Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘reviewlet’

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[reviewlet rewind] She Got Up Off the Couch, by Haven Kimmel

by Katie Umans

Reviewlets give FWR contributors the chance to recommend books of all genres that other fiction writers might enjoy. Reviewlet Rewinds like this one highlight books published more than two years ago, and Reviewlet Classics refer to books published more than twenty years ago. At first I was not so sure about She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana (Free Press, 2005), the sequel/companion to Haven Kimmel‘s A Girl Named Zippy. She Got Up seemed like outtakes from its predecessor, and the aw shucks introduction justifying a sequel worried me. (“I didn’t expect much from […]


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[reviewlet rewind] A Girl Named Zippy, by Haven Kimmel

by Katie Umans

Reviewlets give FWR contributors the chance to recommend books of all genres that other fiction writers might enjoy. Reviewlet Rewinds (like this one) highlight books published more than two years ago, and Reviewlet Classics refer to books published more than twenty years ago. You know that moment in life when you realize that stories of the things that loomed large in childhood — your terror of the woman who lives next door or your absolute certainty that some of the playing cards in a deck are female and some, male — can be condensed, as if through a trash compactor, […]


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recommended read: Fish Bones by Gillian Sze

by Laura Roberts

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I love Gillian Sze. Not in a “we’re romantically involved” kind of way, but yes, we were classmates at Concordia University for our undergraduate degrees in Creative Writing, and from the first moment I read her work, I knew she was a great writer. So you’ll have to forgive me if I gush over her first book of poetry, Fish Bones (published by DC Books’ Punchy Poetry imprint), because I’ve always had a bit of a girl crush on her. Hopefully that doesn’t sound totally creepy and stalkeresque. I just […]


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reviewlet: How Far is the Ocean from Here by Amy Shearn

by Anne Stameshkin

How Far is the Ocean from Here, Amy Shearn’s captivating debut, follows a young surrogate mother who flees to the desert shortly before her due date. Accomplishing a seemingly impossible goal, the novel sustains the quality and language of a short story for 320 pages. Shearn exceeds at painting characters and relationships – particularly the bond between surrogate Susannah and father Julian; an adopted child himself, Julian feels a strong pull to the woman carrying his first blood relative–much to the chagrin of his wife, Kit. The book’s POV, a shifting third person with hints of omniscience, is ambitious and […]


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Reviewlet: The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier

by Anne Stameshkin

Once there was a city where everyone had the gift of song. Once there was a city where people did not look one another in the eye. Once there was a man who happened to buy God’s overcoat. The View from the Seventh Layer is a rich, ethereal collection: here are fables, ghost stories, romances (among them a sci-fi adaptation of “The Lady with the Pet Dog”), personal histories, anxieties of influence, and spiritual bursts — even a choose-your-own-adventure for the soul. These stories unfold in worlds just shy of our own, where metaphors take literal form. Each explores the […]


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Reviewlet: Instant Love by Jami Attenberg

by Anne Stameshkin

At the FGIBI party, I had the chance to meet Jami Attenberg, whose novel-in-stories Instant Love I recently read and admired. Instant Love follows an ensemble of vivid characters whose lives intersect as they stumble upon, after, or away from romance. Whether the passion in question is fleeting or fundamental, each story sharpens to a fine narrative point–a moment of connection or dissolution. The effect of reading these stories together satisfies more than merely sampling one. Attenberg makes me believe in her characters’ lives beyond the page by offering scenes across shared history (spanning high-school romances to hasty marriages and […]


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Reviewlet: Away by Amy Bloom

by Anne Stameshkin

This beautiful novel by one of my favorite short-story writers follows the adventures of 22-year-old Lillian Leyb, a recent survivor of a Russian pogrom, from New York’s Lower East Side to Seattle to the remotest parts of Alaska, where she hopes to get a boat to Siberia. (The story is set in the 1920s.) After her husband and parents were murdered before her eyes and her small daughter lost in the fray (and sought for some time), Lillian emmigrated, hoping to escape her haunted past and carve out a life for herself in New York. But just as Lillian’s getting […]




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