Save the Short Story

Last week I participated in a panel at Sarah Lawrence College discussing how to submit to magazines. My fellow panelist was an agent and she basically popped everyone’s hope balloon by telling them over and over again that no one wants to publish short story collections. 

I know, I know, it’s the same old song and dance. I really hope that by telling people that everyone IS reading short stories and that there are more and more people writing great stories, we can reverse psychologize this misconception that we don’t want short stories.

Therefore, I was really happy to read that 4 out of 6 authors shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor award were debut authors. SOMEONE is publishing short stories by new authors–and they are being awarded with prizes!

Last year, the award judges decided not to publish a short list. Instead, they awarded the prize the Jhumpa Lahiri.  

One Story authors Lydia Peelle and Lauren Groff were on the long list.  

 Read more about the authors here and here.  

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Doesn’t everyone love Alice Munro? 

Alice Munro was announced as the winner of the third Man Booker International Prize. The panel made this comment: 

“Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every short story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.”

You can read more about the prize here. 

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Elizabeth Strout has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for “Olive Kitteridge,” a collection of 13 linked short stories. The stories are set in rural Maine and center around Olive Kitteridge, a seventh-grade teacher. 

Isn’t it great that people are recognizing great story collections?  I haven’t read it yet, but several of my friends have been telling me that it’s terrific. 

You can read more about her here.   

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Recently, three new literary biographies about Flannery O’ Connor, John Cheever, and Donald Barthelme have placed a new spotlight on the short story. 

A. O. Scott wrote a piece in the NY Times this past weekend about the new resurgence of the short story. He writes:

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. More of life is glimpsed, and glimpsed more clearly, through Barthelme’s fragments, Cheever’s finely ground lenses or the pinhole camera of O’Connor’s crystalline prose.

You can read the rest of the article here. 

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Anne Sanow won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her short story collection Triple Time, which will be published in September. There were 300 works submitted. Ann Patchett, who works diligently to save the short story (and was kind enough to include two One Story stories when she edited the Best American Short Stories), judged the contest.

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize recognizes and supports writers of short fiction and makes their work available to readers around the world. The award is open to writers who have published a book-length collection of fiction or at least three short stories or novellas in commercial magazines or literary journals. 

The prize carries a cash award of $15,000 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press under its standard contract.  

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Who would have thought that almost a hundred years after his death, we would be able to read a new Mark Twain story?

Apparently, “The Undertaker’s Tale,” was discovered in the Mark Twain (or Samuel Clemens) archive. The story is going to be published in the quarterly mystery magazine the Strand. 

Supposedly, it’s not the greatest story (according to Carolyn Kellogg’s LA Times article). I wonder if this was a story that Mark Twain wanted people to read since he never published it in his lifetime.

You can read the Kellogg article here. 

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Last night Tobias Wolff won The Story Prize for his new collection of short stories, Our Story Begins. It’s basically the equivalent of a Greatest Hits album. During his interview with Larry Dark, he mentioned that he didn’t want this book to be a complete compilation since that might be a bit “too funereal.” 

Jhumpa Lahiri was the first to read and she chose the story Hell-Heaven. I had read this story twice before, but hearing her, I noticed several new things, such as the description of the safety pins in the early part of the story, which come into play at the end. 

Later, Joe Meno read from his story, Frances the Ghost. I hadn’t read his work before, but the story was funny and heartbreaking and sad and courageous. He said that he wrote it because of a girl he once knew who was braver than all the other neighborhood kids and he modeled Frances after her. Some stories are meant to be read aloud and this is one of them. 

For some reason, I predicted that Tobias Wolff would read Bullet in the Brain. I was introduced to this story by a fiction professor in college. The funny thing about it was that when she photocopied the story from the original magazine, she had neglected to copy the last page, not realizing that there had been another page, so we all assumed that the story ended abruptly, in the middle of a sentence. Which made complete sense to us since this guy just got shot in the head. 

The next week, one of us had discovered this mistake and after we read the last page, it spurred another discussion on how we had all completely believed in that story before we found out there was another page. It’s that sort of mastery of language that earns the trust of Wolff’s readers. 

On the ride home from the award ceremony, it occurred to me that what I love about short story writers is that they notice the small moments. It’s the small things that are drawn out and examined. Ultimately, in the end, I believe that’s what we’ll all remember best. 

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I first read “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” in Best American Short Stories and Karen Russell had one of the best new voices I had read in a long time. 

Today I came across an article about her and she said: 

“I really didn’t think people would read the stories. I wrote totally for pleasure without any idea about sales and critics,” said Russell, 27. “Now, I feel grateful and lucky.”

I’ve always felt it was a beautiful thing that people write short stories for love. There’s no fortune to be made and it’s not like the old days when a good short story writer could support a family simply by publishing in magazines. Today, most literary magazines pay only in copies of their issues. Even the most established journal may pay only $100 to $250 for each story. So it’s great to see when authors get their short story collections published and find success. 

You can read the rest of the interview here.  

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I’ll be at the One Story booth at the AWP conference. If you’re going to be there, please stop by booths 324 & 325. It’s going to be a lot of fun! We’re also throwing a small party on Friday night, so please come by the booth to get the details.  

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In the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, there is a question and answer transcript of a conversation between four young literary agents. It’s a pretty good article which goes into detail in a candid way about the type of work literary agents are looking to represent. There’s a part of the interview which really surprised me.

Jeff Kleinman, an agent at the Graybill & English Literary Agency  cofounder of Folio Literary Management, said that he didn’t read short stories because, “It’s totally boring.” So I guess you all should stop sending him query letters for your story collections.

Later on, another agent says that story collections are “hard because ninety percent of the world doesn’t want to read them.”

I think part of the problem with short stories is that it isn’t mainstream. Therefore, people who love them should support them and part of that support comes from our collective purchasing power. I buy short story collections all the time. About half of my bookshelves are devoted to short story collections.

If you love short stories, think about showing your support by subscribing to a literary magazine (like One Story!) and buying short story collections.

I think that short stories have made huge strides lately, especially with the popularity of short stories being made into movies and the success of Jhumpa Lahiri’s collections. 

Not everything is for everyone and although I don’t judge Jeff Kleinman for not liking short stories, it made me feel not-so-sorry for him when he admitted later to losing out on representing The Kite Runner.

Here’s the part of the interview about short stories: 

KLEINMAN: See, I don’t want to read short fiction. I don’t want to curl up with a collection of short stories. It’s totally boring.

BARER: You’re what’s wrong with literary fiction today.

ZUCKERBROT: It’s not boring at all! How can you say that?

KLEINMAN: I want to get captured by a book and find myself five hundred pages later—

BARER: You can be captured by a short story collection.

ZUCKERBROT: You totally can. Did you read Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler?

KLEINMAN: No, I keep falling asleep before I can get started on those things. I see their covers and I want to fall asleep.

BARER: Lorrie Moore? Alice Munro?

ZUCKERBROT: Did you ever read Eudora Welty?

BARER: This is why story collections are so fucking hard. Ninety percent of the world doesn’t want to read them.

Tell us what isn’t captivating you.

KLEINMAN: If I want to read a book, and I’m going to spend thirty bucks, I don’t want to read about a bunch of characters who are going to come and go. I want to fall in love with these characters. I want to fall in love with these characters and the world they’re living in so completely—

BARER: Julie Orringer! Jhumpa Lahiri! Nathan Englander! There are so many great collections out there.

ZUCKERBROT: What about the people who say, “I don’t have time to read a novel”? Short story collection! You can start and finish in a short period of time.

KLEINMAN: No, to me the reason they don’t have time to read is because the books are not keeping their interest.

What is not keeping their interest?

KLEINMAN: I think there’s so much MFA stuff with such a standard voice and such a standard protocol. Everything is—

BARER: Jim Shepard’s last short story collection!

KLEINMAN: I’m falling asleep already.

You can read the rest of the Q & A here. 

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