Jeff Kleinman Hates Short Stories
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.
Popularity: 65% [?]
So, I guess this asshat eats only fast food and prefers postage stamps to murals.
Comment by Garry — February 3, 2009 @ 6:36 pm
Not sure what I meant by the above. I was half-asleep and kind of angry that this guy has belittled the short story like he has. Plus, I find it depressing. There’s one less person who will fight for short story writers.
Comment by Garry — February 4, 2009 @ 11:40 am
Boy, I wonder what *he’s* been reading.
Comment by Heather S. Ingemar — February 12, 2009 @ 10:13 pm
I liked his candor– a lot of people are bored by short stories. I think it was telling that he said a lot of them have the same tone. I’m always looking for fiction that is very contemporary– has a stylish tone, a sense of humor, about unusual or new things– and that is hard to come by in short stories. Also, collections of short stories tend to run one into the other– which one is the best? Where do you start? Onestory is the first idea that has attracted my interest in the form recently. For some reason, collections of stories really turn me off, but I’ll read a standalone short story in the New Yorker, for example. I can assume that the story selected is of high quality, is worth my time, and I don’t need to make decisions about where to focus. I think in this era of multiple entertainment distractions, guidance and curation are important. The way people consume information is changing, and I like to see the story format adapt and survive.
Comment by Cheryl — March 1, 2009 @ 11:03 am
The beauty of a short is that you can hold it all in your head and examine it for days. There tends to be one pure, bright-shining moment that stays with you. The trick is to only read one at a time, and then - dare I say it? - THINK about it. One Story does so much for the form because it encourages just this thing.
Comment by Cortney — March 11, 2009 @ 11:35 pm
Cheryl
You are looking for stories that are “very contemporary [with] a stylish tone, a sense of humor, about unusual or new things”: ZZ Packer, Miranda July, Judy Budnitz, Sherman Alexie, Aimee Bender…keep going… and for heaven’s sake everyone on the right rail of this website, not to mention the more “out there” stylists like Gary Lutz and Ben Marcus, and on, and on. I in fact think it’s easier to find inventiveness in the modern American story than in the modern American novel. Though that, of course, can also be disproven and it’s really a rather stupid point to make in the first place, pitting one form against the other the way this fellow does. Anyone who says they don’t like short stories is just biased, uninformed, lazy, unawakened to the possibilities. There is no difference between short stories and novels when it comes to exemplars of the form: the good ones are good and the bad ones are bad. What is tedious and tonally dull in stories is every bit the same in novels–only worse, cause you have to endure it longer. Yes, i too have been bored by many stories in the New Yorker and elsewhere, stories that seem formally unengaging to me and of a certain familiar tone and stripe. But there is so much that is phenomenal and fantastic out there and you bump right into it when you make even the most cursory investigation into the short story form.
This guy, when he says “I’m falling asleep already” is trying to be witty but he just sounds illiterate to me. What, hasn’t he heard of George Saunders? Wells Tower? What a toss.
Comment by Amanda Gersh — April 14, 2009 @ 1:03 pm
Although I’ve had some success in publishing my stories, I must agree with Kleinman — who, by the way, had some interest in a non-fiction book I had written but in the end rejected it. “I think there’s so much MFA stuff with such a standard voice and such a standard protocol.” Yes. “How-to” academia killed the short story for the general population. It killed the creativity that older masters such as Mark Twain displayed. It discouraaged individual thinking and, to a large extent, individual voices and intuition. A fairly successful novel and story writer told me recently he only got an MFA, because most rules-driven editors wouldn’t have paid any attention to him without it. OF COURSE the general public isn’t interested in today’s short fiction. Most of their authors are writing only for each other.
And Proulx’s comment: “The audience for a film may be a different type of person than a reader of short stories.” They are NOW, yes. Who made that happen? Almost everybody read stories by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lardner, etc., in the general interest mags. General interest readers liked them. Now I hear Saturday Evening Post is going to start publishing short stories again. We’ll see how that works out. I’ll be the first in line with submissions. Prediction: If SEP follows academia guidelines, it will soon drop short stories again. Speaking of rules — Proulx meant “different type of person FROM,” not “THAN.”
Comment by Carole Carlson — July 27, 2009 @ 9:48 am