Celeste Ng offers compelling proof that storytellers aren’t so different from scientists: both explore the same very large, very dark, very crowded room, poking and prodding and tirelessly asking, what if?
Beneath an unassuming demeanor, Pushcart Prize-winning Robert Garner McBrearty writes stories of the revolution. The former dishwasher on the mythologies of the American West, the bravery of small presses, Colonel William B. Travis, and why he feels solidarity with scrappy underlings.
You may have said those words once or twice yourself, perhaps? (If not, please leave this blog. Now.) It may comfort you to know that you are not alone in that sentiment: even established writers think so, now and then—and have for decades, if not centuries. To prove it, Michael Hoffman has combed through the letters of Joseph Roth, finding every mention of his novel The Radetzky March, which would become his masterpiece. Here’s a sampling: November 20, 1930 Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig: “‘The Radetzky March,’ it’ll be called, set in the Dual Monarchy from 1890 to 1914. I’ll […]
The title of Jim Shepard’s latest collection, You Think That’s Bad, could also be a creative mantra. Here the veteran writer discusses his research process, the apocalyptic state of the world, the (possible) irrelevancy of literature to the apocalypse, his epic mustache—and other matters of importance.
Marriage is so last century. Natalie Bakopoulos contemplates the demise of the marriage plot and Jeffrey Eugenides’s complex, undermining revival of it in his aptly-titled novel, The Marriage Plot. Is love still the ultimate trump card? Dear reader, it is. With some qualifications.
“To love and to express it is to be vulnerable. To create works of art is to be vulnerable, and it’s hard for people to let themselves be vulnerable. Especially in this world, where the internet lets us democratically savage one another, it’s even scarier, but the courage to be an artist means also the courage to love and to express it.” So says Robert Olen Butler in this candid interview with Emily Alford.
We love TED here at FWR–which, in case you haven’t encountered it before, you’re welcome, and I hope you didn’t have any work to do this month. This is an old TED talk, but one I hadn’t heard before and one I’ve been thinking about–particularly because it challenges the concept of storytelling. In his TED talk, writer/economist Tyler Cowen talks about why stories make him nervous and why we should be suspicious of stories. Here’s a snippet of the transcript: I was told to come here and tell you all stories, but what I’d like to do is instead tell […]
It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Eileen Pollack’s work at FWR. In fact, as our Founding and Features Editor, Anne Stameshkin, noted in an addendum to a 2009 interview with the author that we published on the site, Eileen Pollack–and her Contemporary Novel class at the University of Michigan–was one of the inspirations for the creation of Fiction Writers Review. So it’s with particular pleasure that we announce her new novel, Breaking and Entering, as our featured Book-of-the-Week title. Congratulations, Eileen! And we’re not alone in our admiration for this new book or Pollack’s work. In her laudatory […]
When Twitter arrived on the scene, its proponents found themselves defending the very short. James Poniewozik put Twitter in historical context, and, in the New York Times, writer and teacher Andy Selsberg argued that writing short could make you a better writer. Now, in the L.A. Times, Pico Iyer writes a defense of the very long sentence: I’m using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment. […] Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered […]
This week’s feature is Anna Solomon’s debut novel, The Little Bride, which was published in September by Riverhead. Solomon’s short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, and Shenandoah, among others. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. Her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Slate’s “Double X,” and Kveller. Before receiving her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, she was a journalist for NPR’s Living on Earth. For more about this novel, including the story behind its origins, please visit the […]
