Psst! Agents and Publishers, Short Story Collections Aren't Poison

As I've said before, it's high time that publishers and agents stopped perpetuating the myth that there isn't an audience for short story collections. Two interviews I saw on the Web last week (via Twitter links) addressed this truism. First, this from an interview with Petina Gappah (An Elegy for Easterly) on the Short Review Web site:

I did not have a collection in mind at all, especially because very early on in my writing career, someone pretty high up in publishing had told me that there was no interest in story collections. So I wrote stories as a way of flexing my writing muscle, and to find my "voice," with no thought of collecting them in a single volume, until my agent . . . suggested putting them together in a single manuscript. I was stunned when Faber offered to publish them. This went against all that I had heard about publishers' loathing of short stories.

And James Lasdun addressed similar concerns in an interview he did for the Edinburgh Festival Guide, billed as "A Strident Defence of the Short Story":

Over the years James Lasdun has turned his pen to novels, screenplays, travel writing, journalism and poetry, but short stories are his current medium of choice, having recently published his third collection, It's Beginning to Hurt. Lasdun suggests that the short story should have great appeal ‘because it’s short, it’s quick and people have limited time and short attention spans. One would think it would fit right into the habits of mind that people have in this era.’ He offers a few hypotheses as to why it remains as the novel’s lesser-seen younger sibling. ‘I think there’s a feeling that this is an insider’s game, that it’s an artsy type of writing, and if you’re not part of that world then you might just be wasting your time and money and why not go out and get a novel by some novelist that you know and love?’

There was also a provocative post on the Rumpus last week, as well as one on the One Story blog.

The fact is, some short story collections have sold very well in the last year or two. Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge has been on the New York Times trade paperback list for 16 weeks. And, Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth was number one on the hardcover fiction list last year and is having a substantial run (18 weeks so far) on the trade paperback list. Stephen King's Just After Sunset also hit the best-seller list last year. Wells Towers' Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, made some extended best-seller lists a few months ago. The Best American Short Stories routinely sells more than 100,000 copies a year. And I'm sure Science Fiction and Horror collections and anthologies, which are often overlooked in these discussions, draw a very solid audience. They're certainly staples of these genres and worth reading.

I know, Strout won the Pulitzer Prize--but I'd bet her collection has sold better than many novels that have won the same award. Oh, and Jhumpa Lahiri is a perpetual best-seller--but the book that put her on the map was another short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (also a Pulitzer winner). When all is said and done, her two short story collections have probably sold as well as her novel, The Namesake, which had the advantage of being made into a film. Of course, Stephen King is Stephen King--I have nothing to counter that, of course.

The point is, story collections aren't poison, and agents and publishers should stop treating them as such. Collections by established writers with strong followings will still sell. And debut collections probably perform no worse than debut novels. Story collections that get support from publishers and reviewers (as in Towers' case), have a chance to find an audience. In addition, I have no doubt that the digital age is going to be a boon to the short story, as shortness becomes a greater advantage.

I could go on and on and on (and no doubt will). But the bottom line is: Writers should keep writing stories. And agents and publishers should stop repeating empty truisms and get behind short story collections instead of offering resistance.

The Web Cast of The Story Prize Event: Jhumpa Lahiri, Joe Meno, and Tobias Wolff

For those who missed it (and those who want to see it again and again and again), the Web cast of The Story Prize event is up on FORA.tv. In case you've forgotten, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joe Meno, and Tobias Wolff (spoiler alert!)—the winner—read from their work and discussed it onstage. And by the way, that's novelist Helen Schulman introducing the event. She's head of the fiction writing department at the New School.

The evening is always a blur to me, so I'm glad that I can watch it later and critique my own performance. I don't prepare questions ahead of time, so I'm never quite sure what I've said.

Some things I didn't remember from my conversations with the three finalists:

• Jhumpa Lahiri talking about how her children keep her grounded as a writer.
• Joe Meno comparing his approach to writing to visual artists' approach to their work.
  
• Tobias Wolff revealing that a real-life bank robbery a friend had witnessed inspired him to write "Bullet in the Brain."
  

I'm also struck by how much each writer has to say about their thought processes.

Updates: More Honors for '08 Collections; Franco-phile or Franco-phobe?

All right, we're (almost) ready to (maybe) put last week's Story Prize event behind us (kind of). Here are a few short-fiction related items that have come up in recent days or that we were too obsessed to point out in the last few weeks. Of particular note: 2008's bumper crop of short story collections is still making news, as is an upcoming collection from a scruffy young talent. And the Pulitzers are yet to come (Apr. 20).

• Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth is the Europe and South Asia Regional winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. The overall winner will be announced on May 16. (Go, Jhumpa!) And Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them is in the running for the Best First Book.
• Tomorrow night the National Book Critics Circle will announce their award winners. Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, as previously noted, is among the fiction finalists.
• Joan Silber's The Size of the World is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction.
• Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's Ms. Hempel Chronicles was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award, which Joseph O'Neill's Netherland won.
• Actor James Franco sold a short story collection to Nan Graham at Scribner. He's currently a student in the MFA program at Columbia University. The stories are set in Palo Alto, Calif., whose high school he paid a visit to in November, 2007, in search of material (see photo). No doubt name (and face) recognition didn't hurt, but let's not be too hasty to pre-judge. Franco will be bringing some extra attention to short fiction, and that's generally a good thing.

Jhumpa Lahiri: What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say

That's Jhumpa Lahiri at the intermission to The Story Prize event on March 4. To her left and mostly obscured is fellow finalist Tobias Wolff. She was brilliant in conversation and provided the audience with interesting insights into her work during our onstage conversation. Here's what one of the judges had to say about Lahiri's exceptional short story collection Unaccustomed Earth:

“In what is only her second book of stories, Jhumpa Lahiri masterfully tells tales of people in today’s globalized, extended world. She depicts their efforts to discern the links of family, of love, both in the moment and over time and place. There is an assurance in these narratives, paced almost leisurely, yet carrying in many places those quickened moments when life or the perception of life is altered forever. The narrative perspectives themselves vary—third-person, first-, second- —in ways that make this feel like a volume of many voices. The interplay of characters who carry life with caution with those who act out of impulse or recklessness, and where it leads everyone, including the reader, is extraordinary.”

Scenes from The Story Prize: Joe Meno, Tobias Wolff, and Jhumpa Lahiri

photo © Eric Richards

In the days ahead, we'll be posting lots of pictures from The Story Prize event on our Web site. Here's one of this year's winner, Tobias Wolff, with fellow finalists Joe Meno and Jhumpa Lahiri at the post-event reception. Behind Lahiri, you can see her editor, Robin Desser.* The three finalists had never met before, but there was a nice feeling of fellowship among them, which you can clearly see in the photo. All three were incredibly nice, gracious, easy to talk to, smart, and truly interesting.

* Knopf's Desser also edits Edwidge Danticat and Nam Le, among others.

The Finalists: Professor Jhumpa Lahiri on mtvU

Pop quiz: What do these people have in common: Larry David, Mike Judge, Natalie Portman, Bill Gates, Snoop Dog, John McCain, Ashley Judd, Marilyn Manson, and Jhumpa Lahiri? Each appeared on an epsiode of mtvU's Stand-In, which punks college classes by replacing their professor with a celebrity instructor for the day. Dude!

Lahiri appeared as a special guest for a fiction writing class at Pace University in 2005, in an episode that was a collaboration between the short-lived MTV Desi, a channel aimed at South Asians in the U.S., and mtvU, a channel available on college campuses. She reads from her story "The Third and Final Continent" (though mtvU only has the attention span to show part of that) and answers students' questions.



Professor Lahiri will, of course, be appearing at The New School on Wednesday night, as a finalist for The Story Prize.

So Long, John Updike

Literary giant John Updike died today. His last short story collection--My Father's Tears and Other Stories--will be coming out in June. It will be his twelfth book of short stories, including a retrospective, The Early Stories: 1953-1975, published in 2003. It goes without saying that he was and will remain an important American short story writer, novelist, memoirist, critic, and poet.

A great book to read about Updike is Nicholson Baker's 1992 book, U and I, which chronicles Baker's near obsessive interest in the U of the title. Readerville is a good source for links to various obituaries and articles on Updike, as well as a place to throw in your two cents about him.

The New Yorker's Book Bench blog is running a series of reminiscences and homages that some of its regular contributors have written. It's interesting that writers such as George Saunders and T. Coraghessan Boyle never met John Updike. I've always thought of him as very accessible, but I guess he didn't make the scene too often.

I did in fact meet Updike once. It was in early 2000 at a book party at a New York restaurant for Best American Short Stories of the Century. My wife, Alice, and I were invited because Updike had chosen her story, "In the Gloaming," for the anthology. We milled about before approaching him, toward the end of the evening. Alice had been eager to meet Updike but was feeling a bit reticent about elbowing her way forward. I literally pushed her toward him. He was, as you'd expect, gracious. It felt odd to be standing near someone whose face I'd seen a hundred times on the backs of books and book flaps. I almost felt like reaching out to touch his aquiline nose or shaggy eyebrows. Updike told Alice that her story was one of his favorites in the book, which bowled her over. After what couldn't have been more than five minutes, we backed out of the circle so someone else could take our place.

Believe it or not, this anecdote connects to two of this year's finalists for The Story Prize. I met a nice young writer named Jhumpa Lahiri at the same party. Interpreter of Maladies was out, but it hadn't yet won the Pulitzer Prize. I had included the title story in Prize Stories 1999: The O. Henry Awards, so it was nice to chat with her for a few minutes. I imagine Lahiri met Updike that night, too. The second connection is that Tobias Wollf (who wasn't there) was the guest editor who had chosen "In the Gloaming" for The Best American Short Stories 1994. Without that, we wouldn't have even been in the room.

I had corresponded with Updike before then and after. He had politely declined offers to be a judge for the the first volume of the O. Henry Awards I edited or for the first year of The Story Prize or to read at the 92nd Street Y for the 80th anniversary of the O. Henry Awards. He always replied politely, via typed postcards that usually included an amusing sentence or phrase. Although I always expected to get a no from him, I firmly believed that the first writer I should ask to do anything was John Updike.

In 1990, he had contributed to my first book, Literary Outtakes (long out of print, I'm afraid), the original ending to his memoir Self-Consciousness, which took the form of an imagined dialogue between Oppositional Other (O.O.) and Self. The gist of it was that O.O. felt Self was being, well, self-indulgent. Updike ultimately and wisely went with a more conventional ending. Here's the last part of the two-page outtake:

I am weary of Self-Consciousness. What I have written here discomfits me; it is indiscreet and yet inaccurate, a greedy squandering of life's minute-by-minute savings, a careless provisional raid upon the abyss of being. Fiction, which does not pretend to be true, is much truer. This stuff is embarrassing. The reviewers will jump all over it. I think I'll save myself a peck of trouble and not publish.
Self: Oh, go ahead. It was written, after all, only by Updike; it has nothing to do with me.

The Story Prize Finalists Are Jhumpa Lahiri, Joe Meno, and Tobias Wolff

Well, we've chosen our finalists:

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf)
Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno (Akashic Books)
Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff (Knopf)

These are amazing books by extremely talented and accomplished authors. We're very much looking forward to The Story Prize Award event on March 4 at the New School. Details to follow.

This is just a placeholder, really. We'll provide more details and more detailed discussion of these books and authors in the days and weeks ahead. And we'll also soon put out our list of other notable short story collections published in 2008.

Unaccustomed Laughter

The New York Times Sunday Book Review has announced it's top ten books of 2008, culled from it's larger list of 100 books, as previously mentioned here. Five of the books are nonfiction and five fiction, including two short story collections: Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri and Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser. Represent!

Stephen King's Latest Equals 90+ Ordinary Short Story Collections

Here's a bit of news from Publishers Weekly:

Reflecting a market in which publishers are significantly reining in their printings, Stephen King’s Just After Sunset arrives Tuesday, November 11, with a 900,000 copy announced printing, down from the 1.25 million copies projected last summer.

I'm sure that may be disappointing to King and Scribner. But, if you figure that the average print run for a hardcover short story collection is probably under 10,000 (most far under), that means the print run for King's book is roughly equal to the combined run of 90 typical short story collections. That's more than the total number we'll receive as submissions to The Story Prize in 2008.

Put another way, if you were to place all of the printed copies of Just After Sunset on one side of a scale and all of the printed copies of nearly every other short story collection published in the U.S. this year on the other, the scale would probably tip King's way. I say nearly all, because Jhump Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, which for one week (lest we forget) sat atop the New York Times Best-Seller List, no doubt has far more than the average number of copies in print. If Just After Sunset reaches the top of the list in the weeks ahead, that will make two stoy collections at No. 1 in 2008. Not bad for a form many consider to be foundering.

Given King's megapopulatity, it's great that he writes stories because it means that many more people will read them. In fact, I'd guess that, given the powerhouse sales of his book and Lahiri's, more Americans will read a short story collection this year than any past year. King has been a generous supporter of short fiction and of other writers' collections. He also writes some darned good stories. So, literary readers, don't hate him because he's popular.

They Coulda Been Contenders

On Sept. 21, Jhumpa Lahiri will be in Cork, Ireland, to receive the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and its generous prize of 35,000 euros. We already know who the winner is because on July 5, the judges for the award announced that they were jumping right from their long list of thirty-nine books to naming Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth as the winner, bypassing the traditional announcement of a short list of four to six books.

The three judges felt strongly that Lahiri's book was far and away the best, but that's not a good reason to bypass the short list. A book award isn't just about choosing a winner; it's also about honoring other worthy books. Those named would have gotten some extra attention and presumably more readers--and the authors might be packing their bags to head to Ireland for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival, which begins on Sept. 17. Instead, everyone on the long list but Lahiri will stay home.

For most authors, being on a short list for a prestigious award adds a valuable credential. It could be the honor that tips the balance toward selling another book, having work reviewed, winning a grant, or getting a job. Announcing finalists can also stimulate discussion leading up to the announcement of the winner. A short list is not only good for the authors and publishers; it's good for the award itself.

The problem is, having judges choose both the short list (or finalists, as most U.S. book awards call them) and the ultimate winner isn't very logical. Why have a two-tiered process with the same group deciding in both instances? I'm sure judges for other prizes with similar procedures have been tempted to simply announce a winner, too. Mindful of this, we set up The Story Prize so that it really does have two tiers. Founder Julie Lindsey and I choose the three finalists, then turn those books over to three independent judges to choose the ultimate winner.

This isn't to pass judgment on the merits of the O'Connor Award's choice of a winner. Unaccustomed Earth has garnered loads of favorable reviews and sat atop the New York Times Best-Seller list for a week--an extraordinary accomplishment for a short story collection. It looks to be a serious contender not only for The Story Prize but also for the National Book Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award, PEN Faulkner, the Pulitzer, etc. Had the O'Connor judges called attention to other worthy books, it might have helped make those authors contenders as well, instead of being stranded on a long long list, which is what they were, let's face it.