America: Land of the Free and Home of the Short Story
The Hay Festival is going on in Wales right now and for those of you who have never heard of it, it’s basically a “Woodstock of the mind” (That’s a quote from Bill Clinton). Those Europeans always have the best festivals.
Lorrie Moore talked to Julian Barnes about short stories and someone in the audience posed the question:
”…we have this idea that in America the environment is much more receptive to short fiction. Is that really the case?”
John Freeman answers the question in his blog for The Guardian. He says:
America has three things that Britain doesn’t have which keeps our audience for short stories alive. For starters, we have a magazine and literary journal culture. Besides the New Yorker, Harper’s and The Atlantic, all of which still publish fiction, there are hundreds of literary journals in the US in which a writer can (try to) publish a story.
There are glorious old publications - like the Virginia Quarterly Review - which put out early work by Nadine Gordimer; experimental journals, like Fence, where a story can look more like a lyric essay; new journals, like McSweeney’s, where new voices and old maestros mix, and hundreds of journals associated with the universities which teach creative writing: the Louisville Review, the Harvard Review, the Kenyon Review.
You can read the rest of the post here.
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I am a lifelong fan of the short story form and continue to wonder why literary editors so often overlook its potential for developing a fan base that would be generate revenue. It seems to me that in this Twittering, texting, flash fiction life, sitting down with an engrossing short story is equivalent to taking a mini-vacation!
Comment by Lynn — June 6, 2009 @ 6:24 am