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Certain Girls, by Jennifer Weiner
Sitting down to write about Jennifer Weiner’s Certain Girls (Simon & Schuster, 2008), I keep thinking of this apocryphal story about a friend of my boyfriend. She wrote a chick lit novel–a...
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In the Convent of Little Flowers, by Indu Sundaresan
Indu Sundaresan’s fourth book and first story collection, In the Convent of Little Flowers (Simon & Schuster, 2008), contains India’s multitudes, all in relationships of opposition – men vs. women,...
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Little Bee, by Chris Cleave
In his latest novel, Little Bee, Chris Cleave employs the same gifts that make him an excellent journalist: a keen eye for the crucial detail and the survivalist instinct to waste nothing, including...
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What the Short Story Writer can Learn from Paul Simon’s Lyrics
I. Simon as Fiction Writer For the last forty-four years, Paul Simon’s lyrics have consistently balanced healthy doses of wisdom and levity, their craftmanship comparable to stories by the most gifted...
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Alone With You, by Marisa Silver
One of the many challenges a writer faces is how to know when something is finished. Does the ending hit that precise, elusive note? Does the collection need one more story to achieve harmony between...
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Book of the Week: The Green Shore, by Natalie Bakopoulos
This week’s feature is Contributing Editor Natalie Bakopoulos’s debut novel, The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster), which releases today. Set in Athens and Paris during the military dictatorship of...
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Book-of-the-Week Winners: The Green Shore
For the last two weeks we’ve been featuring Natalie Bakopoulos’s debut novel The Green Shore, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: John Yunker (@TouristTrail) Jennifer Solheim (@JenniferSolheim)...
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Book of the Week: Wild Girls, by Mary Stewart Atwell
We’re particularly pleased to feature Mary Stewart Atwell’s debut novel Wild Girls as our current Book of the Week, because Atwell is one of our contributors. She received her MFA from Washington...
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“Plot is a Blueprint of Human Behavior”: An Interview with Natalie Bakopoulos
Though in some ways I got to know Natalie Bakopoulos through the experience of reading her debut novel, The Green Shore, it was on the shore of Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast earlier this summer that we...
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Book of the Week: The Green Shore, by Natalie Bakopoulos
This week’s feature is Natalie Bakopoulos’s debut novel, The Green Shore, which is just out in paperback from Simon & Schuster. Bakopoulos, who we’re proud to call one of our Contributing Editors,...
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And Now We Get Honey: An interview with David James Poissant
One early Sunday morning last August found me tiptoeing barefoot down the driveway to retrieve the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row literary supplement. You can read Printers Row online, but I like to...
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#empathyforeverybody: An Interview with Maya Sloan
I first got to know Maya Sloan on a day-long bus ride (along with FWR’s Editor-in-Chief Jeremiah Chamberlin) across Bulgaria in 2009. We were all fellows in the Sozopol Fiction Seminars program,...
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Absence Makes the Art Grow Stronger: An Interview with Garth Stein
Garth Stein’s latest novel, A Sudden Light (Simon & Schuster, 2014), follows the success of The Art of Racing in the Rain (Harper Collins, 2008) and has its origins in a play he wrote in 2005. A...
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Architectures like Underground Cities: Part V of an Interview with Julianna...
I came across Roxane Gay’s 2012 interview with Julianna Baggott in The Rumpus in the fall of 2013. In it, Baggott described her use of not one but two pseudonyms as an author (Bridget Asher and N.E....
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Characters We Care About: an Interview with Paul Vidich
I first met Paul Vidich in Bulgaria, when we were fellows together at the 2010 Sozopol Fiction Seminar. Along with translators, publishers, and other writers in English and Bulgarian, we spent five...
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An Interview with Kristen-Paige Madonia
I met Kristen-Paige in 2008, when I moved from New York City to Charlottesville, Virginia. She had recently arrived from San Francisco and was teaching at our local literary center, WriterHouse. She...
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You Write Until You Die: An Interview with Paul Vidich
Paul Vidich and I have never met in person, but we share the honor of being selected for the first-ever Poets & Writers Magazine “5 Over 50” list, published in the November/December 2016 issue. It...
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Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
It is clear to me from the start that I might not be smart enough for Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ debut collection, Heads of the Colored People (37Ink/Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster); that...
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Hurts and Old Feelings: An Interview with David James Poissant
David James Poissant doesn’t have to prove a damn thing to anyone. He’s already a short story virtuoso, with fiction of his appearing in places like The Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, One Story,...
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