BookFox

The Atlantic Renews Commitment to Short Stories

 The Atlantic is going to start publishing fiction again. So no more of those newstand-only summer fiction issues (which were good, though, especially the 2008 one that highlighted emerging authors). Instead, a supplement will accompany the May issue that will include half a dozen short stories and -- obligatory for all American magazines, for every single issue -- an essay from the ubiquitous Joyce Carol Oates.

Here's an excerpt from the full note in the April issue:

"But as longtime, generously loyal readers know, for the past five years we have published fiction once a year in a special newstand issue, rather than in any of our 10 subscriber issues. During what has been widely noted to be a 'challenging' (read: harrowing) business environment for publishing, this has been a necessary compromise. But none of us has been particularly happy with it, and we have been searching for ways to once again place great fiction in front of all our readers."

The vote of confidence is encouraging. As they say later on in the editor's note: "We are seeing renewed interest in the short story."

Strangely, editor James Bennet doesn't mention what will happen with the Kindle model, which sells e-stories for $3.99. Will they continue with supplements, the Kindle model AND a summer fiction issue? It seems like they're experimenting with all forms of distribution and will stick to whatever works.

I actually respect this -- it seems forward thinking. Even if the Atlantic editors don't know the course, they're willing to try out a few roads to find a viable model.

Granta: Work

 I've been loving the latest issue of Granta. If you want a sneak peak, read Daniel Alarcon's "Life Among the Pirates," which offers a Peruvian view on book piracy. Apparently, pirates earn more money than the publishers do, and sometimes have spies in foreign publishing houses that steal translations. Plus, the police can't mop it up because the publishers don't bribe them enough. At the end, it's a touching moment to see Alarcon track down his own pirated work and confront the perp selling it.

Theme for the next issue of Granta? Sex. (After work comes . . . You get the picture.) And rumor has it there might be a party in LA? Can't wait.

Online Fiction

A torrent of new online fiction came out this week.

Kyle Minor has the short story "The Truth and All Its Ugly" out on Harper Collins Fifty-Two stories. You all know I have a man-crush on Minor since reading his sizzling debut collection, "In the Devil's Territory," so hoof it on over there.

Five Chapters is celebrating its 200th story with "Take Care" by Aryn Kyle.

And last and kind of least, The Library of America sports a weekly classic story, and this week they're highlighting Kate Chopin's story "A Respectable Woman." Full Disclosure: I hate Kate Chopin. The Story of an Hour makes me feel nauseous as the teacups at Disneyland and contains far less fun. But nonetheless, I'm passing this link on because kudos to The Library of America for publishing a short story weekly, and sometimes they publish authors I do not secretly despise.

Third Coast Contest Winner

 Speaking of short stories, I just won the Third Coast fiction competition, judged by Ann Beattie. Many thanks to the editors of that fine journal and to the wonderful Ann Beattie. 

The story, "Fatu Ma Futi," in which a young man volunteering in Samoa becomes fascinated by a Samoan cross-dresser, will be published in the Fall 2010 issue.

Anecdotal Evidence of Rising Book Piracy

I know this hardly constitutes a groundbreaking study, but in the last year I've detected an uptick in the number of searches coming to my website looking for pirated books. It's not because I'm writing more about piracy issues -- the search terms are different from words of mine.

So far I've noticed three different types:

• Mysterious links from Bit Torrent sites (Pirate Bay et al)
• Searches for [book name] followed by a word linked to illegal downloads: bit torrent, rapidshare, free online copy, etc.
• Hail Mary's to Google: "illegal ebooks" "free ebooks"

Since I don't have any illegal books to download, or even significant excerpts, I'm a bit confused as to the logic of this. Of course, maybe I'm a tiny bit glad that they're having a hard time finding illegal files.

If Google searches (no, not the blundering Bing) are mis-directing would-be pirates to my site, I can only imagine how many hits legitimate piracy sites (oxymoron intended) are receiving. 

Alyson Hagy: Ghosts of Wyoming

 Love the prose of Alyson Hagy. Her third collection, Ghosts of Wyoming, just came out from Graywolf Press, and has eight stories highlighting the hardscrabble lives of the rural natives, past and present. The stories were originally published in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Five Points, and Idaho Review (Every collection I read, I see where the stories were originally published, and after reading each story I see if my perception of the journal is validated or adjusted).

Two of these stories, "Brief Lives of the Trainmen" and "Oil & Gas," are notable for the way they merry-go-round the point of view, swirling from character to character as if the story is designed to give you more of a tableau of the time and space than the journey of a particular person. The POV's a shifting limited omniscient, which novels use frequently, but not short stories.

Anyway, I thought I'd give you a taste of some of my favorite lines from the book. Enjoy.

• He calibrates stoic sentences.
• I left Armand and went into an afternoon braceleted by high, white clouds. They were spaced like beads on an invisible string.
• I walk to the far side of town when the horizon is still iron plated with darkness.
• I was so busy admiring Sukie's dimples that I missed the rattler's buzz between her words.
• What it brought him, as far as she could tell, was a clean, white dignity he could sail above his griefs.
• The rope of feeling swung in her chest again, cold, jerking.
• The biggest mountains in the range took twilight into their teeth.
• Livia followed the serrated sound of adult laughter.
• Morning is rolling on its rim.
• Otherwise, the rage sluicing along the veins of his forearms will overwhelm his good thoughts.
• Small cumulus clouds roost on the western horizon.

Literary Journals Segregating Fiction

In the last few years, many prestigious literary journals have moved to a two-tier model for publishing: they maintain their print journal for the big-name authors, and create an online space to publish emerging authors. 

Granta now has their "New Voices" program, started last year, which publishes new authors online every month. American Short Fiction has began to publish a story a month online. Kenyon Review has done likewise, publishing a number of stories in an online format. Zoetrope has long published their contest winner in on online-only format. And of course AGNI might be the longest-running example, with its AGNI online section. Even the glossies have begun to glom onto a similar strategy: Atlantic Monthly attempted to sell (overpriced) short stories via an iTunes model.

These bifurcated fiction offerings accomplish a number of goals:

• It allows the journal to highlight up-and-coming authors that wouldn't make it into the print issue.
• Maximizes the potential revenue from the print journal (Big names sell mags)
• Provides fresh content online, driving traffic to the website
• Helps the biggest journals appear hip and relevant by launching burgeoning authors, rather than only publishing established authors.

I think it's telling that many of the journals that have adopted this model have been the top in the industry. Also, the top journals have the most sharply demarcated lines between established/print and emerging/online.

But this type of system has a number of problems, as well:

• Perpetuates the stereotype that print is prestigious and online is second-grade.
• Divides the journal brand, where some authors put in their bios "Famous Journal X" and others have to add an additional caveat, "Famous Journal X online." It's a false dichotomy -- if you wrote an online piece for Esquire, you would just put Esquire in your bio, not Esquire Online.
• Creates less of an incentive for journals to invest in a young writer, to stand behind them strongly enough to publish them in a print journal. Instead, younger writers can reliably be shuffled to the (cheaper and safer) online spaces.

I'm guessing this model of original content in both print and online capacities will slowly erode the current dominant model of Print as primary, with a website as the second-tier source of bulletin board and excerpts. Perhaps this is actually a transitional stage: we've seen virtually all literary journals ramp up their online presences in the last five years, and now we're entering a stage where journals are starting to blend their print/online production, and in the future we might see another shift.

Yes, I know about all the online literary journals out there, probably screaming at the screen right now that they've led the way. And Electric Literature and Narrative have plowed a road into that frontier as well. 

But five years ago, big literary journals were still staunchly sticking to print. I wonder if in 2015, how many big literary journals will have shifted to online only. More importantly, how many of them will be able to maintain their prestige (e.g. when you shift online, don't pull a TriQuarterly and fire all your paid staff).

Electric Literature #3 Review

 Issue #3 of Electric Literature just came out, featuring Aimee Bender and Rick Moody, among others. I got my hands on a copy of the print journal, and I'm glad to see that a journal that touts itself as being available on so many digital platforms hasn't let the print side languish. It's a beautiful design, better than many journals only publishing in print. Inside, it showcases the art of Adam Thompson -- simple but fun sketches between the prose, like a genie lamp coming out of a genie lamp and an automatic rifle controlled by marionette strings.

"The Red Ribbon" makes me glad to see the way Aimee Bender's fiction has matured. I thoroughly enjoyed her early stories -- "Girl in the Flammable Skirt" -- as well as her novel "An Invisible Sign of My Own," but this story seems to bear the traces of those early fabulist fictions, while moving on to a more grounded realism. As always, her more fantastical elements are balanced by deep and bracing humanity.

Rick Moody's story, "Some Contemporary Characters," was first published via Twitter (to much fanfare). While I admired the attempt to publish a story through Twitter -- as much for the new form of dissemination as for the natural constraints of 140 characters -- I had a hard time reading it. I started in the middle, where several friends were re-Tweeting the story. Then I backtracked to the source at Electric Literature and tried from the beginning. It never gelled. Thankfully, when I read it here in the journal, I liked it much more. The haiku-like story switches between the points of view of an elderly scholar and a textophiliac girl with "three different hair colors, none of them found in nature."

It's nice that this third issue has begun to highlight emerging writers. The first two issues were stocked full of brand names -- Michael Cunningham, Lydia Millet, Jim Shepard, Lydia Davis, Colson Whitehead -- and now the journal has built the cachet to explore lesser known names, like Matt Sumell. Sumell's story, "Little Things," starts like this:

"I folded my arms. They felt big, capable of anything. Lifting, carrying, digging, feeding cows PCP so they revolt with unexpected and tremendous violence -- anything. Wrapping gifts in tissue paper and busting teeth out of Christian heads. Pumping bicycle tires, pumping gas, pumping iron, bagging my own groceries and skipping boulders across the Long Island Sound all the way to Connecticut. Cracking eggs with one hand and folding laundry. Pushing my Mexican neighbor's broke-down car across the street Thursday mornings to avoid street sweeping tickets and tossing my cell phone to a friend who needs to make an important call to his mom. Opening every jar for every lady. Helping. I felt like helping. I felt like I could help." 

The strong voice carries this short piece about a family dealing with their dying mother. Not an original topic, but certainly told in an entertaining way. There are fisticuffs between brothers, a father losing his gallbladder, the man who never stopped walking (like "The Unnamed," yes), murders with chicken soup cans, Catholic girls dying for human touch, and icing that scalds. Miraculously, it all sticks together. 

By surrounding the story of the mother's death with the violent, odd, and melancholy ephemera heard on the news or happened to friends, the normally isolated event of death is seen with a wide-angle perspective, a single star in a constellation of pain. In fact, I like that this story precedes the Rick Moody story, because the way that a Twitter story communicates is only through and amongst the welter of thousands of other tiny stories. It's important to recognize that no single narrative takes primary stage -- it's always filtered through all the other tragedies of the world -- and Sumell captures that well.

It's tough to characterize the aesthetic of any journal, but E.L. hovers in that liminal space between traditional and experimental. At least in regards to the first three stories in this issue, it could be called innovative without sacrificing the foundations of fiction. But whatever you call it, it's good.

Image Journal #64

 I've been a subscriber to a number of journals over the years. Recently, I've subscribed to Image, but the last issue in particular disappointed me. It only had a single story -- disappointing in itself -- but even more disappointing was that the story wasn't any good.

The author was Scott Russell Sanders, whose grandiose list of accomplishments (Guggenheim, NEA) and books (over 20, one nominated for the Pulitzer) clearly has not inured him from writing badly.

In "Waterfall," Aurora is a waitress who had an unfortunate liaison with a swastika-bearing sailor and got pregnant, then ran from home, leaving her child, and suffers under the guilt. While waitressing, she serves the blind black man Eugene who's a linguist, and who performs the entirely unoriginal trick of guessing of people's points of origin by their speech ("My Fair Lady" rip-off).

The first problem of the story is the entirely artificial relationship that develops between Aurora and Eugene. You don't make friends with the people you serve in a restaurant (I know. I waitered. Trust me.) You certainly don't serve as their tour guide and reveal secrets to them that you've never told anyone after spending a few minutes with them.

The second problem with this story is that Eugene is a saint. Blameless characters just don't work out well in fiction. Especially not if they're relying upon the twin cheats of being "disabled" and a "minority," in order to establish their lofty outsider status. (Not to mention relying way too blatantly on the Greek myth of the wise blind sage). Characters need faults and flaws or else they are fake.

The third problem with this story is that at the end, the very climax itself, comes when the blameless, innocent character Eugene tells Aurora she's forgiven. Aurora speaks first:

    "I've never told anybody else."

    "That's a heavy load to carry," he said. "But even that you can lay down."

    "I don't see how."

    "You can lay it down because you're forgiven."

The cheesiness of the dialogue is forgivable (maybe). But to try to shoehorn a religious message of forgiveness at the end of a story, or to act as though that line of dialogue might actually solve the problem of having a five-year-old son you haven't seen in half a decade, or parents you've ditched, is willfully ignorant of the laws of the fiction and, more importantly, the laws of life. The attempt to be subtle is no excuse for religious sentimentality.

I read many bad short stories that many me feel nothing -- this one made me feel cheated and slightly disgusted. To recover, I'm going to go wash myself off in some Flannery O'Connor.

Ted Conover: The Routes of Man

 I count myself as one of the many ardent fans of Ted Conover, ever since he wrote Newjack: Guarding Sing-Sing, which is a gritty nonfiction story about prison life. And to think once the prison authorities turned him down for access, he simply got a job as a prison guard. He got to write about all sorts of fun, light-hearted prisoners, like the one that routinely stored his piss in his mouth, waiting to spew it on a passing guard.

Anyway, this post is not about Newjack. Conover's just come out with The Routes of Man. It's a book about roads (as if you couldn't tell from the cover), which sounds dull but is not. Also, the subtitle might have tipped you off: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Ways We Live Today. The concept reminds me a bit of Wendell Berry's distinction between roads and paths -- roads are imposed upon nature, cutting through the topographical landscape with impunity, while paths work with nature, curving and rising and dipping in order to adjust itself to the land.

Conover's blogging about the book a bit at Powell's, which has links to the introduction explaining why he wrote the book.

Etgar Keret On The Silver Screen

The movie is called "$9.99." No, that's not the price for streaming it, or some price cross-over from the e-book world. And it's based on Etgar Keret's short stories. And it's stop-motion animation. Fun, fun, fun. It'll actually sell for $24.98 when it comes out on February 23rd. Here's the trailer:

Spoiled Salinger

Bookslut pointed me toward the Economist blog "More Intelligent Life," where in a post titled "Salinger's Spoiled Children" Bradley Freedman describes a friend's pilgrimage to see JD Salinger and present him with a manifesto demanding more fiction. Freedman, as you can infer from the title of this post, disagrees with his friend's impulse:

But instead of accepting Salinger’s published works as gifts, they sought his unpublished writings as their due, like ungrateful children. Surely art is not an obligation. It must always be a choice.

I don't think their expectations are that far off the mark. And characterizing them as "ungrateful children" surely goes too far. 

I think his friends believed, as I do, that art kept only for oneself is selfish. As human beings, we don't exist in a vacuum, we exist in communities and societies that rightfully demand dues. It's not an option to give those dues, it's a duty. 

Obligation to society comes in many forms. The most obvious one would be voting, at least in a democracy. Or caring for your children, or participating in the safety of your neighborhood. And for an artist, you need not only to write, but to share that writing. To do otherwise, such as hoarding manuscripts for five decades, is to be derelict in the artist's duty.

Unfortunately, in American (Western?) society, "choice" has been elevated to the highest moral platform. As long as you have options, as long as your will or agency is primary, then that is above all the moral good. This is not only self-centered, it's plain wrong. So when Freedman says that "[Art] must always be a choice," he is essentially saying that the choice belonged to Salinger, that he had the right to choose or not to choose. But even as high as we've enthroned the Individual in Western thought, this is a false choice. We do not get the right to choose whether or not we contribute to society. We just have an obligation to contribute.

It must be said: Salinger failed in his responsibility to society. He most certainly did not have the "right" to withhold his writings from his devoted fans and from a free society that enable him to publish in the first place. Because of his solipsistic attitude, Salinger is the spoiled one, not those of us who requested more work from a master of fiction.