Save the Short Story

Doesn’t everyone love Alice Munro? 

Alice Munro was announced as the winner of the third Man Booker International Prize. The panel made this comment: 

“Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every short story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.”

You can read more about the prize here. 

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Elizabeth Strout has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for “Olive Kitteridge,” a collection of 13 linked short stories. The stories are set in rural Maine and center around Olive Kitteridge, a seventh-grade teacher. 

Isn’t it great that people are recognizing great story collections?  I haven’t read it yet, but several of my friends have been telling me that it’s terrific. 

You can read more about her here.   

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Anne Sanow won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her short story collection Triple Time, which will be published in September. There were 300 works submitted. Ann Patchett, who works diligently to save the short story (and was kind enough to include two One Story stories when she edited the Best American Short Stories), judged the contest.

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize recognizes and supports writers of short fiction and makes their work available to readers around the world. The award is open to writers who have published a book-length collection of fiction or at least three short stories or novellas in commercial magazines or literary journals. 

The prize carries a cash award of $15,000 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press under its standard contract.  

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I’ll be at the One Story booth at the AWP conference. If you’re going to be there, please stop by booths 324 & 325. It’s going to be a lot of fun! We’re also throwing a small party on Friday night, so please come by the booth to get the details.  

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In the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, there is a question and answer transcript of a conversation between four young literary agents. It’s a pretty good article which goes into detail in a candid way about the type of work literary agents are looking to represent. There’s a part of the interview which really surprised me.

Jeff Kleinman, an agent at the Graybill & English Literary Agency  cofounder of Folio Literary Management, said that he didn’t read short stories because, “It’s totally boring.” So I guess you all should stop sending him query letters for your story collections.

Later on, another agent says that story collections are “hard because ninety percent of the world doesn’t want to read them.”

I think part of the problem with short stories is that it isn’t mainstream. Therefore, people who love them should support them and part of that support comes from our collective purchasing power. I buy short story collections all the time. About half of my bookshelves are devoted to short story collections.

If you love short stories, think about showing your support by subscribing to a literary magazine (like One Story!) and buying short story collections.

I think that short stories have made huge strides lately, especially with the popularity of short stories being made into movies and the success of Jhumpa Lahiri’s collections. 

Not everything is for everyone and although I don’t judge Jeff Kleinman for not liking short stories, it made me feel not-so-sorry for him when he admitted later to losing out on representing The Kite Runner.

Here’s the part of the interview about short stories: 

KLEINMAN: See, I don’t want to read short fiction. I don’t want to curl up with a collection of short stories. It’s totally boring.

BARER: You’re what’s wrong with literary fiction today.

ZUCKERBROT: It’s not boring at all! How can you say that?

KLEINMAN: I want to get captured by a book and find myself five hundred pages later—

BARER: You can be captured by a short story collection.

ZUCKERBROT: You totally can. Did you read Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler?

KLEINMAN: No, I keep falling asleep before I can get started on those things. I see their covers and I want to fall asleep.

BARER: Lorrie Moore? Alice Munro?

ZUCKERBROT: Did you ever read Eudora Welty?

BARER: This is why story collections are so fucking hard. Ninety percent of the world doesn’t want to read them.

Tell us what isn’t captivating you.

KLEINMAN: If I want to read a book, and I’m going to spend thirty bucks, I don’t want to read about a bunch of characters who are going to come and go. I want to fall in love with these characters. I want to fall in love with these characters and the world they’re living in so completely—

BARER: Julie Orringer! Jhumpa Lahiri! Nathan Englander! There are so many great collections out there.

ZUCKERBROT: What about the people who say, “I don’t have time to read a novel”? Short story collection! You can start and finish in a short period of time.

KLEINMAN: No, to me the reason they don’t have time to read is because the books are not keeping their interest.

What is not keeping their interest?

KLEINMAN: I think there’s so much MFA stuff with such a standard voice and such a standard protocol. Everything is—

BARER: Jim Shepard’s last short story collection!

KLEINMAN: I’m falling asleep already.

You can read the rest of the Q & A here. 

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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.   

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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. 

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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. 

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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.   

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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!!

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