Canadian Short Story Controversy
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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