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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Many of my favorite fiction writers started out as poets. When I read a story I am much more interested in how the story is told than the story itself. The stories that come from poets tend to have a musical quality that must stem from paying extremely close attention to language.
Alice Fulton, who has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship for her poetry, is debuting her first fiction collection, The Nightingales of Troy: Connected Stories.
In an interview with The Boston Globe, the author is asked whether she considered writing this collection of short stories as a novel:
No. My initial intention was to learn to write fiction by writing short stories, because I had this notion that I could write them and throw them away if they didn’t work. It would be much harder to discard a novel. This was my way of learning different narrative techniques as well, because the short story allows that, whereas a novel would have demanded continuity of tone and style. I had a vague intention of evoking the linguistic qualities of particular epochs. “Happy Dust” has some qualities of 19th-century writing; the 1920s story is spare, more modern; the 1930s one seems to have a WPA feeling; and “The Real Eleanor Rigby” I tried to make as effervescent as a lava lamp.
The rest of the interview can be read here.
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While I was at the Lit-Mag Fair this past weekend, I got a great poster from the boys and girls at the Salt Hill booth and I told them that last year the girls from Pindeldyboz gave me a beautiful poster which is hanging up in my bathroom. I also display volume 2 in the cabinet and on more than one occasion someone comes out of the bathroom with the magazine and says, “This is great! What is a Pindeldyboz?”
When I asked them where Pindeldyboz was this year, I was sadly informed by John Holliday that Pindeldyboz is no longer in print. I will miss their printed issues, which always had great covers, but the good news is that the magazine is still up and running — and now it’s free online.
Kelly Shriver’s short story from their February 21 issue,”The Ethical Dilemma of a Sandwich Down the Pants,” is one of ten stories in the running for The Million Writers Award (That’s another reminder for you to vote if you haven’t done so already — you can cast your vote here until July 17).
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The Literary Magazine Fair is an annual event hosted by the clmp every year. Tomorrow (June 15) it will be held at the Housing Works Used Book Cafe (126 Crosby Street). All literary magazines will be on sale for only $2!
A lot of literary editors will be there (including me) so come join us and I hope to meet some of you there. I’ll be the one wearing the One Story T-shirt.
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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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What a great idea - Sniplets.com is the short story’s answer to itunes. They’re basically audio short stories you can purchase and download. I like to listen to audiobooks in my car, but sometimes it will be a week before I take another drive long enough to get back into the novel, and by that time, I’ll have lost the momentum of the story.
With Sniplets, you can listen to a 10-minute story for that quick ride down to your friend’s house or a short subway ride.
The service categorizes stories in time increments, like 2 minute or 20 minute stories, by author, title, and genre.
As a member of Sniplets, you’ll get a free audio short story each week.
Also, for those short story writers out there, they accept submissions! Unfortunately, they’re 6 months behind on their reading.
Popularity: 39% [?]
Penguin UK launched a digital writing project that married reality games to short story writing. The site is called We Tell Stories and the ambition is to create new forms of the story for the internet age.
I browsed through the site and it’s interesting, but I don’t know about its literary merit. “Fairy Tales” by Kevin Brooks is kind of like an internet version of Mad Libs. You choose the name of the princess and king and what type of characters they come across. This might be fun for grade-school kids.
“The (Former) General In His Labyrinth” by Mohsin Hamid is a very slow-moving choose-your-own-adventure story. And once you go on a tangent, you have to click back (and back and back) in order to get to the original story, which slowed down the action.
I thought that all the interactive clicking bogged down the actual “story” part of the experience, but I think Penguin may just be doing this to launch their contests and push the books they’re selling. I think that this idea could have been executed better, and I’m sure we’ll see more sites like this in the future.
Unfortunately, the contests are only open to residents of the UK (darn!) - but the website is fun games for all.
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