries, modern architecture, and books. The mission of this library is, at least in part, to be a fun, inviting space–one where kids can stand on the furniture and eat while they read, and where books are integrated with music, games, and other media. Reading becomes socially awesome. And yet DOK also values reading’s solitary nature by providing–as an alternative to the wide-open, light-soaked spaces–nooks and secret rooms where readers can lose themselves in a book. Surrounding […]


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RopeWalk Writers Retreat

Benjamin Percy writes to FWR about RopeWalk, where he taught earlier this month: Historic New Harmony, Indiana, was the site of two nineteenth century utopian experiments, and in the same spirit, the The RopeWalk Writers Retreat offers up a small slice of heaven. Here, a competitively chosen pool of students study for a week under four prominent writers (faculty over the past few years include Andrew Hudgins, Erin McGraw, Sigrid Nunez, Lee Martin, Marianne Boruch, Kyoko Mori, among others). There are workshops and panels and readings and one-on-one conferences — the standard fare — but unlike other conferences, no one […]


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Bread Loaf-bound

FWR writer (and often behind-the-scenes editor) Celeste Ng has been invited to attend the “oldest writing conference in America,” the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, this August as a Scholar. She’s promised to send us dispatches from the beautiful Green Mountains. Two other FWR contributors, Steven Wingate and Preeta Samarasan, were both Bread Loaf Fellows in 2008, and Steven was awarded the Bread Loaf-sponsored Bakeless Literary Prize in Fiction for stories from his debut collection, Wifeshopping. (Steven even talked a little about the conference in an essay for FWR last month.) Here are links to more about this year’s conference and […]


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Catskill Studio for Writing

The fabulous Thisbe Nissen (Out of the Girls Room and Into the Night, Osprey Island, The Good People of New York, The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook) is starting a summer writing workshop in the Catskills. In her own words: Dear Everyone, Some of you may know that up here in Saugerties, NY we’ve been hatching a plan for a summer writing workshop, and now that we’ve got some official flyer-type-things and an application form and even a website, I’m sending this out in the hope that you all might pass it along to potentially interested students, former students, or anyone you know […]


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What are you doing this summer?

FWR’s contributors are participating in some very cool programs, and we’re eager to know what other writers are up to over the next few months. Leave a comment here, or email fictionwritersreview@gmail.com to tell us where you’ll be writing, teaching, or otherwise fictionizing. (And check in tomorrow to hear more about the Catskill Studio for Writing.) 1. Natalie Bakopoulos is currently teaching a week-long writing workshop on the Greek island of Andros as a part of the Aegean Arts Circle, which was founded in 2003 by Amalia Melis. Stratis Haviaris, a poet and the founding editor of the Harvard Review, […]


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I was Born Doing Reference Work in Sin

Last week, poet and activist Dustin Brookshire recommended Denise Duhamel’s work to FWR readers, and I failed to mention that Dustin has a poetry blog of his own, one bearing what may be the best name ever: I was Born Doing Reference Work in Sin. This month he’s featuring a very cool series with guest poets (including Mark Bibbins, Ellen Bass, and Denise Duhamel) called “How I Discovered Poetry”, and his site also hosts a longer-running series, “Why Do I Write?”




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