Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘recommended reading’

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Journal of the Week: One Story

Since launching in September, Fiction Writers Review’s “Book of the Week” promotion has shipped seventy-nine books to readers located in twenty-four states and three countries. Whether we’re giving away debut novels or acclaimed collections, the enthusiasm on Facebook has less to do with free, signed first editions than what these books do and how their authors accomplish it. It’s exactly this enthusiasm that now allows us to expand the spotlight from books deserving your attention to literary journals deserving your attention. Starting this week, Fiction Writers Review will begin profiling publications we admire right here on the blog in a […]


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Thursday morning candy: Storyglossia

by Lee Thomas

In honor of the online literary community, which we discussed this week in Celeste’s blog post about Virtual Book Tours and my interview with flash fiction maven Meg Pokrass, we’d like to feature online literary journal Storyglossia this Thursday morning. “Storyglossia” is a term coined by Editor Steven J. McDermott, with an impressive etymological explanation on the Storyglossia site, which you can read here. Their first online issue debuted in March 2003, and since then 41 issues of the journal have gone up – every one of which you can peruse on their easily-navigable site. In addition to Meg Pokrass, […]


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[Poetry for Prosers] Recommended Reads from 2010

by Katie Umans

Fiction writers are sometimes the first to prostrate themselves and say they don’t get poetry, but these five recommendations have been hand-picked for prosers: Post Moxie by Julia Story, Thin Kimono by Michael Earl Craig, Noose and Hook by Lynn Emanuel, The Madeleine Poems by Paul Legault, and American Fanatics by Dorothy Barresi.


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Thursday Morning Candy: Fogged Clarity

by Celeste Ng

Founded in 2009, Fogged Clarity is an online, non-profit arts review that incorporates visual art and music in addition to fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, reviews, and original multimedia content. The “Fogged Clarity Sessions,” for instance, feature musicians visiting the studio to record several tracks, mostly acoustic. Writes executive editor Ben Evans: I have always believed that the most important thing a human being can do is create, and if creation is the whispering of personal truths into the commotion of existence, then I established Fogged Clarity to make those whispers a little more audible. The combination of visual art, music, […]


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Thursday morning candy: Tin House

by Lee Thomas

The founders of Tin House – magazine, book publisher, workshop destination – put their mission best, so I won’t try to improve upon it: The first issue of Tin House magazine arrived in the spring of 1999, the singular lovechild of an eclectic literary journal and a beautiful glossy magazine. Publisher Win McCormack said of the effort, “I wanted to create a literary magazine for the many passionate readers who are not necessarily literary academics or publishing professionals.” From their latest issue (pictured above), which fills me with a tinge of nostalgia (did anyone else think of Jan Brett’s wonderfully […]


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Thursday morning candy: Ploughshares

by Lee Thomas

In a landscape crowded with brand-new literary mags – which are always exciting to FWR – we want to give a shout out to an old stalwart: Ploughshares. Started in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1971, Ploughshares has called Emerson College home for the past two decades. Several Fiction Writers Review contributors have had work appear in the magazine, including Valerie Laken and brand new Contributing Editor Travis Holland. One of my favorite aspects of Ploughshares is that every issue is edited by a different guest editor, who shapes the theme and selects pieces with his or her own particular aesthetic. Past […]


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Selected

by Travis Holland

How often does it happen? Once or twice, maybe? You’re in a bookstore, you’re at the library, drifting among the stacks, your eye glazed over not with boredom but indecision, because you simply cannot decide what it is you want to read next. Reading something next, that’s the easy part, particularly if you’re one of those readers for whom the prospect of not reading something, anything, is just, well, unthinkable. You read one book or one story, and when you’ve finished that, you read another. It’s like breathing in a way, one breath and then another, and another. But on […]


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Thursday morning candy: Wigleaf

by Lee Thomas

There’s something to be said for simplicity. An afternoon spent at the park. Only what you can fit in your pocket. A bowl of fresh apricots straight from the tree (sorry, New York has me dreaming of summer already). Every time I visit Wigleaf, their clean design aesthetic, wide margins and punchy, brief stories of under 1,000 words feel like a cool drink of water on a hot day (even when I am looking at several inches of snow outside the window). Wigleaf started in 2008, and we have Scott Garson to thank for the design and main editing on […]


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Thursday morning candy: Smokelong Quarterly

by Lee Thomas

Here’s where my November resolution to read War and Peace over the last two weeks of December begins to look like so much bluster and brim. I’ve never been a huge fan of New Year’s Resolutions for this very reason: the likelihood of failure feels like the hulking beast perched atop the crumbling overhang of the dainty little ledge where I contemplate things like “finish two stories a month.” BUT, have I got an easy resolution for you: in 2011, read more flash fiction. What’s not to love? You can finish reading it before your coffee gets cold, you can […]


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Thursday morning candy: Narrative

by Lee Thomas

Family driving you to bunker down in the spare room with your laptop? Never fear! Narrative magazine’s Winter 2011 Issue is up. You can read a six word story by Sherman Alexie that will probably make you feel like your own family isn’t so nuts. You can read three prize-winning tales from Narrative‘s Spring Contest. Fiction, cartoons, poetry, nonfiction – a rich collage of storytelling, right there for the enjoying. I’ll stop rattling on, and let you get to it. Maybe the stories you read will provide some fodder for dinner-table discussion? You never know.




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