Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘W.W. Norton’

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Book of the Week: This Will Be Difficult to Explain, by Johanna Skibsrud

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Johanna Skibsrud‘s debut story collection, This Will Be Difficult to Explain (W.W. Norton). She is also the author of a novel, The Sentimentalists (2011), and two collections of poetry: I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being (2010) and Late Nights With Wild Cowboys (2008). She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she is at work on another novel. In his recent reviewlet of this collection, Ben Pfeiffer writes: This Will Be Difficult to Explain is a slim, lime-colored book with a picture of a lackadaisical girl on the cover. It holds nine […]


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Book-of-the-Week Winners: Wherever You Go

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Last week we featured Joan Leegant’s debut novel, Wherever You Go, as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congrats to: Wendi Corsi Staub (@WendyCorsiStaub) Vicky Ludwig (@greentea166) LauraCatherineBrown (@lauracbrown) To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us! Thanks to all of you who are fans.


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Book of the Week: Wherever You Go, by Joan Leegant

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is Joan Leegant’s debut novel, Wherever You Go, which was released by W.W. Norton and Company. Her first book, a collection of stories entitled An Hour in Paradise, was published when she was 53. Winner of the PEN/New England Book Award, the Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction, and the 2011 Nelligan Prize from the Colorado Review, Leegant was also a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. For eight years she taught fiction writing at Harvard. Currently she divides her time between Boston and Tel Aviv, where she is the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University. In her […]


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Book of the Week: White Truffles in Winter

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

This week’s feature is N.M. Kelby’s new novel, White Truffles in Winter, published this month by W.W. Norton. Kelby is the author of five previous books of fiction: A Travel Guide for Reckless Hearts: Stories (Borealis Books, 2009), Murder at the Bad Girl’s Bar and Grill (Crown, 2008), Whale Season (Three Rivers Press, 2006), Theater of the Stars (Hyperion, 2003), and In the Company of Angels (Theia, 2001). She’s also the author of The Constant Art of Being a Writer: The Life, Art and Business of Fiction (Writer’s Digest Books, 2009). Her short fiction has appeared in such places as […]


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Once Upon a River, by Bonnie Jo Campbell

by Brian Short

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s charisma is formidable, and her energy infectious. This same energy can be found in the churning rivers and restless characters of her new novel, the follow-up to Campbell’s acclaimed story collection American Salvage. The protagonist of Once Upon a River is Margo Crane, a teenager who has grown up along the fictional Stark River, obeying its currents and snooping for its secrets.


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Touch, by Alexi Zentner

by Casey Dembowski

Alexi Zentner’s debut, Touch, began as a short story and grew to a mythical realist novel that delivers monsters, secret family histories and three generations of the Boucher family – all nestled in Sawgamet, a northwoods logging town. Casey Tolfree unpacks the book’s elegant mingling of past and present, reality and myth, and loss that gives the living strength.


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The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia, by Mary Helen Stefaniak

In the tradition of Southern storytelling, Mary Helen Stefaniak’s novel The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia offers a window on the power of myth to transform one small town during the Depression. Leslie Clements explores how that tension between progress and tradition free the inhabitants of Baghdad, Georgia, for radical reinvention.


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Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, by Brad Watson

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.




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