Over at Papercuts, Dwight Garner reveals that last night Jhumpa Lahiri soared into the number one spot on the New York Times Bestseller list with her collection of short stories, "Unaccustomed Earth." When's the last time a short story collection was #1? Glad you asked, because I was willing to guess virtually never, but then I checked this site, that lists all the #1 slots on the list since 1942. The last one was in 2002, with Stephen King's "Everything's Eventual" a collection of fourteen horror stories. Beyond that, in 1994 was James Finn Garner's "Politically Correct Bedtime Stories" (!?). Beyond that, I can't find any.
But those two other short story collections have obvious niches -- Stephen King perennially appears on the bestseller lists because he taps into the horror genre market, and James Finn Garner has taken already familiar fairy tales and rewritten them with politically correct themes (Little Red Riding Hood chastises the Wolf for his misogynistic language). So Jhumpa Lahiri is actually forging new ground, by not only putting a literary title at the number one spot, but a literary collection of short stories.
Unfortunately, I think it says a lot more about Lahiri's commercial appeal than it says about the potential marketability of the short story form, but the side effects are still nice -- events like this always give agents hope that maybe, just maybe, your short story collection will actually sell.
Of course, back in February, I quoted Steve Almond at AWP, who predicted this, at least in part: "There’s one profitable short-story collection published a year, and Jhumpa Lahiri already wrote it."
