Nobody advised Josh Weil to write three novellas for his first book, The New Valley, but that’s what he did. Mary Westbrook and the author talk about the stories behind the novellas and how well-intentioned advice can lead writers astray.
Short Story Month is off with a bang! Inspired by the Emerging Writers Network who inaugurated May as Short Story Month in 2007—and the Big Poetry Giveaway for National Poetry Month, Fiction Writers Review is excited to welcome you to our second year of The Collection Giveaway Project: a community effort by lit bloggers to raise attention for short story collections. Thanks to all who have already emailed FWR Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus, who is spearheading the CGP this year. For participating blogs, and details on how YOU can participate in The Collection Giveaway Project, please visit the CGP Home. […]
Attention New Yorkers: FWR contributing editor Erika Dreifus will be reading from her debut story collection, Quiet Americans, on April 10 as part of the Sunday Salon series. She’ll be reading with Paul Lisicky, Karen Abbott, and Bino A. Realuyo. Not in NYC? On April 12, the Jewish Book Council’s Twitter Book Club will host Erika and her book for an online discussion from 12:30 to 1:10 pm EST. Follow @JewishBook and @ErikaDreifus and keep an eye on #JBCBooks for updates. And finally, Erika is giving away two Kindle “copies” of Quiet Americans to celebrate its release in Kindle format. […]
FWR contributor Valerie Laken‘s story collection, Separate Kingdoms, has just come out, and those of you in NYC can hear her read from it live at KGB Bar this Sunday, April 3, at 7:00 pm. Laken will read with Cat Valente as part of KGB’s Sunday Night Fiction series. And stay tuned next month, when we’ll be giving away three copies of Separate Kingdoms in honor of Short Story Month! Further reading: Learn more about Valerie Laken and her work through this FWR interview Follow Valerie through “The Magical, Dreadful First Hundred Pages,” her essay adapted from the 2010 AWP […]
On Wednesday, Anthony Doerr was awarded the 2010 Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall. The ceremony also honored two finalists, Yiyun Li and Suzanne Rivecca. Reports the Story Prize’s blog: Anthony Doerr, for instance, in answer to a question about the preponderance of older women in Memory Wall, talked about how his grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s disease, came to live with his family when he was in high school and how, in his teenage self-absorption, he had been somewhat oblivious to her condition. Yiyun Li discussed how her characters stubbornly resist being swept along by the tide of history—even […]
Each week we give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Jacob Paul’s Sarah/Sara, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Eileen Pollack, Emma Kate Tsai, and Ana Maria Velasco. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed copy of this new novel. This week we’re featuring Erika Dreifus’s story collection Quiet Americans. Erika, a Contributing Editor at Fiction Writers Review, wrote a lovely review of last week’s Book of The Week, Sarah/Sara for the site last year, which you can find here. Her other reviews for FWR […]
J.T. Bushnell considers how Lori Ostlund’s debut story collection, The Bigness of the World, filled as it is with “godless homosexuals scattered across the globe” would have likely pleased Flannery O’Connor, whose own work is “unapologetically regional and almost dogmatically Catholic.” Ostlund, who won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction last year, writes of the mystery beneath our outer trappings, an underlying truth that binds the two writers in common cause.
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 […]
Each week we give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. Last week we featured Damon Galgut’s novel In a Strange Room, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Alex Boyles, Kara Candito, and Joanne Wong. Congratulations! Each will receive a copy of this new novel. This week we’re featuring Charles Baxter’s Gryphon: New and Selected Stories. Baxter is the author of more than a dozen books, including four previous collections of stories, five novels, and several books of nonfiction. His novel The Feast of Love was nominated for the […]
Curtis Smith returns to Rick Bass’s story collection The Watch after two decades in order to remind himself what it was in this particular book that sparked a young man to want to become a writer, as well as to see whether the stories still hold up to his fifty-year-old self.
