Save the Short Story

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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Sorry that the postings have been very light this past week, but I just found out last Friday that I had to move out by the end of the month! So I’ve spent the last few days packing and labeling boxes. I’m sitting in the corner of my new living room surrounded by boxes upon boxes of my stuff. Add to that, my husband and I picked up a stray cat (actually, she picked us) who is not getting along with my two dogs. Things are a bit hectic here. Does anyone want a very nice black-and-white kitty? We can’t decide on a name yet. I suggested Emily Mortimer, but my husband hates that so right now we’ve been calling her Meow Meow a.k.a. The Unnamed Emily Mortimer Project.

With all this going on, I haven’t been able to search the internet for short story tidbits. Luckily, Jenny Shank from Books and Writers newwest.net sent me a link to her interview with Steven Wingate, the winner of the Bakeless Prize last year for his story collection, “Wifeshopping.” He used his tax refund to enter a variety of short story prizes at literary magazines and won several of them. He sent his collection around eighteen times before he won Bakeless.

Let’s all use our tax refund this year to save the short story!The interview can be found here. 

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