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.

Joe Meno: What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say

Joe Meno was a revelation to much of the audience at The Story Prize event on March 4. His book, of course, wasn't nearly as well known as those of the other two finalists, Jhumpa Lahiri and Tobias Wolff, but by the end of the evening, the signed copies of Demons in the Spring had sold out. In our onstage conversation, he explained the theme of disaster that runs through the stories in the collection and the significance of the title. Here’s what the judges had to say:

“Playful and moving, inventive and sharp—each story in Joe Meno’s Demons in the Spring takes our understanding of the world and gives it a twist. Wives turn into clouds, tiny elephants sniff out missing children, and miniature cities glow underneath our skin. There are also factual elements—bits about Iceland (a travel guide that includes climate and population), Stockholm Syndrome (a retelling of the events that coined the phrase), and the Unabomber (including his actual mailing address in jail)—that serve as platforms to investigate deeper issues of the soul.

“In lesser hands, these unconventional forms and outlandish leaps of imagination would feel like empty concepts, but Meno fills each of these stories to the brim with heart. There is true emotion hiding behind every trick mirror, and it comes across in spades. As I finished each story, I found myself looking forward to the next, wondering what Meno would surprise me with. But what sets this collection apart, and moved me the most, was that his characters consistently choose hope over despair. Meno brings great skill to every line, and proves, as in his story, ‘The Architecture of the Moon,’ that human connection can be the small light used to illuminate a great darkness.”

photo © Eric Richards

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: Joe Meno, the 'New' Writer Who's Published Six Books

As a finalist for The Story Prize, Joe Meno joins the company of two widely known authors--Jhumpa Lahiri and Tobias Wolff. While Meno may seem like a newcomer to some, however, he has already published four novels and has another, The Great Perhaps, coming out in May. Not only that, Demons in the Spring is his second story collection. That's impressive output from the 34 year-old Chicagoan, who also writes plays.

Meno's work has inspired a couple of short films--one of a story, "Our Neck of the Woods," and the other of his first novel, Tender as Hellfire--as well as this trailer (which unabashedly appropriates Wes Anderson's style) for his most recent novel, The Boy Detective Fails.



There will be more on Joe Meno to come in the weeks leading up to The Story Prize event on March 4. For now, here's a bibliography of his work (in backwards chronological order):

The Boy Detective Fails (Akashic Books, 2006)
Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir: Short Stories (Triquarterly, 2005)
Hairstyles of the Damned (Akashic/Punk Planet, 2004)
How the Hula Girl Sings (Akashic, 2001)
Tender as Hellfire (Akashic, 1999)

The Short List, Long List, Other Notable Books--Whatever

It looks like it's going to take me a little while to post a page of Other Notable Books published in 2008 (which is what we call our shortlist/longlist) on The Story Prize Web site. That's because I write a paragraph on each book, and that involves flipping through the collections again to refresh my memory and sometimes rereading a story or two. So I guess I might as well just go ahead and put out the list. Here it is:

A Better Angel by Chris Adrian (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan (Little Brown)
The Development by John Barth (Houghton Mifflin)
The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier (Pantheon)
Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (Harcourt)
The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford (HarperCollins)
I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass (Pantheon)
The Boat by Nam Le (Knopf)
Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser (Knopf)
Fine Just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx (Scribner)*
Glass Grapes and Other Stories by Martha Ronk (BOA Editions)
The Size of the World by Joan Silber (W.W. Norton)
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
Legend of a Suicide by David Vann (University of Massachusetts Press)

Compare this list to the tally I made in December of short story collections named to yearend best books list (or don't because I'm about to), and you'll see a lot of overlap. Ten of the 14 books on this list, plus two of our finalists (Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth and Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins)--for a total of 12--overlapped with the 22 books listed on that post. I'd add, that six of those books weren't entered for The Story Prize, so it's really 12 out of 16.

On the other hand, there are five books on our list that I didn't see mentioned in any yearend lists (though in all fairness I stopped counting on Dec. 15). What explains this? For one, there's the old (but true) saw that there's no accounting for taste. Secondly, we probably read more story collections than anyone picking books for those lists, so our field was bigger.

Still, I can't help but feel that some very good books were overlooked. To begin with, I didn't see finalist Joe Meno's Demons in the Spring on any yearend list and, obviously, if we think it's good enough to be a finalist, we feel like that's a major ommission. Demons was well-reviewed when it was reviewed, which wasn't enough. I also find it surprising that I didn't see John Barth's The Development--which gave me as much pleasure as any book I read--on any lists.

In any event, I'll give some of my thoughts on particular books on this list in upcoming posts and say more about our finalists soon.

* Note: We got Annie Proulx's collection in galley form, hence the white spine on the book fifth from the right.

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.