Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘speculative fiction’

Interviews |

Open Secrets: An Interview with Carrie Messenger

“I love that short stories are tales—that you need to hold somebody’s attention the way you would if you were talking to them. With novels, it’s a Scheherazade situation, and you’re trying to get them to come back and stay.” Carrie Messenger talks with Jennifer Solheim about her debut collection, as well as fairy tales, Eastern European history, translation, and more.


Reviews |

Animals, by Don LePan

In his novel Animals, we follow Don LePan’s characters into a not-too-distant future, where human beings with birth defects are slaughtered as edible products. Readers’ sense of injustice will be roused by LePan’s descriptions of suffering in the feedlots–but can a novel inspire us to stop eating factory-farmed meat? Laura Roberts hopes it can.


Shop Talk |

It's all in the details… or is it? Movies vs. Fanfiction

I don’t know about you, but when I see a movie after reading the book on which it’s based, I almost always prefer the book to the movie. Okay, there are exceptions: The Lovely Bones, for instance, where I prefered the film, and The Princess Bride—I love both the movie and William Golding’s novel deeply, and differently. But when it comes to Harry Potter, I land firmly on the book side. For me, much of the fun is in the details of Rowling’s world: the Fizzing Whizbees and Puking Pastilles, the elaborate recipes for Polyjuice Potion and the Draught of […]


Reviews |

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, by Alissa Nutting

Alissa Nutting has “story” written in ink on every page of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, her lively, well-imagined, and jaw-droppingly smart prize-winning debut. Imagine Donald Barthelme writing smart feminine narratives, Mary Gaitskill sans the kinky sex, or Margaret Atwood turning to dry, Colbert-style humor, and you may start to get an idea of what to expect.


Interviews |

Vampires are People, too: An Interview with Janice Eidus

NPR’s Marion Winik has called Janice Eidus’s latest novel, The Last Jewish Virgin, “Twilight…with a sense of humor, a brain, and a feminist subtext.” At the Algonquin hotel, Eidus talks with Lauren Hall about paying homage to—and reinventing—the vampire myth; judging a book by its cover; and writing longhand in the mountains of San Miguel de Allende.