Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘short story collection’

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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 […]


Interviews |

Fundamentalism and Compassion: An Interview with Jess Row

Jess Row’s second collection of stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, is an examination of some of our most intense impulses, and the debates, quandaries, and mysteries in these seven stories will stay with you. Charlotte Boulay talks to Jess Row about the intersection between compassion and extremism.


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Stories We Love: Self-Help

by Casey Dembowski

It may have been written before I was born, but Lorrie Moore’s debut collection Self-Help holds a special place on my bookshelf. Maybe it’s because it was Moore’s MFA thesis from Cornell, or maybe it’s her complete disregard for standard writing rules, but the collection brought me into a world I didn’t want to leave. Her jab at the lucrative but clichéd self-help genre offer often jaded advice on how to be. As a near-graduate of an MFA program, the idea of my thesis becoming a published work is an intriguing yet frightening idea. Living a life of letters and […]


Reviews |

You Know When the Men Are Gone, by Siobhan Fallon

Siobhan Fallon’s debut story collection You Know When the Men Are Gone lets readers into a secret world of military families. Behind perfectly manicured lawns and Family Readiness Groups, Fallon’s stories reveal the stress of repeated deployment, wounded service members, and the difficulties of homecoming. Beth Garland, herself a military spouse, reviews a collection infused with “grief, heroism, and bitter disappointment.”


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Stories We Love: "Body Count"

I adore all of The Pale of Settlement (2007), a collection of linked stories by Margot Singer that won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. I’ve reread the entire book. But the story that I’ve returned to most often—many times—is “Body Count.” Initially published in Prairie Schooner (and therefore available online to those with JSTOR access), “Body Count” presents us with a protagonist who appears across the collection: Susan Stern. In 2002, Susan, an American-born Jew with close family in Israel, is living in New […]


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Book of the Week: The New Valley, by Josh Weil

This week’s featured title is Josh Weil’s story collection The New Valley. Weil was born in Roanoke, Virginia, to a family of would-be “back-to-the-landers.” With an agronomist father and a mother “deeply attuned” to nature, it comes as no surprise that Weil pays such careful attention to the natural world in his writing. The New Valley (Grove Press, 2009) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. The book also won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the New Writers Award from the Great Lakes Colleges Association, and a “5 Under […]


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Yes, Virginia, Some Agents DO Love Short Stories: a guest post by Julie Barer

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our Short Story Month celebrations, we’re delighted to present this guest post by agent Julie Barer of Barer Literary. I once dated a man who shared my taste in fiction almost completely. Diehard fan of the often overlooked Canadian writer Robertson Davies? Check. Particularly drawn to novels that played with genre like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell? Another check. Books that seemed written for young adults but read just as well for grownups, like Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games Trilogy? Triple points. As you can imagine, this […]


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Book of the Week Winners: Binocular Vision, by Edith Pearlman

by Lee Thomas

Last week we featured Edith Pearlman’s story collection Binocular Vision as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Susan Ashley Michael, Mimi Asnes, and Christine Ha. Congratulations! To claim your signed copy of this collection, please email us at the following address: winners@fictionwritersreview.com To anyone who’d like to be eligible for our future drawings, visit our Facebook Page and “like” us. No catch, no gimmicks–just a great way to promote books we love. To everyone who’s already a fan, big thanks!


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Stories We Love: Impossible Things

A short story collection I re-read at least once a year is Connie Willis’s Impossible Things. It begins with the obligatory Lewis Carroll epigraph, but then adds another from Auden: “Nothing can save us that is possible.” One of Connie Willis’s overarching themes is communication: what do we say to each other and, of those conversations, what do we actually understand? One story follows a NASA negotiator and a woman renting him a few square feet in a Japanese apartment as they try to figure out if the friendly aliens who’ve just arrived at Earth are trying to set up […]


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Choosing the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories: a guest post by Laura Furman

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our continuing celebration of Short Story Month, we’re delighted to present a guest post by Laura Furman, editor of the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Each year, I choose the twenty stories to be included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Once I’ve gathered them in a manuscript without attribution of authorship or publication, I send the stories to the three jurors of the year. They in turn read them and, without consulting either me or each other, pick an individual favorite and write about it. The emphasis in this part of the book’s life is […]




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