Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘short story collection’

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Win a copy of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, by Robin Black

by Anne Stameshkin

Before I recommend or send any book to one of FWR’s reviewers, I always read a sample story or two, a chapter, or maybe the first fifteen pages. If I fall in love, I order a copy of the book for myself. But sometimes there’s a novel or collection that demands to be read immediately. If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Random House, April 2010) made me forget I had a job, a website, friends, a boyfriend waiting for me to pick him up, dinner burning on the stove. And even after finishing this book (and sending […]


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Short Story Month 2010: The Collection Giveaway Project

by Anne Stameshkin

Inspired by the Emerging Writers Network—who dubbed May as Short Story Month again this year–and the Poetry Book Giveaway for National Poetry Month, Fiction Writers Review is excited to propose a community effort by lit bloggers to raise attention for short story collections: Short Story Month 2010: The Collection Giveaway Project. Warm thanks to Erika Dreifus (The Practicing Writer), who suggested FWR as a home for this project, and who will be joining the cause. To participate in Short Story Month 2010: The Giveaway Project: (1) This month, post an entry on your blog recommending a recently published short story […]


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Andrew's Book Club: April 2010 Picks

by Anne Stameshkin

There’s still a week left in April: spend it reading one of these new collections recommended by Andrew Scott. INDIE PICKS: – Strange Weather (Press 53), by Becky Hagenston. Winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Praise from Antonya Nelson: The sensibility overseeing these fine stories is curious, clever, quick, hilarious, and heartbreaking. The world contained between the covers of Strange Weather is both realistic and magical, silly and sublime, ‘romance and raunch. Just like real life.’ When a character working a desk job in a toxic chemical plant announces wistfully that ‘nothing’s blown up,’ the reader completely understands […]


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Andrew's Book Club: March 2010 Picks

by Anne Stameshkin

This month, Andrew Scott — our Oprah of story collections, long may he reign! — recommends the following books: Big House Pick: Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, by Brad Watson (Norton) “The dark and brilliant tales of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives capture the strangeness of human (and almost-human) life. In this, his first collection of stories since his celebrated, award-winning Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson takes us even deeper into the riotous, appalling, and mournful oddity of human beings. In prose so perfectly pitched as to suggest some celestial harmony, he writes about […]


Reviews |

Pieces for the Left Hand, by J. Robert Lennon

by Polly Stewart

J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand is a collection of 100 linked short short stories–linked by their location, a small upstate New York town that resembles Lennon’s hometown of Ithaca, and by their narrator, described as “unemployed, and satisfied to be unemployed.”


Interviews |

Elephants and Online Fiction: An Interview with Michael Czyzniejewski

by Michael Hinken

Author of the recently published short story collection Elephants in Our Bedroom, Michael Czyzniejewski grew up in the Chicago suburb of Calumet City, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1995 with a degree in rhetoric, and two years later, he received an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University.


Interviews |

The Rebel from Helena: An Interview with Maile Meloy

by Joshua Bodwell

Through prose that is concise, confident, and empathetic, Malie Meloy evokes what David Foster Wallace called the “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions” of life, and treats them with “reverence and conviction.” Joshua Bodwell talked with Meloy about her newest collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, the craft of writing short fiction, and the art of finding the right voice for a story.


Reviews |

We Are the Friction: Illustration vs. Short Fiction (edited by Sing Statistics)

by Lee Thomas

Even the idea itself is intriguing: pair twelve international illustrators and short fiction writers, press go, see what happens. The slim, wonderfully designed collection We Are the Friction sets the stage for unexpected relationships. Following their 2008 collaboration, I Am the Friction, the masterminds behind the concept are designer Jez Burrows and illustrator Lizzy Stewart, who together form Sing Statistics. Both Burrows and Stewart are based in Edinburgh, but the two-dozen writers and illustrators in this anthology reside across the globe – from Toronto to Kansas City to Barcelona. The cover promises a veritable garden of earthly delights: “5 Giant Animals, 63 Expletives, 6 Instances of the Ocean,” and “1 Sentient Muffin” among them. Let’s begin with that muffin.


Reviews |

Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker

by T. M. De Vos

Life in Russia, said author Aleksander Snegirev, at Housing Works’ September 21 Rasskazy event, is uncomfortable, but always interesting. So, too, are the stories in this plump new anthology from Tin House: Arkady Babchenko’s beleaguered soldier returns to Chechnya a page away from German Sadulaev’s lyrical descriptions of Chechnya’s devastated countryside. The binding is a veritable trench across which both narrators peek at each other warily.


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Best American Short Stories by the numbers

by Celeste Ng

The Millions pointed us to this interesting analysis of the Best American Short Stories series from the blog Years of BASS. Jake, the brain behind Years of BASS, has read all of the collections since the 1978 edition and compiled some statistics. C. Max Magee (of The Millions) reports: Interestingly, Alice Munro, though Canadian, has made the most BASS appearances over the last 30 years by a wide margin with 18 appearances. After her come some more of the leading lights of short fiction: Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike with nine stories each; Mavis Gallant (another Canadian) with eight; […]




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