The Christian Science Monitor has announced what they think are the best short story collections published this year. Of course Jhumpa Lahiri is in it, but so are Nam Le, Roddy Doyle, Cynthia Ozick, Elizabeth Strout, Uwem Akpan, Lara Vapnyar and Jane Gardam. 

Check it out here and their slideshow of the winning book covers. I know we’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I love looking at covers. 

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The fiction class I teach in Westchester started a few weeks ago and in my search for new books at the library, I discovered that the craft books for short story writing are arranged next to books on the art of fishing. I thought this was sort of appropriate.

My grandfather loves to fish and one time I asked if I could tag along and he said, “Well, if you want to sit around and do nothing for hours and hours in the hopes of catching a fish and getting a few minutes of excitement, you’re welcome to come along. However, I don’t think it will be much fun for you.”

I feel that writing is kind of like that description. You plug away and do the work and most days you might not feel that you accomplished much, but sometimes it’s writing the fifty pages that just don’t work to get to those two awesome pages which lead you into the real start of a story you wouldn’t be completely ashamed to admit came out of your thoughts.

What strikes me about each writing class I teach is that people don’t really understand the commitment it takes to write something worthwhile. No one would ever decide to run the NY Marathon and not work out for months and months. Yet, people feel that they can just pick up a pen and the words will pour forth. All you need is to attend a great workshop/seminar/conference and Voila!

I once overheard someone say, “I could have gotten into Harvard.” This kind of statement always gets under my skin because someone who could utter something like that just has no idea the amount of hard work it takes to accomplish something like that at the age of eighteen. Someone who could actually say something like, “I could have gotten into Harvard,” would never say that because she knows that it was that stupid B-minus in Biology class which pushed her right out of contention. All that childhood sacrifice and summers spent memorizing those stupid 604 vocabulary words for the SAT and weekends cleaning up mouse pee and praying for your Westinghouse project results go right out the window (and, most likely, into a lesser Ivy like Brown or Cornell–if you’re lucky).

So yes, I’ve heard there are some writers who whistle while they work. I think that’s great. But most of the time, it’s awful hair-pulling frustrating work, but you know that if you get up to boil a cup of tea, you might just open up that US Weekly your sister left behind when she stayed over for the weekend and you’ll never get that blob of an idea into any shape at all. So you stay seated. You keep fishing. 

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A few months ago, I attended an Amy Hempel reading and someone in the audience asked her if she has “graduated” to writing novels yet. You could see her bristle and she told him very firmly that she just wasn’t interested in writing novels. The novel’s loss is the short story’s gain, and recently Amy Hempel was the winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, a $30,000 prize.

 The Rea Award for the Short Story is given annually to a living American of Canadian writer whose published work has made a significant contribution in the discipline of the short story as an art form. Is is not given for a collection of stories or for a body of work, but rather for originality and influence on the genre. 

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Steven Millhauser wrote an essay about the short story in the New York Times:

The novel is insatiable — it wants to devour the world. What’s left for the poor short story to do? It can cultivate its garden, practice meditation, water the geraniums in the window box. It can take a course in creative nonfiction. It can do whatever it likes, so long as it doesn’t forget its place — so long as it keeps quiet and stays out of the way. “Hoo ha!” cries the novel. “Here ah come!” The short story is always ducking for cover. The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence. 

For all its short storiness, he says that the short story has a “littleness (that) is the agency of its power.” I think we can all agree with him.

Read the rest of it here.

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Almost every short story writer dreams that her work will pique the interest of those in Hollywood and be made into a film, but the audience for a film may be a different type of person than a reader of short stories.  

 According to an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Annie Proulx shares with us the effect of the success “Brokeback Mountain” has had on her career:

“Brokeback Mountain” has had little effect on my writing life, but is the source of constant irritation in my private life. There are countless people out there who think the story is open range to explore their fantasies and to correct what they see as an unbearably disappointing story. They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for “fixing” the story. They certainly don’t get the message that if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it. Most of these “fix-it” tales have the character Ennis finding a husky boyfriend and living happily ever after, or discovering the character Jack is not really dead after all, or having the two men’s children meet and marry, etc., etc. Nearly all of these remedial writers are men, and most of them begin, “I’m not gay but….” They do not understand the original story, they know nothing of copyright infringement—i.e., that the characters Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar are my intellectual property—and, beneath every mangled rewrite is the unspoken assumption that because they are men they can write this story better than a woman can. They have not a clue that the original “Brokeback Mountain” was part of a collection of stories about Wyoming exploring mores and myths. The general impression I get is that they are bouncing off the film, not the story. There’s more, but that is enough, ok?

Proulx shares where she gets ideas for her stories, how she comes up with names for her characters, and why she thinks the short story is the superior literary form. 

The interview can be found here.  

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David Foster Wallace, the brilliant writer who gave us “Girl With Curious Hair,” died yesterday. He was 46.

 A little over ten years ago I lived with a roommate, a person with such a superiority complex that she made fun of every musician I liked and every book I owned. I returned home one day to find her sprawled out on our ugly green sofa with my copy of Girl With Curious Hair. She looked up at me with her eyes sort of glossed over and said, “This is the first time I’ve ever read anything that describes life EXACTLY.”

There aren’t too many writers I admire more than David Foster Wallace. This evening, as I turned on my computer and I spotted his name on the news tab on Yahoo’s homepage, I couldn’t believe what I had read. 

Depression is such a misunderstood disease. I’ve always felt that it should be treated like any other illness. My husband’s coworker has just been diagnosed with lymphoma and she has the complete support of her friends and family. Her bosses have moved her into a cleaner office so that her immune system isn’t compromised. Her coworkers have taken on a lot of her work load so that she has more energy to recover. People should take a depression diagnosis just as seriously. 

If you are depressed, please get help. If you know someone who is depressed, please know that they need help, because they do, even if they turn you away. Please don’t turn your back on them. Tell them they are not alone. More importantly, tell them you love them. Take them to a movie. And if they don’t want to get out of bed to go to a movie, bring a television set and VCR to their college dorm room and sit with them through a really stupid science fiction movie. That’s what someone did for me and it has made all the difference. 

Now go hug someone and take a walk in the rain just because you can. Life is good.  

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One Story will have a table at the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday, so if you’re in town, come by and say hello. There are also tons of readings, check out the schedule here. 

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When I was growing up, I actually thought that Superman existed because I watched a show about Superman that was set up like a fake news report and the anchorwoman looked right at the camera and said, “So, if you happen to be on this street corner, look up, because you just might see Superman.”

I also believed in The Incredible Hulk because my parents took me to Hollywood and I actually met him. He was green, with what appeared to be very real greenish hair, large muscles, and I saw him lift a car up with one arm. I saw this with my own eyes. My parents got me an Incredible Hulk mug, cereal bowl, and dinner plate and I ate almost every childhood meal out of dishware emblazoned with The Hulk. The school week was bookended by Little House on the Prairie on Mondays and The Incredible Hulk on Fridays. The only two hours of television I was allowed to watch. Why can’t they make a decent movie about my favorite green superhero?
I believe in the power of superheroes. And now superheroes are in short stories.

Owen King, the author of One Story Issue 85, “The Cure,” is the editor of a new book of short stories about superheroes. It’s called (very appropriately) Who Can Save Us Now?  One of my favorite One Story stories, “Girl Reporter” by Stephanie Harrell, is also included in the anthology.

If you’re in NYC, stop by Piano’s on September 5th . Owen King, Kelly Braffet and Stephanie Harrell will be reading at around 7pm. Afterwards, we are also holding a Superhero costume contest, so bring your capes!

Read up on what the press is saying about this book in the NY Post, Paste Magazine, bookgasm, & The New Yorker.

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Apparently there is a lot of trouble brewing in Canada over the publication of The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, edited by the author Jane Urquhart. 

Two Canadian literary magazines, The New Quarterly and Canadian Notes & Queries have jointly responded to this book and have called their movement a “Salon des Refuses” (named after an exhibition of artists excluded from the Paris Salon in 1863). These magazines recently sent out two new issues featuring stories by authors excluded from the Penguin book as well as essays criticizing Urquhart and the anthology. 

Urquhart then responded to this by saying that omissions to any collection are inevitable: 

“I, too, very much admire many of the authors that have been included in the Salon des Refuses…If they were excluded, they were excluded for any number of reasons, quality not being the primary one…You have to leave people out - that’s the way it is…It’s quite upsetting when one does the best one can do under a certain mandate, and is then attacked for something outside that mandate.

“You can read more about the Salon des Refuses here and Urquhart’s response here. 

Every year I look forward to the O. Henry, Best American Short Story, and Pushcart Prize collections to see if One Story has been included. It’s wonderful when we are, but we also understand when some of what we feel were our best stories don’t make the cut.

I feel that, as editors, we should understand more than most that there are a lot of great stories out there that get whittled out for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. There are only 20 stories in the Best American Short Stories collection, so there’s only so many stories that can be included. By the same token, One Story whittles down all the hundreds of great stories that are sent to us every year to only 18 issues a year. And yes, we get plenty of hate mail for that.

Can’t we all just get along? I think it would have been great to publish stories by authors who were not included in the Penguin book as an add-on without criticizing the editor of the Penguin book.  

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To piggy-back on one of my last posts about short stories that have been made into films, here is a list from ifc.com of novels and short stories that would make good movies. Here is the list. 

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