Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘story collection’

Shop Talk |

Book of the Week Giveaway: Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, by Brad Watson

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

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 Picking Bones From Ash, by Marie Mutsuki Mockett, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Lucy Biederman, Thea Burgess, and Brian Boyle. Congratulations! Each will receive a copy of the book, signed by the author. This week we’re featuring Brad Watson’s Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. Stories in this collection have appeared in such places as The New Yorker, Granta, The Idaho Review, The Greensboro Review, Ecotone, and The Oxford American. In the […]


Reviews |

Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, by Brad Watson

by Tom Bennitt

There are no zombies or vampires in Brad Watson’s new collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (W.W. Norton, 2010), but there are plenty of folks who act like they’re either dead or from another planet. And, yes, many of Watson’s characters are “aliens”—not green creatures with large heads, but alienated, isolated. They are people who wander through life without an anchor, who don’t feel the pull of gravity.


Interviews |

Talking with the Dead: An Interview with Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li (Gold Boy, Emerald Girl) discusses with Angela Watrous what it means to be an American writer; the elusive process of revision; the art of transforming stories into screenplays; and the act of talking aloud to famous dead writers.


Interviews |

Starting with Small Moments: An Interview with Andrew Porter

by Polly Stewart

Polly Atwell talks with Andrew Porter about how crafting stories is like editing film, what particular advantages peripheral narrators can afford, and why it’s “completely surreal” to hear actors read from your work.


Reviews |

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, by Laura van den Berg

“I imagine the seasonally unspecified stories in Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us must be set in spring because spring is a time that makes me feel young, young as girls and in as much danger. And then there’s always this odd moment of realization that I am young and a girl and in some dangers. I’m still in too-close contact with boys I once loved, still prone to crying in public, still not aware of the dynamic personal lives of adults. Spring in the Midwest is about babies and hope and vitality, but it’s also about knowing that eventually a late frost is going to swing in out of no place and kill everything you haven’t collected in the shed. And I wanted the people in these stories locked up safe.”


Shop Talk |

Last Call: Win One of Eight Free Short Story Collections!

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

As the month winds to a close over Memorial Day weekend and summer officially begins, we’ll also be wrapping up our celebration of May as Short Story Month. Inspired by The Emerging Writers Network and their unparalleled coverage off all things story-related each May, as well as The Poetry Book Giveaway For National Poetry Month, we decided to launch The Collection Giveaway Project (warm thanks to Erika Dreifus of The Practicing Writer for suggesting our site as a home for this promotion). The goal is a simple one: to get readers talking about their favorite stories and story collections. So […]


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O. Henry Launch Party at Idlewild Books this Saturday

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

For those of you in New York, Idlewild Books will be hosting a launch party for the 2010 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories Anthology this Saturday from 6-8pm. FWR is pleased to have two of its contributors represented in this year’s collection: Preeta Samarasan, whose story “Birch Memorial” was published in A Public Space, and Natalie Bakopoulos, whose story “Fresco, Byzantine,” was published in Tin House. Come join us for the reception with several of the authors featured in the anthology. Idlewild is located at 12 W. 19th street (near 5th Avenue).


Reviews |

Swimming with Strangers, by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

by Brian Short

The stories in Kirsten Lunstrum’s new collection, Swimming with Strangers, are smart, harrowing, dramatic, and quite often surprising. In one, the narrator describes the story of her own birth; in another, as the characters discuss fairy tales—one of the characters forces his students to read the Brothers Grimm in their brutal, original forms—the roles of witch and distressed damsel switch back and forth. While we could easily imagine stories like these in which thematic elements take over, Lunstrum keeps them at a low burble, focusing on the reality of these characters’ struggles. It is a very brave choice.


Shop Talk |

Steve Almond on Self-publishing

by Celeste Ng

On The Rumpus, author Steve Almond explains why he recently decided to self-publish a book of short stories and essays, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey–and it’s probably not for the reasons you’d think: If this were a traditional publishing endeavor, the next question would be how to get the book a “bigger platform,” meaning a place in the great Barnes-&-Noble-Amazon-Kindle-i-Pad-clusterfuckosphere. But because this is something much more personal, I decided – nah. I was cool with Harvard Bookstore selling it. But other than that, Minute, Honey is available only at readings. My reasoning is pretty simple: I want […]


Reviews |

A Little Bone of Crazy, or This is Your Brain On Snowbroth: Leni Zumas’s Farewell Navigator

Most of Leni Zumas’s stories in her exceptional (and stylistically exciting) debut, Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008), are compact studies of paralysis in the tradition of Beckett and Ioensco. Sherwood Anderson could have been describing Zumas’s characters as they, too, are “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.” In “Farewell Navigator,” one character envies a group of blind schoolchildren for having teachers “to pull them. Nobody expects them to know where to go.” And in “Leopard Arms”—a story told from the perspective of a gargoyle—a father fears “of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand.”




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