BookFox

John Grisham's Ford County

On November 3rd, John Grisham is dipping into the short story realm with his first collection, "Ford County," which has a manly ring to it (it's where his first novel, A Time to Kill, takes place). Nice to have the commercial boys dip into a realm normally owned by the literary folk. I predict sales that haven't been seen since Steven King published his last short story collection.

There's a video interview with him, in which he describes his motivation for writing this collection: "Well, I tried everything else but poetry." Oh, if only all short story writers could have such noble aspirations.

Grisham says that they're long short stories -- there are only seven -- but no matter the length, it's excellent publicity for the form.

Fiction Bonanza

There's a flurry of new short stories being released over at Five Chapters these next fifteen days. Instead of serializing a story over five days, there's a new short story each day, including some from collections I've been reading lately -- Jennine Capo Crucet, who won the Iowa Short Fiction award this year, and Lori Ostlund, the Flannery O'Connor Award winner. 

It's being called the Infinite FiveChapters, and while this a flagrant abuse of the word Infinite, we'll let it slide because A) hyperbole is fun, and B) end of summer blowouts are especially good when they involve short stories.

Some others scheduled to show up:

• Lauren Grodstein
• Adam Davies (who's been showing up everywhere recently!)
• Samantha Peale
• Victor Lodato
• Tania James

The full schedule includes many more authors.

Short Stories as Moles; or, the Literary Journal Scene in Germany

Thanks to Absinthe Minded (great name, by the way), for referring me to this article in the Goethe Institut about the literary journal/short story scene in Germany. Love the opening:

"Like moles, literary magazines burrow through the subsoil and often bring literary treasures to light. They live on self-exploitation, are sometimes short-lived and bizarre, and publish against the mainstream. And they sometimes feel out trends that later rock the literary scene with truly eruptive success."

The article goes on to discuss the career of Günter Eich, how circulations run between 30 and 30,000 (ha! -- love the lowballing), and the stubbornly long literary journal name "das heft das seinen langen namen ändern wollte."

Rolf Grimminger, quoted in the articles, notes the changing role of literary journals:

“The significance of literary magazines has changed greatly in recent decades. In the 1950s they were still a real medium of information about what was going on and about authors and the possibilities of writing. Then competition came in the form of features articles in newspapers and audio-visual media”. Today the charm of many magazines is precisely their niche existence and their subversive subterranean activities."

He's right about the persevering charm of literary magazines -- for many of them, it is about filling a (admittedly small) niche. In the U.S., though, I doubt that feature articles in newspapers were ever offering competition. The rising competition is certainly audio-visual media, especially since publishers are now wanting books themselves to be multimedia shows.

The course for most journals seems not towards mainstream status and struggling against the parameters of their niche, but working on embracing, exploring, and digging deeper into those niches.

10 Greatest Short Story Writers?

Over at Listverse, they do a great job of amassing a huge number of Top 10 Lists, but the ten greatest short story writers is wack.

Okay, they have some shoo-ins (oh, and they limit it to American short story writers). O'Henry? I'll grant that. Poe? Sure.

Then debatables. Asimov? Well, he's a talented writer, especially if you're in the SF scene, so that one could be argued in terms of preference. And same goes for Steven King.

But Ray Bradbury, I'll grant that fullstop -- he's a guy who's risen above genre to the level of pure greatness (although his greatness is certainly in his past, and not in the drivel he keeps pushing out these days).

And sorry, JD Salinger just doesn't make the cut. Nine stories is really his only proper story collection (the others are novellas). Besides, he's really known for Catcher in the Rye. Except if when he dies he comes out with a treasure trove of stuff he's been writing for decades -- then he might well turn into a contender for the list.

Also got to argue with Updike. His fame rests on the Rabbit books and other novels, and though I respect his facility with poetry and essays and short stories, it's still all about the novels.

The ultimate WTF moment? Chuck Palahniuk. Seems like the list author had a secret Man Crush, cause there is no other way Chucky is getting on this list (even despite the kick-ass I-am-Wolverine photo)

What we desparately need is some Cheever, some Flannery, some Hemingway, some Carver, and less of a list weighted toward Genre Folk and Old Fuddy Duddies.

Of course, if you'd like to argue as well, you can wade into the forum and join the 202 commenters who have already given their two cents.

Guardian Summer Short Stories

The Guardian has released their summer short story bonanza, which includes some as short as a thousand words.

Dave Eggers offers "A Fork Brought Along," which has the amazing distinction of being the funniest story I've ever read about a fork.

AM Holmes contributes "All Is Good Except The Rain" which has so much dialogue it resembles a play, but two women having a discussion over lunch turns into very strange affairs, ala typical AM Holmes style (my favorite story of hers -- "Georgica" -- has a woman spying on lovers at the beach, waiting until they leave so she can extract the fluid from condoms and impregnate herself with it. Shocking and haunting.)

In "The Massive Rat," which offers his Black Swan Green world from the Father's perspective, David Mitchell wins the award for best verb -- "Me and Lorna have sort of Berlinned the house into her zone and mine" -- and for the cheesiest coincidence (read it).

Also includes William Boyd, Julie Myerson, and the winner of their short story competition, Lisa Blower.

Short Story Censorship

In a high school English class unit called Love/Gender/Family Unit, Kathleen Reilly taught short stories by David Sedaris, Laura Lippman, Stephen King and Ernest Hemingway. But not anymore. She recently resigned, after parents demanded she remove the stories from the curriculum.

Parent Sue Ann Johnson was one of the more vocal objectors to the stories, arguing kids are being harmed:

“There is an agenda, people. Wake up,” she said. “We are desensitizing our children to violence. We’re desensitizing them to sex. We’re desensitizing them to drugs. We’re talking about the hearts and minds of the future of America.”

I can only wag my index finger of shame. This is a simple error, to suppose that exposing someone to violence/sex/drugs is the same as desensitization. Certainly desensitization is something to avoid, but would anyone say that visiting the slums in Kenya risks desensitizing students to poverty? The exposure would probably lead them to become more sensitive, perhaps even to act in positive ways on their sensitivities.

I'm reminded of Chuck Palahniuk's defense of Fight Club, how he argued that portraying violence in all its real, mucky messiness was the best antidote for the glorified fakery in movies that leads to desensitization.

Literature is the best possible place to expose students to such things. You can't help but think that most acts of censorship are a failure to read properly; in other words, a form of illiteracy. It's a failure to read literature as it's meant to be read -- not as a nonfiction book advocating a particular lifestyle, but an interaction and exploration of life itself.

The National Coalition Against Censorship has also picked up the story. There's a you-go-get-'em editorial in the local newspaper, too, from a recent graduate arguing that his alma mater should keep the short stories in the curriculum. It's cute because it's so winsome.

Perhaps we need some kind of Short Story Superhero that can defend against these censorship mafias. With a suit and a spiffy motto, nothing could withstand Short Story Man! He could leap tall parents in a single bound. He could cast protective webs around the banned books.

Okay, I'll stop now.

Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize

The shortlist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story prize is out, and they did much better at creating a shortlist than last year, when the Jhumpa Lahiri coup took down the prize.

• An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe)
• Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw (New Zealand)
• Ripples and other Stories by Shih-Li Kow (Malaysia)
• Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy (United States)
• The Pleasant Light of Day by Philip O Ceallaigh (Ireland)
• Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (United States)

Nice international selection, and love to see my boy Tower representing. Winner of the 35,000 Euro prize will be announced Sept. 20.

Review: "Fugue State" Brian Evenson

The stories in "Fugue State" will haunt you. Brian Evenson has a remarkable ability to come up with creepy tales that won't be extracted from your head. For example, take "Invisible Box." Imagine a girl sleeping with a mime, a mime that's still dressed up with the gloves and the face paint. During the completely silent sex, the mime draws a box around the two of them, and for days afterwards, the girl can't shake the feeling that the box still traps her.

Try sleeping on that one.

If the stories were odd in certain genres or patterns, they would be easier to shake, but these are wholly original creations that frighten in unexpected ways. In "Younger," there's this horror of a father leaving his two young girls alone with the strict instruction not to answer the door if anyone comes. The way that the unknown knocker knocks traumatizes the younger sister for the rest of her life. There's nothing intrinsically scary about the storyline itself -- it sounds pretty prosaic. But Evenson invests the story with such tension it might as well be vampires and zombies at the door.

The graphic story in this collection, "Dread," lives up to its name. Illustrated in stark black and white panels, the main character has a schizophrenic struggle after being haunted by a phrase in a unmemorable book: "He no longer resembled me." The graphic novelist Zak Sally, who drew wonderfully for this story, also created a header for each of the other eighteen stories, but these are too small and too infrequent. A full page graphic for at least some of the stories would be an improvement.

Not all the stories are frightening. If you want a satire of the publishing industry, "Ninety Over Ninety" is hilarious. It's a spoofed version of "Entourage" for the publishing world. Kossweiller, a hard-working editor at the Entwinkle House, publishes works of literature that don't sell, and then is routinely hammered and abused by his commercial-fiction-seeking boss, "Cinchy," who is deathly afraid of dolls. (Entwinkle = Entrekin? You make the call).

The title refers to esoteric tortures "Cinchy" uses to abuse editors who displease him, like making an editor get ninety contracts in ninety days, and then once he got them, ripping them all up in front of him.

Overall, Fugue State is highly readable and highly entertaining (if you don't mind being freaked out for a week or so). Evenson plays with notions of self and authorhood, while never giving up the emotional core of fear. If I had some kind of star system or a BookFox "Read This!" award, Evenson would get high marks.

Review of Damion Searls "What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going"

In the fourth story of this collection, "A Guide to San Francisco," the narrator says, "I have to admit I have never been as moved by the realists or the world-creating fabulists as I am by the pattern-makers." If you agree with that aesthetic preference, you should read Damion Searls' "What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going."

The book is slim enough to be a fiction chapbook, with five first-person stories about writers, and relies on complex patterns and beautiful prose to carry the pieces. Rather than a casual series of events, a slow accumulation of acutely rendered details moves the stories forward.

Lovers of literature should lap up the frequent references to literary titans like Hawthorne, Nabakov, Gide, Orwell, and Fitzgerald. There's also a good bit of Borges in some of the stories, with literary criticism about stories that don't exist, and meta stories commenting upon themselves, and fiction not only mirroring reality but creating it.

Here are a few treasures that I enjoyed mining:

• "The trees drip with green: the air is too saturated to hold more color."
• "[The angels] loom, like the buried first memory of a parent."
• "Her high, thin gaze would sweep down from above her crucifix necklace or pearls like a frigid Arctic wind to cool anyone's faintest interest in mentioning [sexuality] around her."

"The Cubicles" chronicles the career struggles of a technical writer, and the deflation of expectations and dreams: "I no longer aspired to see my name blazoned on title pages, meanwhile achieving such fame nevertheless: my name on the credits pages of dozens of books, read by thousands, books explaining how to use a certain database or manage client ROI in a B2B e-business footprint or design a Customer Call Center (CCC)." The third story, Goldenchain, shows the rattling gasp of an expiring marriage during a trip to Puget Sound. All five of the stories bear of the mark of careful, deliberate thought about character and language, and give fruits to those intrigued enough to return for a second (and third) reading.

If nothing I've said has convinced you one way or another, take another look at the cover. It's a stenciled car driving into a kaleidoscopic square. Yeah, reading this book can kind of feel like that.

Cao Naiqian: There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think Of You Late At Night

Before I get to a micro review of the collection itself, I have to admit that I'm impressed by Naiqian's bio. Growing up in a rural section of China, he didn't start writing until 37, as a result of a bet with a friend. He still has his day job as a detective (!) for the government. He actually lived before starting to write, by working in a mine and in a factory and with music and as a farmer.

With a bio like that, you can't help but be interested in the fiction.

"There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think Of You Late At Night" describes the hardscrabble life of peasants in a rural cave-dwelling town in China. Each of these thirty stories is short -- think flash fiction, or short shorts -- but accomplishes much with a Carveresque-style minimalism. Desperate lives generate stories about simple elements like food and sex, which reoccur frequently: growing food, cooking food, destroying food, and adultery, bestiality, incest. The reappearing characters, with names like Dog, Grunt, Zits We and Widow San, don't want modernization or political progress or the afterlife, they want little more than pride and honor; full bellies and sated sexualities.

Stylistically, Naiqian has this habit of repeating an exact phrase twice: "It grew darker and darker. It grew darker and darker." Also, in dialogue, he gives attribution for every single line, so sometimes you read "Heinu said" four times in a row without any other characters speaking. By piling on the words the particular information grows in significance. It's reminiscent of the way Hebrew poetry in the Psalms moves elliptically around a subject by describing it in at least two and sometimes four different ways. But since Naiqian doesn't vary the expression at all, it lacks the kind of aesthetic variation of Hebrew poetry. Instead, it captures the bare-bones existence of his characters -- even the words to describe them, and their words themselves, are limited, spare, and can only repeat identical lines for emphasis, rather than by any kind of linguistic flourishes.

The details of this collection, especially about animals, come straight from the source. There's true-experience tidbits about flies, such as the fact that fly droppings on food can't immediately be seen, but turn black after a period of time, and also that a fly can still buzz around even after it's been decapitated.

There's also a spot-on description of a lesbian hen, and the way Naiqian describes her mating ritual in this excerpt is precise, especially the last line (I raised chickens, so yes, I know):

"Whenever the village hens saw Fluff Ball coming, they would stop what they were doing and hunker down, lift their tails exposing their red rumps, and allow Fluff Ball to mount them. Fluff Ball would strut, its chest thrust forward, over to the most attractive hen. It would spread its right wing like a fan and circle the hen. Round and round it would go before leaping on the hen's back to do it. To maintain its balance, it would grasp the feathers on the hen's neck in its beak."

The translator, John Balcom, who also wrote an introduction, mentioned that the dialogue is particularly difficult to translate, since Naiqian uses heavy dialect. How it comes out in English is full of curses. There's plenty of "fuck your mother to death" and "fuck your ancestors." For example, this exchange in the first story, "The In-Law":

Blackie said, "That fucking In-law is here for you."
The woman said, "Don't let him in. Wait till I put on my pants."
Blackie said, "Shit, what difference does it make?"
Blushing, the woman said, "Why don't you just tell him I'm sick? It is that time of the month, anyway."
"How can I do that?" asked Blackie. "We Chinese always keep our word."
Blackie went out to meet the In-Law.

A lot of cultural nuances are probably lost in translation, but the issue of class comes across loud and clear. The stronger pieces in this collection are the ones that don't rely excessively upon dialogue, like "Widow San" and "Heinu and Her Andi." Coincidentally, they're also the slightly longer ones.

If you'd like to explore rural Chinese culture, this book will give you a look that is almost too close for comfort.

Narrative Has Competition! (Hello, Electric Literature)

Narrative has become the current gold standard for online literary magazines, wading in the fray and dominating the competition in a relatively short time.

Well, watch out. Electric Literature just launched, and it looks like a doozy.

True to the name, EL is distributing electronically, through a host of formats: e-book, Kindle, and iPhone, plus print-on-demand. It seems a smart new path for literary journal distribution. Plus, EL actually provides a business model that might work, as stories are sold for .99, a much better distribution model than wrangling a few copies into independent bookstores, many copies of which are unsold and scrapped.

Might I mention the lineup is as strong as that first issue of Black Clock that took the literary world by storm?

• Michael Cunningham
• Jim Shepard
• T Cooper
• Lydia Millet
• Diana Wagman

As far as money, they say this on their submission page (a backhanded jab at Narrative?):

We pay writers, they don't pay us. We are proud to support writers who entrust us with their work.

They also pay at a Subtropics rate ($1000 smackers a story). But it's pretty hilarious that a journal with "Electric" in their name doesn't accept electronic submissions. [CORRECTION: Though initially confused by the set-up of the submissions page, I have now verified that they do accept electronic submissions.]

Plus, if all that isn't enough, they have pictures of hot girls doing weird things on their website (But not as explicit as Fence, though).

How Do Parks Resemble Short Stories?

At the Guardian, they review the new anthology "Ox-Tales," structured around the four elements, and "Park Stories," a set of eight specially commissioned short stories all corresponding to a major British park.

Explaining the rationale behind the parks, editor Rowan Routh said: "There's a kinship between parks and short fiction - both are confined things."

I could go farther -- short stories are manageable enough to be read in parks. They are the perfect park-lit.

Oh, and the article continues the trend of speculating that short stories are experiencing a revival. Yet at the same time, the article starts by explaining how short story writers used to make a living at writing short stories, and now for "Ox-Tales," they're donating the stories. Hmmm. Not exactly revival-ish. (But it is for charity!)

But one thing Britain's got right. They are sponsoring the short story form. The USA could pick up some tips.

Open Letters Monthly In June

The June issue of Open Letters Monthly is out -- A Fiction Issue, no less -- and it's a doozy. Not only a ton of reviews, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck, reviewed by John Madera, but the genuine article of fiction itself. This issue includes six short stories/novel excerpts.

Also, I review noir thrillride, "Nobody Move," by Denis Johnson, with the not-at-all-sensational title, "This Book Will Shoot You."

Mix Tape of All-Time Best Short Stories (With Secret Theme!)

Over at Emerging Writers Network, Dan's been hyping up Short Story Month, and a lot of others are getting in on the action.

Marcel Jolley mentioned mix tapes over there. So I submitted a mix tape for Dan, themed along Fantastic Fiction. Love the concept of mix tapes. Did a bunch on this blog way back (including my SEX mix tape!). If I could rename this blog, I'd call myself Book DJ. Or Story DJ.

Below is another mix tape. I don't want to call these the best short stories, but these are certainly some of my favorites. Classic favorites, really. I'm thinking about making another list of more recent short story favorites, maybe a Modern Collection of my favorites in the last twenty years.

I tried to avoid being too much like Norton or a syllabus. I tried to choose stories that stuck with me over the years, and also ones that I enjoyed upon multiple re-readings.

While my picks have a lot of chalk in terms of authors, the particular stories might not be what you'd first guess. O'Connor too often gets nailed with "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" and Faulkner gets "Barn Burning." Kafka always gets stuck with "The Metamorphosis." The other obvious choice for Carver is "Cathedral," which is also wonderful and mysterious, but "A Good, Small Thing" crucifies my heart every time, and I love that the story stayed with him so long he had to revise it and add so much more.

All-Time Short Story List:

• "Parker's Back" Flannery O'Connor
• "The Laughing Man" J.D. Salinger
• "In the Penal Colony" Franz Kafka
• "A Good, Small Thing" Raymond Carver
• "Black Pantaloons" William Faulkner
• "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" Ernest Hemingway
• "The Dead" James Joyce
• "The Garden of Forking Paths" Jorge Luis Borges

But wait! This is not just a randomly collected All-Time Short Story List! There is a secret theme linking all these stories together! Bonus points to anyone who can identify it! Bonus points also to anyone who wants to wildly and roundly criticize some of my suggestions and offer their far superior choices!

Hint: 6 explicitly follow the theme. 2 metaphorically follow the theme.

Esquire Fiction Contest

Esquire is giving the short story a little nudge.

Or, given the bar-brawl story they just published, more like a shove.

They are starting to publish stories again, albeit only online, and are also sponsoring a contest for short stories under 4000 words with one of these three titles:

• Twenty-Ten
• An Insurrection
• Never, Ever Bring This Up Again

The first two seem ambiguous enough to spawn a number of interpretations, but that last one tells too much. Nonetheless, it's good to get more stories in glossies, and I think it's even better they're online. Nothing exists unless it's online. Any of my friends can and will read my stories when they're online, but when they're in print mags, nobody bothers.

So kudos, Esquire.

GQ, watch out. I just might have to cheat on you.

Online Short Story Award for 2008

storySouth, one of the more notable literary journals operating online, has announced the longlist of short stories up for the Million Writers Award. All stories published online in 2008 were eligible. On May 15th, the shortlist of ten stories will be announced, at which point the winner is determined by public vote. I would offer a snarky comment about using mass voting to determine a literary winner, but 1) I imagine the people devoting time reading online short stories are a cut above general public and 2) it can't be any less scientifically accurate than the debacle of juried awards -- just read the behind the scenes finagling of any juried prize.

Kudos to the storySouth team for pumping up the prize money from last year (total of $800 bucks for the top winners, now). Also, if you want to keep up with discussions about the top stories, check out storySouth editor Jason Sanford's blog, including the stories about the quick disqualification (!) and how awesome Kyle Minor is, considering he nabbed four nominations (I totally agree with the awesomeness).

Narrative Magazine scored the enviable position of Most Story Nominations (8!), which indicates how quickly it's risen in the online literary journal world. But it's innovative, attracts big names, and pays big bucks (perhaps the last two are related somehow?). Most importantly, although often online-published stories are deemed as second-citizens, Narrative really is blazing the way in establishing cachet for stories published online. I must say, though, that Narrative is like McSweeney's in some ways: it has an ardently devoted fan base while suffering under a flock of vocal detractors.

Some other mags garnering high numbers of nominations:

AGNI (4)
Blackbird (4)
Carve (5)
Eclectica (4)
Fantasy Magazine (6)
Storyglossia (5)
Strange Horizons (6)

The Familiar Short Story Take

Articles about short stories come with almost metronomic precision from the major media outlets. You can almost count on their release -- every few months, a short story article will try to stir up the literary hornets nest. There was Steven King, there was Mary Gaitskill, there was Millhauser.

Granted, most of these articles say very little new about the situation. Most of them could be recycled quite easily from ones a year or two before. The formula seems to be easy enough. Pick one side of the equation: lament the lack of cachet of the short story, or strike a radical's pose by bucking the assertion that anything is wrong with the form. The former is of the Chicken Little variety, claiming in vociferous tones that the short story "is dying, it's dying," while the latter tends towards the Hasty Generalization by picking hope-catalyzing incidents and applying them to the broader literary environment.

The most recent articles of this last stripe. In the New York Times, A.O. Scott (a favorite movie critic of mine) argues that the short story is seeing a resurgence. For evidence, he cites that three major biographies recently released (on O'Connor, Cheever, Barthelme) might signal the superiority of the short story genre:

"And this work, far from being minor, is among the most powerfully original American fiction produced in the second half of the 20th century . . . Reading through their collected stories, you wonder if novels are even necessary. The imperial ambitions of a certain kind of swaggering, self-important American novel — to comprehend the totality of modern life, to limn the social, existential, sexual and political strivings of its citizens — start to seem misguided and buffoonish."

A.O. Scott is always a delight to read, and I respect him as a thinker and a critic. But the evidence here does not fully support the conclusion, and what seems semi-plausible (though rather old news) are the scraps he tosses in at the end: that the Kindle might spark a revolution in the short story format (please God, yes), and that despite the death of the golden age of the short story, the form has remarkable staying power.

Might I say, though, that despite my critique of the regularity and formulaic qualities of these articles, that I appreciate that they do appear, because I would hate for short story collections to go the way of poetry and be relegated to the ghettos of journalistic space and attention. Attention is always good news for the form.

In the Guardian, there's also a piece on short stories. It's a delight because the editor must have given James Lasdun a long leash, as the piece doesn't seem constrained by expectations of what a reader might or might not enjoy reading on that newfangled screen thingy.

Lasdun covers One More Year by Sana Krasikov, Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin, The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah, and Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower. Coincidentally, Wells Tower's book is also mentioned by A.O. Scott. You know it's a wonderful collection when it serves as the example in multiple essays of the excellence of the form. And deservedly so -- it's a brave, adventurous collection, full of the type of stories that make you think of the possibilities of short fiction.

Best (?) Five Lit Journals

The Daily Beast has an article about the five best literary journals, but two of the journals -- N+1 and The Believer -- I'd describe more as book reviews.

One Story deserves its place on this list, but it's interesting that Quick Fiction gets a nod -- as the name implies, it's all fiction under 500 words. They have excerpts only available online for each story -- no, I'm joking. (Remember the 6-word story craze? Try excerpting the Hemingway one: "For Sale: Baby . . . " -- Now pay to see the rest). But explore the Quick Fiction website, because it's a nice design.

Lastly, there's Subtropics, about which Lizzie Stark writes:

"Subtropics is the most traditional literary magazine on this list."

If by traditional she means not publishing exclusively flash fiction and coming out twice a year instead of every three weeks, then yes, Subtropics could be considered traditional. But I wouldn't call the aesthetic of Subtropics traditional. Consider John Brandon's "Naples. Not Italy." Or Chris Bachelder's "Gatsby's Hydroplane."

Ray Bradbury Reading From New Collection

In you are not in Chicago in the dead of winter enjoying AWP, and are in Los Angeles which has seen a spell of rain but also some temps in the 70s, consider checking out Ray Bradbury at the Beverly Hills Library on Friday. He's launching a new collection of short fiction, "We'll Always Have Paris."

And bless his heart, I saw Bradbury a few years ago in Pasadena, and boy does he still tell a story.

Genre Short Stories

B&N Review has a piece by Paul Di Filippo on the state of short stories, specifically genre short stories. It starts:

If at any given moment short fiction is not actually experiencing a Golden Age, it is always seen to be dying. Critics, authors, publishers, editors, readers -- even sociologists! -- engage (or should that be indulge?) in incessant hand-wringing and shirt-rending over the beloved, terminally ill art form. They adduce sparsity, low quality, lack of showcases, poor commercial prospects, and audience indifference, then debate root causes and programs of improvement. A mythic paradise of a time when the short story reigned supreme is recalled, and dreadful, Orwellian future prospects limned. Yet, somehow, short fiction manages to persist and even thrive.

Listening to Short Stories

If the recession/depression has you pinching pennies, check out audible.com, the iTunes of short stories. To celebrate four weeks of short story month, Audible has lots of stories for 99 cents. But if you just want to read the stories, not listen to them, both the Fitzgerald Benjamin Button story and the Junot Diaz story are free online. Condalmo comments on the offerings:

You lured me in with “free Vonnegut short story” bait - downloading now - but readers/listeners will also likely want to stick around for the Joe Meno (The Great Perhaps, Demons in the Spring) piece “I Want the Quiet Moments of a Party Girl” or “The Bet” by Mr. Anton Chekhov. You’re setting loose five different stories each week, which gives you plenty of chances to get a Tobias Wolff one in there. (And don’t go with “Bullet in the Brain” because that’s free over at The New Yorker.) I’m counting on you.

Ali Smith On Short Stories

The first story in Ali Smith's collection The First Person is half meditation on the form and half character struggling with her friend's cancer. I won't reproduce any of the cancer storyline, but the first two quotes below are said by characters when trying to describe the short story:

"The novel, he was saying, was a flabby old whore. Whereas the short story, by comparison, was a nimble goddess, a slim nymph."

"A short story is like a nymphomaniac because both like to sleep around -- or get into lots of anthologies -- but neither accepts money for the pleasure."


Then, towards the end of the story, Smith makes the unusual move of listing how famous practitioners of the form described the short story. It's always interesting to read a list like this, but the real success in this story is that it doesn't feel pedagogic or antiseptic, but streamlines nicely with the emotional thrust of loss and love. But here's some of the list:

• William Carlos Williams says that the short story, which acts like the flare of a match struck in the dark, is the only real form for describing the briefness, the brokenness and the simultaneous wholeness of people's lives.
• Franz Kafka says that the short story is a cage in search of a bird.
• Nadine Gordimer says short stories are absolutely about the present moment, like the brief flash of a number of fireflies here and there in the dark.
• Elizabeth Bowen says the short story has the advantage over the novel of a special kind of concentration, and that it creates narrative about time absolutely on its own terms.
• Jorge Louis Borges says that short stories can be the perfect form for novelists too lazy to write anything longer than 15 pages.
• Ernest Hemingway says that short stories are made by their own change and movement, and that even when a story seems static and you can't make out any movement in it at all, it is probably changing and moving regardless, just unseen by you.
• Alice Munro says that every short story is at least two stories.

Glen Pourciau Interview

Glen Pourciau's short story collection Invite won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Iowa press. The stories contained in Invite, ten in all, were originally published in journals such as New England Review, Ontario Review, and Mississippi Review. I caught up with Pourciau over email and asked him a few questions.

BookFox: Several of your stories involve small social faux pas or minor encounters blown into supernova proportions. To what degree was that meant as a unifying factor of this collection, and what other unifying factors did you have in mind?

Glen Pourciau: I like to write stories about situations in everyday life. I believe that we have narratives going on within us that underlie our behavior and influence us. I like to put people in unsettling situations that bring out these underlying narratives. The situations you describe in your question were an organizing influence in the collection. Another was that a number of stories mention invitations. Another was that some of them end with the narrator unable to speak. And voice is a focus or a great part of the texture of most of the stories.

BF: Many of these stories avoid naming locations, focusing more on the inner psychological spaces of characters. Did you ever flirt with setting stories in specific locations?

(The answer after the jump)

Short Story Book Club

The One Story blog, Save the Short Story, alerted me to a new book club, Andrew's Book Club, which focuses on two short story collections a month. January's picks are Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff and Things That Pass for Love by Allison Amend.

The book club offers multiple ways to have conversations about the books: a facebook group and a space for comments. And the photo accompanying this post isn't only for Fight Club nostalgia: check out the About page of the book club.

Story Prize Finalists

Out of a field of 73 books, the Story Prize has announced its finalists for 2008:

• Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno (Akashic Books)
• Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff (Alfred A. Knopf)

I am surprised by the Joe Meno nomination, but also delighted because I enjoy his fiction. Also, isn't it fun to see a smaller publisher like Akashic sandwiched between two Knopf books? Unfortunately, I think he has the smallest chance of winning.

Only a third of the stories in Our Story Begins are brand new -- the rest are snagged from previous collections -- but in a year when a version of the National Book Award winner was published thirty years previously, I don't think that hurts Wolff's chances.

Unaccustomed Earth needs no introduction, or more publicity for that matter, but Lahiri is immensely talented and can write stories that appeal to both critics and mainstream sensibilities, a talent greatly needed in the short story world. But she would be such a shoo-in -- remember the debacle where Unaccustomed Earth jumped the whole shortlist procedure for the Frank O'Connor award? -- that to award her yet another short story prize is a bit of overkill.

I do wish that the Story Prize would start with a slightly larger pool of finalists: five would be a nice round number, or if they wanted to be contrarian, four or six. Shortlisting makes excellent publicity for short story authors who desperately need it, makes a better pool for short story readers to draw from, and makes guessing the winner more interesting.

The press release:

These three books were selected from among 73 story collections from 56 different publishers or imprints. Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times Best-Seller List and was the unanimous choice for Ireland’s Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Meno’s Demons in the Spring was published by small press publisher Akashic Books in a limited edition with original illustrations by 20 artists from the fine art, graphic, and comic book worlds—and part of the proceeds are benefitting 826Chicago, a drop-in tutoring center. Wolff’s Our Story Begins includes 16 stories from three previous collections and adds ten new stories to the mix, representing a substantial selection of accomplished work by a master of the form.

The winner is announced March 4th, 2009. The prize is $20,000 (oh, and a silver bowl to boot!).

My prediction? Bet on Tobias Wolff.

Buy these books from Amazon: Unaccustomed Earth, Demons in the Spring, Our Story Begins

Ten Short Story Collections You Should Know About

Let me whet your appetite for short fiction in 2009. Below is a list of ten upcoming short story collections, most of them coming out in the first six months of the year. Some heavy hitters, some favorites, some in translation, some from bigger publishers and some from smaller publishers. In a word, Variety.

1. Chimamanda Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

Fresh off receiving a Genius Grant, Adichie focuses on Nigerian/American relationships and connections in this forthcoming collection. (June)

2. Irving Welsh, Reheated Cabbage

I couldn't think of a less appetizing title. But obviously that's the point. (August)

3. Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes

Described as "five stories of music and nightfall." I suppose that works as a unifying theme, if you force it. And I'm detecting a tendency for high profile authors to package only four or five stories together into a book, while the norm is about ten to a dozen. Trend? (May)

4. Raymond Carver, Beginners

So I opposed the printing of this book. I should divulge that now. But it is rather unprecedented to have a pre-edited book of short stories come out, so my curiousity is piqued. What will we learn about Carver and what will we learn about the editing process of Gordon Lish? If nothing else, it will stoke up controversy again, so watch out.

5. J. Robert Lennon, Pieces for the Left Hand

I was introduced to Lennon by Harper's serialization of his abridged novel. Which was wonderful. So I've been a regular reader of his blog Ward Six since then and look forward to these flash stories, over a hundred of them, none of them longer than a page. Yes, it came out four years ago in the U.K., but this is the first time it's widely available in the U.S. (April)

6. Helen Humphreys, The Frozen Thames

High Concept short story collection, with each one of the forty vignettes chronicling a fictional moment at the last forty times that the Thames river froze. Intriguing, no? (March)

7. Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry

If she's going for irony in the title, she's got it, because her stories do make me cry. This is her third short story collection, but the last installment came in 1997. Although being busy with Veronica is a perfectly valid excuse for the last decade. (March)

8. Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

The supernova debut of 2009. The buzz will be deafening. Reserve front row seats at your local bookstore now. Publications in New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope. Pakistani stories about class. Watch for it. (February)

9. Ali Smith, First Person

Just came out. Very playful, metafictional. Here's the LA Times review. (January)

10. Carol Windley, Home Schooling

Located in and around Vancouver, these seven stories explore domestic situations through the eyes of women and children. (February)

UPDATE: The Story Prize Blog added a few more collections to this list:

Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible (January) (Selected and new)
Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (March)
Joyce Carol Oates, Dear Husband (April)
Robert Boswell, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (May)
James Lasdun, It's Begining to Hurt (August).

Yes, I didn't include Joyce Carol Oates in the ten, but really, she publishes about three books a year, so who can keep up?

Two more I could add would be The Withdrawal Method, by Pasha Malla, coming out in March from Soft Skull Press (I'm already half through it) as well as Future Missionaries of America, by MacAdam/Cage, coming out in February.

Chris Adrian's "A Better Angel" Review

Frequent readers of this blog will know that I found Chris Adrian's short story collection "A Better Angel" to be one of the more fascinating short story collections of 2008. Which is why I decided to do an in-depth 2500-word review. In a reviewing culture that rarely gives space to short fiction, and space, when it is alloted, runs to a thousand words, I thought it important to spend a chunk of prose on the collection.

You can find the Chris Adrian review in the January issue of Open Letters.

Here's an excerpt from the middle:

A Better Angel isn’t exactly a new development on the themes of Adrian’s novels. Its nine stories were published over a decade, between 1997 and 2007, a time period that encompasses Gob’s Grief (2000) and The Children’s Hospital (2006). These stories originated alongside the novels and don’t break from them as much as suture new narratives together with familiar themes. All three books have strong commonalities: as well as the aforementioned angels, there’s an overlapping cast of characters (Dr. Snood, Pickie Beecher, Calvin, and Dr. Siri Chandra—an anagram of Chris Adrian), despair over dead brothers (often twin brothers), and a hospital’s worth of medical argot delivered with surgical snappiness (“Tell me the three classic findings on X-ray in necrotizing enterocolitis.”). If this seems rooted in autobiography, that’s because it is: Adrian has been a divinity student and pediatrician, and his brother died in a car accident in 1993.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Just in time for the Christmas-day debut of the Brad Pitt/Cate Blanchett film, Jacket Copy has a multi-blogger discussion about the Scott Fitzgerald short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I'm one of the voices in this discussion, so please pop over there as the posts roll out over the next couple of days.

Sidebar Reading

Apologies for neglecting the right sidebar updating what I'm reading. I've been reading a spate of novels (some of them very very small, you know, like 2666), and so have not been adding to my short story collection reading.

But don't worry -- I've jumped back in the fray with some small press/university titles, four of them, and am mid-way through a few more. In lieu of extended analysis, I'll merely say that Invite by Glen Pourciau has been one of my favorite collections among the recent ones.

Literary Journal Rankings

On this lovely Monday morning, I'd like to direct your attention to the left column, under "Pages." I've added a new one: Ranking of Literary Journals. Although I realize the dangers of such an attempt and the impossibility of creating a list that will not be debated, I wrote this because when I was first starting to send out to literary journals, I wanted a guide to help steer me.

Unfortunately, other than a top-eleven list or two, there isn't much out there. So this list should help you to know when you're sending out to one of the most difficult journals, and also know it if you're sending to a mid-list journal. There are multiple strategies out there -- break in at the lower levels and build your way up, or pound away at the big boys until a story breaks through -- but I'll leave those choices up to you.

This list of the top literary journals is not meant to be exhaustive. Actually, the opposite: it's meant only to highlight great journals and create a hierarchy of the best journals. It excludes online literary journals because I have ranked them elsewhere. Some of the sections (especially IV and V) have very little differences in status between them. The most incomplete list is section V, which could have twenty or thirty more journals added, and there is space for a section VI, but it would include a good hundred or more journals. Consult Duotrope for those options.

My ranking criteria included perceived reputation, frequency of appearances in literary news, appearances in newly published collections, my personal experience with these journals, other ranking attempts and Duotrope rankings. Although the actual list is broken down into sections based on the difficult of getting published, this is just a convenient way of smashing all the above criteria into one easy-to-label format. Also, in ranking these journals, I tried to evaluate their current status, not (if applicable) their former glory.

If you have suggestions or critiques, I welcome them in the comments section of that page.

Short Story Quiz

For all of you out there who think you know short story collections, here's your chance to test your mettle. This twelve-question quiz covers the gamut from classics to newly released, asking questions on nationality, biography, dates, content and more. So buckle down and start answering.

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Roundup

Poets and Writers has a searchable archive of contests, including a function where you can find fee-free ones. (like Greensboro Review)

Book Reviewers, not to be outdone by the hundreds of fiction contests, now have their own contest. Virginia Quarterly Review wants the best review of a book published in 2008 by writers under thirty. Winners (and perhaps the five runners-up) are published in VQR. The name, "Young Reviewers Contest," makes it sound like the award is for tweens, but in the literary world, "young" is anyone under thirty-five.

Open Letters has a trifecta (1, 2, 3) of criticism on Evan Connell's collected fiction, "Lost in Uttar Pradesh."

After reading James Wood's "How Fiction Works," I'm starting to feel bad for John Updike, who is used as a primo example of how not to write in Wood's section on authorial/character narration. The text in question, of course, is "Terrorist." I still remember that Harper's article that dismembered that novel piece by piece . . .

It is disconcerting to find that various individuals named "John Fox" have already published a young gay lover novel, texts on "nonparametric regression", how poetry can heal, the historical "Trail of the Lonesome Pine", an expedition through Manchuria and, of course, the book of Martyrs. Guess I'll have to go with the John Matthew Fox approach.

Articles continue to pour in to eulogize Solzhenitsyn.

The Ambiguous Ending

Since John Fox asked me to write a guest entry on his blog, the thing that came to mind, was an argument we had the last time I saw him.

Maybe it wasn’t so much an argument as me talking out of my ass about what I perceive to be the hallmark of most great short stories: “The Ambiguous Ending.” John Fox – as he often does - completely misinterpreted what I meant by ambiguous. I don’t mean a vague ending or the half-assed attempt by a stymied author to escape the story without you know actually ending it. I mean in the sense that the story ends with a small human gesture, or a bit of dialogue that can change your entire perception of the story and its characters.

Most of my favorite short story endings have stuck with me to a greater degree than the conclusions of the great classic novels. That might be to my deficit but the structure of a good short story throws the reader into the action fast, and is built to deliver a powerful emotional turn in those last sentences. No time for a drawn out epilogue or extended goodbyes. I recommend a few examples from some of my recent favorites.

“Modern Love” by TC Boyle

“The Magic Barrel” by Bernard Malamud

“The Artificial Nigger” by Flannery O’Connor

“93990” by George Saunders

Anything Special About Short Stories?

Since this is a short story blog, I thought I’d write a bit about literary theories of the short story. I should confess that I am not the BookFox, and probably not even worthy of the title BookWeasel. Right there I was going for an animal slightly less smart (and slightly more smarmy) than a fox, and I just wanted to clearly express that intention. My name is Brent, and last year around this time I wrote a review of Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You.

BookFox already reviewed the story collection that caught my eye on my last visit to Border’s (Nam Le’s The Boat), so I decided that a brief foray into literary theory might be appropriate, since I’m starting an MA in literature in August. I realize that even the words “literary theory” might put off the writers and aesthetes that read this blog, but I promise I won’t use any long German or French words, and I’ll probably end up with more questions than answers.

My interest in short story theory is mostly selfish. As a writer of short fiction, and no long fiction, I have found myself asking, “is something wrong with me? Why can’t I just write a novel like any normal self-obsessing introvert?” At the root of this insecurity is the idea that short stories are really just poorly developed novels. While I think this is a highly inaccurate picture of short fiction, I also wonder if it is a pervasive (if perhaps subconscious) view held by many readers. But then I think about writers that were clearly more interested in short fiction, like John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver, and my suspicions of the uniqueness of the short story as a form are again aroused.

The essential question that comes up in short story theory is one of definition: “is there a quality of short stories that distinguishes them from novels and other pieces of literature?” At first, especially given the broad swath of short stories available, I’m inclined to agree with a critic like Norman Friedman, who rejects anything other than length as a determining characteristic. What makes a short story is that it is shorter than other forms of fiction. It’s simple, practical, and nearly airtight. And, it seems to fit Poe’s definition of a short story as “something that can be read in one sitting.” Still, it’s not sexy enough to explain why so many brilliant writers devoted their lives to the form.

Charles May, on the other hand, has suggested that the short story is primarily concerned with “fleeting moments of mythical perception” that transcend everyday experience—or, as Friedman has labeled them—epiphanies. This definition seems to resonate with something I have experienced in reading, writing, and teaching short stories. Many of my favorite short stories center on characters who reach a moment of enlightenment, maturation, or restoration. Many times these moments feel mythical because of their epic importance and their attempt to explain the unexplainable. It's the moment when you, as a reader, know something big just happened, but you don't really know what it means. Or maybe you do later, after some serious space from the story. I'm thinking of stories like Carver's "Cathedral," or O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Stories where the character says or does something significant yet strange.

I also entertain a burgeoning opinion that short stories are branching from a tree of fairy tales, myths, fables, and other forms of brief, traditionally oral storytelling. In America, the popularizers of the short story were Poe and Hawthorne, both of whom called their stories “tales,” and explored the line between the natural and the supernatural. In short, their writing allowed room for mythical experiences. Consider Goodman Brown’s vision in “Young Goodman Brown,” or the beating of the heart in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Are these supernaturally real events or naturally explainable phenomena? Because of these origins, I wonder if short stories are more open to supernatural events or “mythical moments.” I’ve always thought, for example, that magical realism is vastly easier to pull off (and usually more successful) in short story form than it is in novel form. The reader of short stories might accept these sorts of magical leaps, almost in the same way that a hearer of an oral story expects exaggeration for effect. But what do you think? Is there anything that distinguishes short stories other than length, or does the word short pretty much cover everything?

Short Story Collections on EW's Radar

Entertainment Weekly lists the top 100 books published between 1983 and 2008. It's idiosyncratic (as any list of this type must be), waffling between pop culture and high-brow, but at least it manages a couple of short story collections:

• Selected Stories, Alice Munro
• Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
• Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat
• Pastoralia, George Saunders
• Cathedral, Raymond Carver
• Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
• Close Range, Annie Proulx

Of course, if you're Richard Ford, you're wondering why Rock Springs (1988) got beat out by Close Range and Krik? Krak!.

Also, I wondered: why 1983? Well, only two books on the list barely made the cutoff point--LaBrava by Elmore Leonard and Cathedral by Raymond Carver--and I think Carver might have been the larger influence.

Speaking of Annie Proulx, if you are a fan of her Wyoming Stories, her next installment is out in September: Fine Just the Way It Is.

And score one for the women: four collections to three!

Million Writers Award: Top Online Stories

storySouth has announced its shortlist of online short stories for the Million Writers Award. It's a very egalitarian selection, with no journal represented twice, and you can read all the stories to vote for your favorite.

Fiction Issue Cagematch: The New Yorker VS Atlantic Monthly

So I've been reading The New Yorker summer fiction edition and also checking out the authors slated for publication in the Atlantic fiction issue, and am struck by the differences. The New Yorker has an all-star line-up of writers, of which I recognized every one: Vladimir Nabokov, Annie Proulx, Mary Gaitskill. Then also some nonfiction pieces by Edwidge Danticat, George Saunders, Tobias Wolff, and Haruki Murakami. Only three stories, but still, a great issue, also containing one-pager bits filed under "Faith and Belief."

Now, the Atlantic. Despite the fact that their fiction has been demoted from regular monthly inclusion to a newsstand-only fiction issue, I have to admire what they're doing with the issue, coming out July 15. They're not spotlighting the established writers, but offering work from the up-and-comers. Yes, they have Wendell Berry as frontliner, and also Julie Schumacher, but on the whole, many of the authors are "emerging," as they say.

• Aryn Kyle: Has one novel out, "The God of Animals." University of Montana MFA.
• Cristina Henriquez: One short story collection out, "Come Together, Fall Apart." Iowa graduate, Virginia Quarterly Review "Fiction's New Luminaries.
• Mark Fabiano: Has a blog that hasn't been updated for nine months, but which contains an excerpt from the forthcoming Atlantic story. As far as I know, no books out yet.
• Jess Row: I really enjoyed his collection "The Train to Lo Wu," so much so that I interviewed him on this blog. He was also named by Granta a "Best Young American Novelist."
• Jessica Murphy: Staff writer at the Atlantic (yes, we will give them a pass on one seemingly nepotistic choice). Also Milton Center fellow, a position at Image, a lit mag which I particularly admire.
• Carter Benton: ??? Perhaps a graduate of University of Montana MFA program. I've emailed the Atlantic folks to ask more.

So who wins this cagematch? For name recognition, The New Yorker wins out. But I'm more excited to see how the Atlantic has created their issue, and what these relative newcomers have to bring to the table. Bonus: From the advertisement, at least, it seems the Atlantic will have more pages actually devoted to fiction.

Interview with Jeanne Leiby, Editor of the Southern Review

Interview with Jeanne Leiby from Sam Armstrong on Vimeo.
I talked with Jeanne Leiby, editor of the Southern Review, about a weak-kneed and shaky-voiced solicitation of Philip Levine, Bret Lott's aesthetic changes to the journal, a special issue about the circus, and cultivating the emerging writers of this generation.

Interviewer: John Matthew Fox
Videographer: Joel Champagne
Video Editor: James Roland

Top Twelve Online Literary Journals

Here are the top twelve online literary journals, at least according to the number of Million Writers Award nominations each journal has received in the last five years.

• Eclectica (31 nominations)
• Pindeldyboz (26)
• Agni (16)
• Strange Horizons (16)
• Word Riot (16)
• Narrative Magazine (15)
• Fiction Warehouse (13)
• The King's English (12)
• Mississippi Review (12)
• Blackbird (11)
• Blithe House Quarterly (11)
• Storyglossia (11)

Literary Rejections and Slush Pile Wars

There’s been a flurry of discussion in the blogosphere lately about what an editor should and should not say about submissions. LROD started with some complaints about VQR editor Ted Genoways, then Howard Junker of ZYZZYVA condemns Ted Genoways, and Ted Genoways responds, and Will Entrekin takes issue with the editor of Fence, the editor of Clarkesworld and myself.

The ethical issue in regards to cover letters might simply be about publishing private correspondence: writers submit a private text to the editor, and expect (in an unspoken contract) that it will remain private. Editors, by talking about or excerpting that text, break that contract. However, I believe that when this “private” correspondence is a mass submission to hundreds of journals, and when the letter betrays a complete lack of familiarity with the journal – calling it by the wrong name, or no name at all; misspelling the name of the editor, or writing a former editor, or no editor name at all; submitting an 85 page manuscript to a journal that publishes nothing over 20 pages – that this contract no longer retains its former strength. Also, as long as the editor offers the cover letter anonymously, they are only showing their submitters that the basic, professional courtesy of passing familiarity with the journal needs to be exercised when they submit. I don’t believe that it is abusing or disrespecting normal submitters in any way. 

That would be the end of it except for those who are skittish and fearful. These are the people who are scared that their work will be ridiculed next. So when these people see the comments by the readers at VQR – “this is the worst thing I’ve ever read” – they are worried that the object of scorn is their own work. It seems rather obvious that these individuals are unpublished, because published authors are quite aware that part of the risk of publishing, or even trying to be published, is fraught with the possibility of ridicule. Look at Scott Snyder: he lands a story in VQR, quite a laudable feat, and people post on Literary Rejections on Display quite nasty things, like they couldn’t make it past the first paragraph, that the entire story lacked authenticity, and that the writing was terrible. I imagine this to be the case with every published story and book (if anyone talks about it all). Once you publish, prepare for an onslaught. There will always be someone out there telling you that your work is subliterate. There will always be someone, no matter how high your accomplishments, that will tell you that you couldn’t cobble together a fourth-grade-level sentence. If you think editors wield a heavy critical stick, try the general public. Which is not to excuse everything that an editor says: they too must exercise judgment. But offering anonymous slush pile critiques is nothing compared to what you’d actually receive in book reviews. 

But to come back to what Genoways talked about, trying to reassure submitters – that none of the people mocked by the slush pile reviewers were the complainers. I’m sure he was right. I know, from my experience reading slush piles, the vast majority of pieces are merely mediocre. Mocking only comes about in regards to the 1% that is jaw-dropping terrible. If you really, really worry that you’re in that 1%, then either you have self-esteem issues or you need to work a bit longer on your craft, because you have to be in the top 1% to make it into these journals. To assume that all submissions don’t merit humor is simply to have never actually read a slush pile. However, I know that laughing in the slush pile room among fellow editors is vastly different than publishing those sentiments on the Internet. So is the problem with witnessing the mockery rather than simply knowing that it exists behind closed doors? Because it will always exist behind closed doors: no way to stop that. 

If the people complaining have no fear that their manuscripts are being mocked, and they are only concerned with protecting others less talented than themselves, then that is a different topic. Then it becomes: Is an editor acting professionally by talking about their slush pile? I believe it to be an editorial choice. I have no problem with editors that talk about outlandish submitters, and I have no trouble with editors that don’t talk. I see nothing intrinsically disrespectful about complaining in an abstract, anonymous way about the quality of submissions received. Only the people with thin skins are likely to be put off. The people with thick enough skins to handle it are likely to be the better writers anyway. 

But that’s cover letters. Let’s consider the manuscripts themselves. I would avoid publishing or talking about the actual text of submitted story or stories. There are many bad writers out there, and it does little good to condemn them. Even in a workshop setting, I believe it necessary to praise the author for something, even if the story on the whole needs vast improvement. But I don’t know an editor that has made slush pile manuscripts available – Ted Genoways shared the comments of his slush pile readers, which I believe are fairly typical of slush pile readings (if you’ve ever read a slush pile, you would likely say similar things). On the back cover of ZYZZYVA, Howard Junker often offers excerpts from cover letters, which are funny or naïve. But I’m not aware of editors that actually share bad manuscripts, and I hope that it stays that way. 

Let me say it: I admire the vast percentage of people who submit to the Southern California Review. To anyone who doesn’t screw up our basic identity, I offer a fair and careful consideration of their manuscript. I admire people who submit for the eighth time to our journal, because even if we don’t accept that eighth one, I admire their tenacity. I love that rush from finding a brilliant manuscript. I love the whole process because I am engaged in this same process, the same postage-and-manila-envelope scheme, collecting the same stack of rejection slips. So fight on, and know that if you have even the slightest bit of respect for the literary journal, the literary journal will extend that respect right back to you.

The iTunes of Short Stories

One Story's blog, Save the Short Story, alerted me to newest short story podcasting site, Sniplits. The idea behind the name, I believe, is that while listening to audio books in the car doesn't allow you enough continuity to enter the dream-like experience of the novel, a snippet of literature -- such as a short story -- is the perfect length for a trip to Whole Foods or LA Fitness. The site is searchable by genre (Horror, Humor, or Literary/Mainstream -- wait, why are those last two together?) and by time (five to thirty-five minutes).

Unfortunately, at least for downloaders, it is a pay site, but as One Story mentioned, that just makes this the iTunes of short stories. Also, I hope some of the fees, which are 48 cents for stories under five minutes and 88 cents for stories longer than that, make it back to the author. If you're adverse to buying on the first visit, they do offer one free short story a week. Currently, the site only offers about a hundred short stories, but since it's only in beta mode, I'm guessing that number will be increasing exponentially in the near future.

Slush Pile Dispatches

So a long time ago, back when a different journal was being published at USC, someone accepted a poem for the literary journal from a prisoner. Just some incarcerated guy that mailed in a typewritten poem. While it seems a kind of noble and liberating idea (giving some locked-up men a voice!), it actually was a bad, bad idea. Why? Because in the last five years, it appears word has spread that some journal at USC accepts prisoner's creative writing, and the Southern California Review has been inundated. You'd hope -- and as an editor, I'd hope -- that there would be some glimmer of talent in the prisoner slush pile, as we've come to call it, but alas, almost all of the cover letters are subliterate, not to mention the prose itself.

The saddest part is that the Senior Editor tells us we can never again accept a prisoner submission. Not as a matter of aesthetic judgment, but of safety. Apparently once a slush-pile-digger wrote back a kind rejection to a prisoner and signed his name, and the prisoner somehow found his email and began harassing him over email, as well as sending letters on a weekly basis. Apparently some of the letters not only questioned the editor's sense of judgment, but threatened him. If this was an urban legend, I'd now tell you that after the prisoner was released, he used the phone book to look up the editor's home address and began stalking him with subliterate notes posted to his front door and placed in his bed, but thankfully this is not the space for urban legends. This is a place for cold hard facts. So I give to you an excerpt of our latest prisoner cover letter:

"Publisher. [We're not a publisher] I am informing you of a book that I have written called 'Pagan's Wrath' and another book called 'Iron City' that I've also written but I have to edit and type up. My book Pagan's Wrath' is complete. I have edited it to the best of my ability and have it fully typed, it is a Viking era novel of 326 pages that deal with the Vikings journeying to america and how they lived and died among the indigenous peoples." [Really? Viking-era, tell me more!] "I am currently putting together four other books. The 'Convict Chronicles'. 'Fugitive One, living outside the law.' 'Tales of Time. And a book of 'Songs and Poetry.' [Publisher Question: Are the songs and poetry about convicts and fugitives? Because that would be sweet.] I've typed up 71 pages of Iron City, forty pages of Fugitive One, living outside the law. Twenty five pages of Tales of Time, and 66 songs for songbook. [My co-editor predicted one will become a bestseller and he'll school all us MFAers.] "Typing is a slow process because ribbons are not always readily available, like right now I only have one ribbon left and its more than half spent so I'm mostly just writing now." [Have to admire the perseverance] "On a personal note, I am currently incarcerated, but this is only a temporary dilemma that will be rectified by 2010." [You think this is a stock line?]

Nam Le: "The Boat"

So Nam Le's short story collection "The Boat" comes out today, and after reading it over the past month, it seems he's going to give Chris Adrian competition for best debut of 2008 (yes, I know Adrian's published before, but "A Better Angel" is his first collection). Le's got geographical range, that's for sure, both personally -- born in Vietnam, grew up in Australia, studied in the U.S. -- and in his fiction, which takes place in Iowa, Japan, Iran, Columbia, Vietnam. Aside from geography, there's also a wide range of genre. The first story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," is a self-referential story with a character named Nam Le trying to write a story at Iowa, and deals with the nature and responsibilities of storytelling, while "Cartagena," involving child-assassins and grenades, takes on the mantle of an action tale, and the third story, "Meeting Elise," transitions into more of a domestic tale of an estranged father's relationship with his musical prodigy daughter.

The only place where the collection falters a bit is in the center, in the near-novella "Halflead Bay." The pace slows down in this story as Le addresses the domestic realm, of small-time exchanges against bullies and a teenage love interest, and this pales against the more ambitious stories surrounding it. But the collection as a whole has this big-hearted, adventurous spirit that isn't afraid to foray into territory with geopolitical repercussions.

There's a New York Times dinner-interview with him, and Luna Park also has a interview, more Q & A style.

Three Short Story Links

Although I missed the initial salvo of reports about the short story panel at PEN World Voices Festival, it's worth checking out this summary from Stingy Kids, (and also Chekhov's Mistress) to find out:
- the pro-short-story state of Korea and how that's changing to encourage novels instead
- how an unrecognized Annie Proulx rose from the audience to deliver a monologue
- Editor of the Paris Review, Radhika Jones, receives 1200 short story submissions a month (and publishes one at most? You do the math)
- Israeli writer Etgar Keret on how short stories should be vomit-y rather than neat and clean

Two out of the three top recommendations by the NBCC in its Good Reads are short story collections, and while Jhumpa Lahiri has been getting tons of press, I think "Dangerous Laughter" by Steven Millhauser should be getting more attention.

Literary Rejections On Display has pics of rejection letters (ah, schadenfreude! Or does a handwritten letter from the New Yorker actually provoke envy?) Also, in regards to the Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ten Genoways challenging preconceived notions at LROD, Rhian Ellis over at Ward Six has read all six VQR stories and has found a common thread. This is what I love about the blogosphere: when a conversation spills out into adjacent blogs and the comment section goes crazy and everyone just starts talking (and arguing). There's something beautiful about that.

Frank O'Connor Short Story Award

The 2008 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the heftiest cash prize in the literary world for the short form (35,000 euros), has announced its longlist. Thirty-nine authors from around the globe are nominated. Only one Canadian was up (no, it wasn't Alice Munro) as opposed to fourteen British writers (!). But the nice thing about this award is that they actually make good on the their promise/goal of highlighting up-and-coming authors. On the American side of things, I'm glad to see Benjamin Percy nominated for "Refresh, Refresh," although both Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccustomed Earth" and Jim Shepard's "Like You'd Understand, Anyway" are obvious picks. (Tobias Wolff wasn't eligible because "Our Story Begins" collected previously published stories).

I'm also glad to see Nam Le nominated under the Australian category for "The Boat," which is his first book and which comes out this month. Roddy Doyle is up for Ireland, but his latest collection, "The Deportees and Other Stories," is underwhelming. Anne Enright, who won the Man Booker Prize for her novel "The Gathering," is also up under the Irish section, but since I haven't read her collection, "Taking Pictures," I can't pass judgment. If you remember, last year the prize went to Miranda July for "No One Belongs Here More Than You," and the shortlist was quirky, bypassing Alice Munro and favoring writers like the Israeli Edgar Keret. So it seems likely that an up-and-comer has a good chance with this prize.

Stephen Corey on Genre Numbers

Stephen Corey, editor of the Georgia Review, wrote a piece for the May/June Poets & Writers. Here's an excerpt in which he quantifies the shifts he's seen with nonfiction, poetry, and short stories:

Well, more people are sending out and publishing what they now call (forgive us, Father Montaigne) "creative nonfiction." In the mid-1980s we received perhaps two to three hundred essays annually, but now that count has increased at least four-fold . . . The number of poems circulating seems to have held fairly steady, while the number of short stories, on the increase for a long time, has diminished in the past few years. I think the publishing industry has worked overtime of late to eradicate the short story form, and I think some of the writing programs may have been helping too. Story cycles, linked stories, novels-in-stories - all these au courant designations are attempted endarounds in the pro-novel, anti-short story game of book marketing. The pressures on our potential new Flannery O'Connors and Ernest Hemingways to "get past" their story writing and into novels as quickly as possible may be opening a sad and profound gap in our literature.

Cynthia Ozick: Dictation

Cynthia Ozick has a new collection of short stories -- or at least a novella accompanied by three stories, so a quartet of stories would be more accurate. "Dictation" came out in mid-March, but we've not seen the type of coverage I'd expect, except for the faithful Complete Review and some coverage given by Bookforum. Also, a recent review by The Washington Post has an accompanying (very brief!) "slideshow" that shows despite Ozick's recent 80th birthday, she seems to still have vitality.

Most of the reviews so far have been complementary, but I was disappointed when I was in a Borders and asked, just out of curiosity, if they had the new Ozick. "Ozick with a S or with a Z?" the clerk asked me. Ugh. I guess I should have been happy that the clerk knew how to spell Cynthia. And then I was informed Borders wasn't going to be carrying that title. What? Because she's old? Because it's a collection of short stories? Or because you're going out of business and therefore only want to sell tawdry mass-markets with high volume and sizable profit margins? Case in point: this is why we should support independent bookstores.

The Podcasts Are Marching On Again, Hurrah; Hurrah

Over at Pinky's Paperhaus there's a post about a new development with the Short Story Review -- they're going to start podcasting short stories in September of 2008, and are already reading submissions. It's a new journal, with only two issues out, but now fifty-two stories a year will be podcasted, selected from the jaws of the slush pile, so go ahead and send in your work. The only downside is that initially, podcasts will only be retained for two months, which I think is a shame in this age of digital, and am positive they could create the space and bandwidth to retain them indefinitely if they just talk to an experienced podcaster.

This is the second literary podcast I'm aware of, other than Boundoff, which is listed in the right sidebar under The Short Story. Both have limits of 3000 and 2500 words, respectively, a word count range that takes ten minutes or more to read, but I could easily see a market emerging for even longer podcasted short stories. After all, books on audio have been doing quite well. I'm guessing we'll be seeing even more literary journals take this podcasting route, as it doesn't have the stigma of publishing fiction online, yet is hip and cool (as the kids are saying these days) and is much cheaper than print.

Bonus Note: I love the common sense but nonetheless necessary disclaimer at the bottom of the Short Story's writers' guidelines: "Short Story does not accept personal essays, poetry or literary criticisms." Just for all the submitters who never happen to read the title of the journal. From all the random submissions we receive at Southern California Review, I wouldn't be surprised to find that number rather high.

Mark This One In Your Calendars

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."

Short Roundup

Dan over at Emerging Writers Network points out a new trend among literary journals, such as Fence and American Short Fiction, to "pay what you can" for a subscription to their journal. A smart move, I believe. Journals need some kind of marketing to jumpstart their subscription base.

How literary journal rejections that take over a year at least let you imagine that you made it past the first five readers (only to be squashed by the sixth).

A low-residency MFA program that went terribly, terribly, wrong.

An interview with Benjamin Percy, whose two short story collections ("Refresh, Refresh," and "The Language of Elk") have made waves.