Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘recommended reading’

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50 Book People to Follow on Twitter

by Celeste Ng

The Huffington Post recently published a list of “The 50 Best Book People to Follow on Twitter.” Those on the list include everyone from veteran authors Margaret Atwood and Anne Rice to up-and-comers like Colson Whitehead. There are plenty of agents, editors, and book bloggers, too, as well as book sites like GalleyCat and Guardian Books. These bookish Twitterers offer thoughts on current events and life in general and favorite writing-related links you might never find otherwise. A representative smattering: from Mokoto Rich, New York Times book editor: Looking at questions asked and not asked about latest incident of flawed […]


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More on the DIY Book Tour

by Celeste Ng

Jeremy recently posted about Allison Amend’s tips for a do-it-yourself book tour. Author-arranged promotions are becoming more and more common as publishers cut back on marketing and publicity, and the L.A. Times has some firsthand accounts of what such a book tour can be like: A cat peeing in an author’s bag? A writer waking up to discover that a complete stranger has left him four jars of delicious homemade preserves? Such things are not traditionally part of book promotion. But they happened to Bill Cotter and Annie La Ganga, an Austin, Texas-based couple who celebrated the simultaneous release of […]


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Reviewlet: An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell

An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell Unbridled Books, April 2010 256 pp Concert violist Suzanne Sullivan is preparing dinner when she hears on the radio that her long-term lover Alex—a well-known conductor—has perished in a plane crash. Living with her husband (a composer), her best friend Pertra (a concert violinist) and Petra’s deaf daughter Adele, Suzanne is forced to grieve in secret. With one foot in a dysfunctional marriage and one hand in the rearing of a child not her own, she comes to realize that it was during her stolen moments with Alex that she felt most whole. But […]


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Literature of the Workplace

by Celeste Ng

In The New York Times, Book Review editor Jennifer Schuessler discusses the evolution of office-lit and why working the double shift might actually be shaping contemporary novels: Enough with the cozy stay-at-home dramas and urban picaresques featuring young slackers with no identifiable paycheck! The literary novel needs more tinkers and tailors, the argument goes. (The best-seller list seems to take care of the soldiers and spies.) In a video introduction to the latest issue of Granta, dedicated to the theme of “Work,” John Freeman, the magazine’s editor, lamented the literary “invisibility” of daily toil. The essayist Alain de Botton, writing […]


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In Defense of Comic Novels

by Celeste Ng

In the art world, comedy seldom gets its dues: if it’s funny, many assume, it can’t also be “real” art. At the Oscars a couple of years back, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly lamented the plight of “A Comedian at the Oscars”: “the saddest man of all / Your movies may make millions, but your name they’ll never call.” Something similar happens in literature, Erica Wagner points out in the UK’s Times: Comic novels — let’s call them terrific novels that happen to be funny — tend to fall through the cracks, especially where prizes are concerned. […]


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Day Jobs of Famous Writers

by Celeste Ng

If you’re reading the FWR blog furtively, hunched in your cubicle over your TPS reports, this post is for you. You are not alone: almost all writers need a day job to support their art. Lapham’s Quarterly reveals the day jobs of some famous writers, such as Charlotte Bronte, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner in trading-card format. Or quiz your friends: Which novelist helped create the modern London police force? Which novelist made only $1838 per year in today’s dollars? If these writers could turn out masterpieces like As I Lay Dying and In the Penal Colony and the Chronicles […]


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Steve Almond on Self-publishing

by Celeste Ng

On The Rumpus, author Steve Almond explains why he recently decided to self-publish a book of short stories and essays, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey–and it’s probably not for the reasons you’d think: If this were a traditional publishing endeavor, the next question would be how to get the book a “bigger platform,” meaning a place in the great Barnes-&-Noble-Amazon-Kindle-i-Pad-clusterfuckosphere. But because this is something much more personal, I decided – nah. I was cool with Harvard Bookstore selling it. But other than that, Minute, Honey is available only at readings. My reasoning is pretty simple: I want […]


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2010 Asian American Short Story Contest

by Celeste Ng

Entries are now being accepted for the 2010 Asian American Short Story Contest–the only national, pan-Asian American writing competition of its kind. The contest’s sponsors are two of the leading promoters of Asian American literary arts: Hyphen magazine is a non-profit news and culture magazine and blog that focuses on exploring Asian American identity, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) is the most prominent organization in the country dedicated to exceptional literature by writers of Asian descent. Fiction Writers Review is proud to be a media partner for the 2010 contest. This year’s judges are Alexander Chee and Jaed […]


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Love Letter to the Deckle Edge

by Celeste Ng

If all the recent talk about the iPad and the Amazon/Macmillan ebook pricing catfight has you longing for a simpler time, look no further than this ode to the deckle edge on The Millions: Opening a book can already feel like opening a gift. Armed with a knife and freeing the pages and the story hidden beneath the folds, it becomes something more, “a penetration of its secrets” and an act of discovery, shot through with a suggestion of violence and danger or of the painful gestation of the words themselves. This act of cutting open pages to read a […]


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When one book closes…

by Anne Stameshkin

After finishing a book you love, is it hard to move on? How long do you wait to open another — and how do you shake that feeling it won’t measure up to the last? On the Kenyon Review‘s KR Blog, Elizabeth Ames Staudt considers this dilemma: An insistence on finding a book that’s impossibly similar to the last will ultimately prove as disappointing as eating a falafel sandwich anywhere in Paris but at L’As du Fallafel, as will an arbitrarily ‘opposite’ selection when you’re still craving fried chickpeas. What’s an appropriate pining period when it comes to novels? How […]




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