Save the Short Story

One Story is celebrating our debut and emerging authors at our first-ever benefit on May 21, 2010. The highlight will be the formal “presentation” of writers who have made their debuts in One Story. Each writer will be “escorted” by an established author who has served as their mentor. John Hodgman will be announcing our “debs.”  

Carolyn Kellogg recently wrote about our ball on Jacket Copy, the LA Times books blog and she says to: “Expect hilarity to ensue.” 

Click here to read the article.   

If you’d like to find out more information or buy tickets to the ball, click here.  

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Recently, three new literary biographies about Flannery O’ Connor, John Cheever, and Donald Barthelme have placed a new spotlight on the short story. 

A. O. Scott wrote a piece in the NY Times this past weekend about the new resurgence of the short story. He writes:

Reading through their collected stories, you wonder if novels are even necessary. The imperial ambitions of a certain kind of swaggering, self-important American novel — to comprehend the totality of modern life, to limn the social, existential, sexual and political strivings of its citizens — start to seem misguided and buffoonish. More of life is glimpsed, and glimpsed more clearly, through Barthelme’s fragments, Cheever’s finely ground lenses or the pinhole camera of O’Connor’s crystalline prose.

You can read the rest of the article here. 

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Who would have thought that almost a hundred years after his death, we would be able to read a new Mark Twain story?

Apparently, “The Undertaker’s Tale,” was discovered in the Mark Twain (or Samuel Clemens) archive. The story is going to be published in the quarterly mystery magazine the Strand. 

Supposedly, it’s not the greatest story (according to Carolyn Kellogg’s LA Times article). I wonder if this was a story that Mark Twain wanted people to read since he never published it in his lifetime.

You can read the Kellogg article here. 

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Last night Tobias Wolff won The Story Prize for his new collection of short stories, Our Story Begins. It’s basically the equivalent of a Greatest Hits album. During his interview with Larry Dark, he mentioned that he didn’t want this book to be a complete compilation since that might be a bit “too funereal.” 

Jhumpa Lahiri was the first to read and she chose the story Hell-Heaven. I had read this story twice before, but hearing her, I noticed several new things, such as the description of the safety pins in the early part of the story, which come into play at the end. 

Later, Joe Meno read from his story, Frances the Ghost. I hadn’t read his work before, but the story was funny and heartbreaking and sad and courageous. He said that he wrote it because of a girl he once knew who was braver than all the other neighborhood kids and he modeled Frances after her. Some stories are meant to be read aloud and this is one of them. 

For some reason, I predicted that Tobias Wolff would read Bullet in the Brain. I was introduced to this story by a fiction professor in college. The funny thing about it was that when she photocopied the story from the original magazine, she had neglected to copy the last page, not realizing that there had been another page, so we all assumed that the story ended abruptly, in the middle of a sentence. Which made complete sense to us since this guy just got shot in the head. 

The next week, one of us had discovered this mistake and after we read the last page, it spurred another discussion on how we had all completely believed in that story before we found out there was another page. It’s that sort of mastery of language that earns the trust of Wolff’s readers. 

On the ride home from the award ceremony, it occurred to me that what I love about short story writers is that they notice the small moments. It’s the small things that are drawn out and examined. Ultimately, in the end, I believe that’s what we’ll all remember best. 

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I first read “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” in Best American Short Stories and Karen Russell had one of the best new voices I had read in a long time. 

Today I came across an article about her and she said: 

“I really didn’t think people would read the stories. I wrote totally for pleasure without any idea about sales and critics,” said Russell, 27. “Now, I feel grateful and lucky.”

I’ve always felt it was a beautiful thing that people write short stories for love. There’s no fortune to be made and it’s not like the old days when a good short story writer could support a family simply by publishing in magazines. Today, most literary magazines pay only in copies of their issues. Even the most established journal may pay only $100 to $250 for each story. So it’s great to see when authors get their short story collections published and find success. 

You can read the rest of the interview here.  

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It’s Halloween, so I’ve been thinking about Zombies, which always makes me think of Kelly Link. The other day at an editorial meeting, a friend of mine told me a story about a doctor who cured people of irrational fears. One of his patients had an irrational fear of Zombies.

“What I don’t understand is why being afraid of Zombies is irrational?” My friend said. ”I mean, they’re SCARY!”

So I guess that makes it a totally rational fear.

Kelly Link recently gave an interview to The Nation. She was asked if people are always asking her if she is ever going to write a novel:

Yes. Part of me thinks it’s a reasonable question, and I also think, Well, if you like the short stories, shouldn’t you ask for more short stories? I don’t think there’s any guarantee that I would write novels that work in the same way the stories work. I don’t think I have the skill set yet. I would love to write a novel, but mostly because it seems like a shame not to try to do something that a lot of people want you to do. I feel sort of like a coward every time I start a short story. But I think I will always love short stories. I’m more excited by short story collections in general–a lot of the editing or anthology work I do is based around the short story. I love novels. Some of my best friends are novels! But I really love short stories best.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

And you can download her book, Stranger Things Happen, for free on her website.

Happy Halloween!

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kottke.org has compiled a list of links about David Foster Wallace, including interviews and personal remembrances from his ex-students. Harper’s magazine has put up everything Wallace had published in their magazine on their website, including a few short stories. Here are the rest of the links. 

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The New York Observer published an article recently that suggests that it may make more sense to publish essays and short stories piece-by-piece instead of compiled together in an anthology. If the reader is only interested in a few of the pieces, why pay $30 for the whole book?

The article went on to explain that there are many people who aren’t as interested in reading a large book, but may be interested in reading something shorter that’s written by the same author. Since we’ve all become a nation used to blogs and text messaging, shouldn’t short stories be more popular than ever? 

Perhaps the publishing industry should take a different approach with short stories.

You can read the rest of the article 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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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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