Although John Updike may have been better known for his novels, he was once described by Lorrie Moore as, “quite possibly. . . American literature’s greatest short story writer, and arguably our greatest writer.”
Updike received two Pulitzer Prizes for his Rabbit series and won the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his large anthology of short stories, The Early Stories 1953-1975. In the preface for that collection, he wrote that his intention had been to “give the mundane its beautiful due.” In 2006 Updike was also awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement.
You can read more about his career here and here.
Popularity: 44% [?]
The Story Prize, an annual award for a book of short fiction, has announced the finalists from the works published in 2008. The three books were chosen from 73 collections published by 56 publishers.
The finalists are:
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno
Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff
This year’s judges are Daniel Menaker, Rick Simonson, and One Story’s Hannah Tinti.
The Story Prize ceremony will take place at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in NYC at 7:30pm Wednesday, March 4. The three finalists will read selections from their work, after which Larry Dark will interview each writer on-stage. The winner will receive $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. The two runners-up will receive $5,000.
It’s a fun event. Last year, the winner was the person who was slated to read last (and set apart in the program). I wonder if they’ll change it up this year so it’s a little less obvious and more of a surprise.
Popularity: 42% [?]
Hortense Calisher, author of more than 20 books and a four-time winner of the O. Henry Prize for the short story, died on Tuesday.
Calisher once said about writing:
”I’ve said that anything can be written about. I think that nothing is too sacred to be written about, and if it is sacred, you would want to be sacred writing it.”
You can read more about her here.
Popularity: 33% [?]
My friend Rachel Cantor forwarded a new website she found on Facebook. I really must start to venture into Facebook, even if people do post pictures of their babies (instead of themselves) on their profiles–something I find kind of creepy.
Andrew’s Book Club features two short story collections a month. The idea is to purchase short story collections and use our collective purchasing power to send a message to the publishing industry. The message is: “We Love Short Stories!”
This month’s indie pick for the book club is Allison Amend’s short story collection, Things That Pass for Love.
Coincidentally, Allison Amend is this month’s One Story Reading Series author, so please come by, check out the reading and buy her book.Click here to find out more about the reading.
Popularity: 49% [?]
It’s no mystery that I’m not very great with technical things and apparently it took a very nice person named Tyler C. Gore from Literal Latte to notice that our site had been hacked by pharmaceutical spam. I guess that’s why this site was getting tons of spam emails from people wanting me to improve my size.
Hopefully, our webmaster has fixed the problem. I just approved a bunch of comments that had been lost to the murky mire of Viagra Spams. All those comments are now on the website. Sorry about that.
Please take the time to see what some people thought…a few months ago.
This is also a great time to check out Literal Latte. I remember picking up copies of Literal Latte in bookstores and shops while I was in college. It was kind of like the Craig’s List for the literary because it was distributed for free. And you know how New Yorkers love free stuff. Now the magazine is on the web and it prides itself on publishing new voices. 98% of what they publish comes from the slush pile. You can find their latest issue here.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
Popularity: 28% [?]
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.
Popularity: 31% [?]
I’ve always liked Stephen King’s short stories. In college, I had a copy of The Night Shift, which had a picture of a hand with eyes on the fingertips. Whenever my roommate saw that the cover was facing up, she’d turn it over.
I think his writing has that affect on a reader–those scary stories have a strange ring of truth to them–and they get under your skin.
In the introduction to his latest collection of short stories, Just After Sunset, Stephen King tells his readers that he was inspired to turn to short stories again during the time he was editing the Best American Short Stories 2007.
So short stories can create other short stories. That’s good to hear.
Popularity: 34% [?]
It’s Halloween, so I’ve been thinking about Zombies, which always makes me think of Kelly Link. The other day at an editorial meeting, a friend of mine told me a story about a doctor who cured people of irrational fears. One of his patients had an irrational fear of Zombies.
“What I don’t understand is why being afraid of Zombies is irrational?” My friend said. ”I mean, they’re SCARY!”
So I guess that makes it a totally rational fear.
Kelly Link recently gave an interview to The Nation. She was asked if people are always asking her if she is ever going to write a novel:
Yes. Part of me thinks it’s a reasonable question, and I also think, Well, if you like the short stories, shouldn’t you ask for more short stories? I don’t think there’s any guarantee that I would write novels that work in the same way the stories work. I don’t think I have the skill set yet. I would love to write a novel, but mostly because it seems like a shame not to try to do something that a lot of people want you to do. I feel sort of like a coward every time I start a short story. But I think I will always love short stories. I’m more excited by short story collections in general–a lot of the editing or anthology work I do is based around the short story. I love novels. Some of my best friends are novels! But I really love short stories best.
You can read the rest of the interview here.
And you can download her book, Stranger Things Happen, for free on her website.
Happy Halloween!
Popularity: 43% [?]
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.
Popularity: 34% [?]
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.
Popularity: 34% [?]
