Opportunity, a collection of short stories written by Charlotte Grimshaw was awarded the Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry. The judges stated that the book was:

“By turns touching, funny, dark, and redemptive, this is a book for reading through then re-reading in a different order, for following clues, for setting aside and thinking about, and for getting lost in.” 

Grimshaw is the daughter of CK Stead, another New Zealand writer.  

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A few days ago I was trying to compile a list of short stories which were adapted into movies. The first one that came to mind was “Brokeback Mountain.” Then I came up with a couple of great Stephen King stories –”The Body” (into Stand By Me) and “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” (The Shawshank Redemption) from his collection, Different Seasons. And of course there’s “Secretary” by Mary Gaitskill, but the short story is so different from the movie that I’m not sure it counts.

I did a google search and found this book and this other list.

Some of the ones in the book are:

The Minority Report
American Splendor
Memento
All About Eve
Rear Window
Rashomon
2001: A Space Odyssey
Bringing Up Baby
Meet John Doe
All About Eve
Psycho

Does anyone know of any more recent ones?

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If America is the land of the short story, then why is the largest prize for the short story awarded on the other side of the pond?

The BBC National Short Story Award is an annual award that celebrates the best contemporary British short story. The author gets 15,000 pounds, which is  about $30,000. For one story! This year there were 600 submissions. I’m actually a bit shocked that the number isn’t higher. One Story gets about that many submissions in two months and we’re not giving away nowhere near that kind of money.

Clare Wigfall’s story, The Numbers,  is the story of a woman with a preoccupation with the number 8 and was inspired by the American anthropologist Margret Fay Shaw, who visited the Outer Hebrides in the 1920s and stayed until her death at the age of 101.

You can listen to an excerpt online here.

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I met Nam Le at the last AWP and the thing that struck me as kind of cute is that he’s an Asian guy with an Australian accent. I have relatives who live all over the world, including Africa, so when they come to visit, I get to hear all sorts of crazy accents mixed in with their Chinese accent. Most of the time it does not work, but for some reason the Vietnamese/Australian thing seems to be a good combo, even though I generally don’t like Australian accents. Go figure.

 Nam Le has a book of short stories out entitled The Boat and I found an interview with him on laist.com.  When asked about how he came to write this collection, he said:

 “…I can tell you that I never imagined, as I was writing these stories, that they would end up in a collection… I was writing these stories just as I started seriously reading short stories, and in part the diversity in this book is attributable to my having become simultaneously smitten with so many stories of all shapes and narratives stripes. I wanted each of my stories to work completely on its own terms, to answer solely to its own aspirations.

As for how they came to be published – a couple of years ago I holed myself up for seven cold months on the top floor of a barn in Provincetown to work on a novel, but found myself compulsively returning to and rejigging these stories. Finally I set the novel aside, knuckled down on the stories, collated them and sent them to my agent to hold in escrow. (He too was waiting for my novel.) I told him not to let me touch the stories again. He read them, then told me he thought they were ready. At that point I realized how conventional wisdom in publishing works – it doesn’t really.” 

Check out the rest of the interview here. 

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I suppose this means that the five other people who published short story collections won’t be able to put “Nominated for the 2008 Frank O’Connor Award” on their resumes. 

The Director of the Award, Patrick Cotter said:

“With a unanimous winner at this early stage we decided it would be a sham to compose a shortlist and put five other writers through unnecessary stress and suspense. Not only were the jury unanimous in their choice of Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth as the winner, they were unanimous in their belief that so outstanding was Lahiri’s achievement in this book that no other title was a serious contender.”

Nice.

The awards ceremony will be held on September 21st, 2008 in Cork, Ireland, and it is the closing event for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival, which kicks off on September 17th.

The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award is an annual award of 35,000 euros, which makes it the world’s richest prize for the short story form. This short story prize is given to the author of the book judged to be the best collection of stories published in English for the first time anywhere in the world from September and August of any given year. If a translated book wins, the purse is shared by the author and translator. This award is in memory of the late Frank O’Connor.  

Check out their website for more information about the award and past winners.

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Peter Cole from Keyhole Magazine has started a postcard project. Every month they’re printing a short story (or a poem) on a postcard with some artwork and passing them out in different cities. This month it’s Nashville. They will also send the author (and any other willing volunteers) postcards to pass along in their hometowns. 

The short stories must be really short, about 200 words. I really like the idea of guerilla publishing. Let’s decorate the world with short stories.

Check out their guidelines here. 

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