Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘serial fiction’

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Shout-out: FWR’s Celeste Ng on Five Chapters

by The Editors

Yes, we here are FWR are hardworking editors bringing you the best reviews, interviews, and essays we can find—but we’re also writers ourselves.  So we’re happy to share that Celeste Ng, our own editor-at-large (and longtime blog editor)  has a story up on Five Chapters. If you’re not familiar with Five Chapters, they’re a great online journal publishing one story each week, in five parts—a little throwback to the old days of serial literature. Celeste’s story, “The Kind of Man,” features a troubled marriage, a meddling father-in-law, a nine-year-old with an unfortunate crush, and… Dick Cheney?  Don’t worry: the entire […]


Shop Talk |

Shout-out: FWR’s Celeste Ng on Five Chapters

by The Editors

Yes, we here are FWR are hardworking editors bringing you the best reviews, interviews, and essays we can find—but we’re also writers ourselves.  So we’re happy to share that Celeste Ng, our own editor-at-large (and longtime blog editor)  has a story up on Five Chapters. If you’re not familiar with Five Chapters, they’re a great online journal publishing one story each week, in five parts—a little throwback to the old days of serial literature. Celeste’s story, “The Kind of Man,” features a troubled marriage, a meddling father-in-law, a nine-year-old with an unfortunate crush, and… Dick Cheney?  Don’t worry: the entire […]


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Literature, drop by drop, on dripread

by Celeste Ng

For those of us trying to sneak reading into our busy lives, DailyLit is a great resource: choose any of its 1000ish titles, and it will email you a snippet a day until you finish the book. (See our blog archive for more details.) But what if you want to read something that’s not in DailyLit’s library–or if you’ve already read all of DailyLit’s titles, you speed-reader, you? Enter dripread, which functions in much the same way but, in addition to a library of titles, allows you to upload a book of your own choosing in ePub format. Says the […]


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New Yorkers: Slow down and… read the novel pages.

by Celeste Ng

New Yorkers are not known for slowing down and looking around. But a stunt by an anonymous novelist may be getting them to do just that. Someone has been pasting pages of his (or her) novel, “Holy Crap,” to lampposts around the East Village, transforming the streets into a kind of choose-your-own-adventure—or literary Burma Shave ad. Reports Yahoo!: Pages began mysteriously appearing on lightpoles in the city’s East Village neighborhood. As of yet, nobody has come forward to claim the work. So far, eight pages in total have made their way to the public. […] At the bottom of that […]


Reviews |

Stealing Pleasure: Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief Series

by Charlotte Boulay

I’ve come a bit late (only 14 years or so) to the wonder that is Megan Whalen Turner, author of the young adult fantasy series The Queen’s Thief. Of all the books I’ve read in recent memory, not many compare to this series, which is serial narrative of the best kind—the kind that gets richer and more complex as it develops. Before this month, there were three novels: The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia. A fourth, A Conspiracy of Kings, has just been released. I can’t wait to read it.


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Recommended Reading: Aryn Kyle story in Five Chapters

by Celeste Ng

I am not a patient person. People who do slow, meticulous things like needlepoint and whittling amaze and bewilder me. This impatience applies to my reading habits, too: when immersed in a book I love, I can’t stop myself from reading faster and faster, eager to see the whole picture, to wolf the whole story into my head. Luckily, though, Five Chapters exists to remind me that patience is a virtue. Five Chapters publishes one story each week, with one section of the story posted each day. It’s an old-fashioned exercise in delayed gratification, and as this week’s story is […]


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Serial Fiction

by Celeste Ng

Serial literature might make you think Dickens, but it seems to be all the rage now. This being the 21st century, Twitter is a natural tool for serialization. In conjunction with Electric Literature, Rick Moody published a short story serialized into tweets, with one installment posted every 10 minutes. Reactions to the experiment were decidedly mixed, but its existence speaks to the renewed interest in the serialized fiction. Meanwhile, online lit journal Five Chapters publishes a short story a week, with one part of the story issued each weekday. And Daily Lit allows subscribers to read variety of books–from Tom […]


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the wovel

by Anne Stameshkin

Editor/publisher Victoria Blake (Underland Press), along with programmer Jesse Pollack, is the force behind a new literary form: the online serial novel, or wovel; NPR describes it as “Choose your Own Adventure meets Wikipedia.” A self-confessed blog addict who loves reading frequently-updated online content, Blake thought it would be great to have opportunities to read literature online in a serial form, a la Dickens (and more recently Chabon), and to have that experience be interactive. Here is Underland’s official description of the wovel (from their website): Every week, the author posts an installment. Installment length hits the sweet-spot of online […]



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