Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

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Book of the Week: Everything Beautiful Began After, by Simon Van Booy

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Simon Van Booy’s Everything Beautiful Began After. Published earlier this month by Harper Perrenial, the book is Van Booy’s first novel. He is also the author of two story collections, The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the 2009 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Additionally, he is the editor of three nonfiction philosophy titles: Why We Need Love, Why We Fight, and Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter. Born in London and raised in Wales, Van Booy now lives in New York City, where he teaches at the School […]


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Stories We Love: "Ballerina, Ballerina"

(Editor’s note: “Stories We Love” made its debut as part of Fiction Writers Review’s Short Story Month celebration. But we love short stories year-round. So here’s another installment, courtesy of FWR contributor Tyler McMahon.) As an undergraduate, I took my first fiction-writing workshop around 1997. It didn’t go well. My peers were entrenched in Mafia stories and Christian parables. I failed to find my voice. The instructor was accepted into law school for the following fall, and declared there was no future in writing. Near the semester’s end, she invited one of her fellow graduate students, Eric Rickstad, to visit. […]


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Longlist for Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award announced

by Celeste Ng

The longlist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award has just come out, and here at FWR, we’re thrilled to have featured many of the writers on it in interviews, reviews, and essays, including: Anthony Doerr, for Memory Wall Danielle Evans, for Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Siobhan Fallon, for You Know When the Men Are Gone Alan Heathcock, for Volt Valerie Laken, for Separate Kingdoms Yiyun Li, for Golden Boy, Emerald Girl Offered by the Munster Literature Centre, the 35,000-euro prize is the largest for a short story collection.  The shortlist will be announced in July.  […]


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Stories We Love: "Map of the City"

Editor’s note: What? Isn’t Short Story Month over? Yes, it is—but that doesn’t mean we stop loving short stories. So here’s an encore round of “Stories We Love.” In “Map of the City,” a story from her new collection Separate Kingdoms, Valerie Laken portrays the life of an American college student in perostroika-era Moscow. The story is brilliantly structured—the names of Moscow metro stations head the various sections, each of which captures a new moment in time and space and thereby mimics the experience of using the subway: you descend into one station and resurface at another. Perestroika, after all, […]


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Short Stories vs. Novels: The Final Smackdown

by Celeste Ng

Just kidding. I don’t mean versus as in fight to the death / zero-sum / there can be only one winner. I mean versus as in: what’s the difference? How are these two forms alike and where do they diverge, and if we’ve been speaking the language of one for a while, how can we shift our thinking so as to be fluent in the other? Because let’s face it: novels are what sell. Send a bunch of agents short stories, and they’ll ask, “But do you have a novel?” That’s the hard-headed, business side of writing—writing a novel is […]


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Curl Up with some Good Stories…from Narrative

by Anne Stameshkin

Is SSM really almost over?! Thankfully we can read stories year round, but I still feel the urge (while they’re center stage) to list two recommendations this week. They both come from Narrative magazine, which does require (free) registration. But I promise, these stories are so good, it’s worth filling out a quick form to read them. And Narrative offers a huge, inspiring, and ever-growing archive of fiction from emerging writers to authors as well known as Margaret Atwood and T. C. Boyle; if I weren’t headed to a wedding this afternoon, I might curl up with this site all […]


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Stories We Love: "Incarnations of Burned Children"

by Lee Thomas

When I first read William Faulkner, in high school, it felt less like reading a book and more like an archeological find—unearthing something long dormant that I’d always known. His cadence, and that humid, repetitious, biblical world of the South, tapped into something in my bones. The first time I read David Foster Wallace’s “Incarnations of Burned Children,” at my brother’s strenuous recommendation, it struck me the same way—whole cloth, True in the capital-letter sense of the word, so perfect I didn’t want to deconstruct it as a writer, lest I drain a bit of its magic. A writing teacher […]


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Stories We Love to Teach: "Tiny, Smiling Daddy"

I use “Tiny, Smiling Daddy,” from Mary Gaitskill’s collection Because They Wanted To, to help fiction students understand the value of stories that lack epiphanies, or any clear transformation in their characters. In Gaitskill’s story, a father who has long struggled with his only child’s sexuality finds that his daughter has published an essay about their difficult relationship, one in which she articulates the limitations of her father’s love. The father, aptly named Stew, is insulted, embarrassed, and rocketed back to moments in the past, gaps in understanding that have left him feeling assaulted and alone. In large part, his […]


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Knockout Punches: a guest post by Stacie M. Williams

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our ongoing Short Story Month Celebration, we are delighted to present the following guest post by Stacie M. Williams of Boswell Book Company. A fellow bookseller, when inclined to discuss my fiction reading habits, described my taste simply and accurately as “dark and twisty.” This, fortunately or unfortunately, is all too true, and when you are a reader of things that are dark in nature, violent in content, lustfully raw, and stormy in mood, it’s sometimes best to take it in small, brief doses. This post honors that taste, with a nod to new favorite […]




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