Meet The Story Prize Judges: Arsen Kashkashian, Noreen Tomassi, and Laura van den Berg

We're pleased to announce our judges for 2014: Arsen Kashkashian, bookseller at the Boulder Book Store in Colorado; Noreen Tomassi, Executive Director of The Center for Fiction in New York; and award-winning author Laura van den Berg. They will choose the winner of The Story Prize from among the three books we choose as finalists. This is our eleventh slate of judges and, since our inception, we have included participants from a variety of fields associated with short fiction: writers, editors, booksellers, librarians, critics, journalists, and academics.

We also have a firm date for The Story Prize event, at which we'll announce the winner that Arsen, Noreen, and Laura will choose: March 4, 2015, at the auditorium at The New School. As always, the event is open to the public. We'll have more information when we announce our three finalists in January.

Jonathan Woods and The Hard-Boiled Tradition

In the third in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Jonathan Woods, author of Phone Call from Hell and Other Tales of the Damned (New Pulp Press) talks genre.

The post-modern romp, Flaubert’s Parrot, which appeared on the literary scene in 1984, made Julian Barnes’ reputation. But his two best books, published in 1980 and 1981 under the nom de plume Dan Kavanagh, are Duffy and Fiddle City. I have read each multiple times. They are crime novels.

Both books feature the bisexual ex London cop, turned purveyor of private investigator services, named Duffy. An odd duck with a gold stud in his ear, he knows his way around the seedier parts of London like the back of his hand.

Tawdry, violent, funny, politically incorrect, eccentric, sexy, well-plotted, entertaining, smart, clever, and a telling commentary on the dark side. These are the attributes of Duffy and Fiddle City. What more could you want from a book? Yet, as was recently suggested in an article in The Guardian, the Man Booker prize-winning author is ambivalent about claiming ownership of them, even as they are again in print after a long hiatus.

a.k.a. Julian Barnes

Is this just one more example of a “literary” type fearful of being categorized as a genre writer? A mere entertainer?

I can’t speak directly to Mr. Barnes views. “Never met the bloke,” as Duffy might say.

But a quick jog down two centuries of American writers shows Mr. Barnes’ reserve in acknowledging his charmingly off-center private eye creation to be misplaced.

Edgar Allan Poe, one of the cornerstones of American literature, invented the detective story with his renown novella, “Murder in the Rue Morgue.” The subject matter of Poe’s most famous tales reads like crime fiction 101: madness, axe murders, evil eyes, revenge, sexual obsession, giant apes tearing people limb from limb.

James M. Cain invented the noir sensibility in his two masterpieces, The Postman Always Rings Twice, published in 1934, and Double Indemnity, published two years later. In both stories lust and obsession lead inevitably to madness and murder. Classic noir follows an ordinary person whose life suddenly tumbles out of control, bound straight to hell. Noir explores the dark aspects of the human psyche and the haphazardness and irrationality of our existence. In it are the roots of existential philosophy, which sees the world as absurd and without meaning, where bad luck and trouble can happen to anyone, anywhere, without notice.

It is well acknowledged that Camus was influenced by Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice when he wrote his most famous work, The Stranger, published in 1942. As Matthew Ward, who produced a new Americanized translation of The Stranger in 1988, said:

Camus admitted using an "American method," particularly in the first half of the book. He mentioned Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner and James M. Cain as influences. My feeling is that The Stranger is more like Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice than Camus cared to admit.

Next up is Raymond Chandler, who, together with Dashiell Hammett, is credited with inventing the American hard-boiled detective story. Chandler is one of the great literary stylists of American writing in the first half of the 20th Century. His The Big Sleep is ranked #26 in Time magazine’s list of the 100 Greatest Novels in English since 1923 (the year Time started publication). Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century lists The Big Sleep as #96.

The sensibility of noir, hard-boiled and detective fiction has inexorably insinuated itself into post-WWII American writing. Flannery O’Connor mixed murder with Catholicism in the rural South in unforgettable stories like “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Chester Himes chronicled the American Black experience of the 1950s and 1960s in his hilarious, violent and sexy Harlem crime novels starring the Black cops Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. An endless stream of lurid tales of sexual obsession and murder flowed from the pen of Patricia Highsmith, whom Graham Greene described as a "writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger.” And who can forget Norman Mailer’s murderous midnight prowl of the 1960s: An American Dream.

Just as greed, lust, murder and mayhem still sell newspapers, crimes and punishment remain the subject matter of our best living writers. From the darkly ironic tales of drug smugglers, modern knights-errant, and psychopaths wrought by Robert Stone in such novels as Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise, to the pulp fiction of No Country for Old Men and The Counselor by the inimitable Cormac McCarthy, to the ambiguous and stylized noir of the young writer Laura van den Berg in her collection The Isle of Youth, crime fiction is alive and well in literary America.

So step forward Mr. Barnes and acknowledge your finest work.

Long live writers with cojones. Literary labels be damned.

Laura van den Berg's Journey to "Antartica"

In the 36th in a series of posts on 2013 books entered for The Story Prize, Laura van den Berg, author of The Isle of Youth (FSG Originals), discusses her years-long quest to write a story about Antartica.

What’s the longest time it has take you to write a story?
A story in The Isle of Youth, “Antarctica,” was almost a decade in the making, in that for about eight years I had been trying and failing to write a story set in Antarctica. With each try, I would get a few pages in and the story would turn to dust. I would push on, writing one inert scene after another. The word count would tick up; the characters would grow flatter and more uninteresting. At my desk, panic would set in. For almost a year, I struggled with a draft called “Whiteout” before finally shelving the story. A few months later, I tried again and wrote a very unfortunate ending scene that involved Emperor Penguins. I didn’t need a year to know that one was a lost cause. And yet, I remained incorrigibly drawn to the landscape of Antarctica—the isolation, the severity, the profound strangeness—but couldn’t find the right story to unfold within that landscape, the right angle of attack.

Looking back, I can see the wrong turns. I kept trying to write from the perspective of a scientist on a research station. I have not been to Antarctica—nor am I a scientist, and by “not a scientist” I mean barely able to name an element on the periodic table—and I struggled to write convincingly about the landscape of Antarctica from that “insider” perspective. I always tell my students that when it comes to what we can write, we are only limited by our own imaginations, and I was coming up against the limits of mine.

After my third failed attempt at an Antarctica story, I gave up. I threw out my drafts. I tried to forget all about whiteouts and Emperor Penguins. I moved on.

In early 2012, I heard about an explosion at the Comandante Ferraz research base in Admiralty Bay on the news. Two men were killed. The story stayed with me. A few weeks later, a line got stuck in my head: “There was nothing to identify in Antarctica because there was nothing left.” Right away I was flooded with questions. Why was this person in Antarctica? Who or what was she there to identify? Why was there nothing left? This line soon became the first line of a new story, a new attempt at writing Antarctica, and eventually two interlocking narratives emerged: a present thread set in Antarctica, where the narrator has come to investigate the mysterious death of her scientist brother, who perished in an explosion, and a past thread set in Cambridge, MA.

Commandante Feraz research base

This incarnation felt different. First, it was mercifully free of Emperor Penguins! Second, since I was writing from the point-of-view of an outsider, I no longer felt limited by all that I didn’t know about Antarctica—outsider, I understood. Research became an adventure, driven by the burn of curiosity, not a slog to fill impossibly large gaps in information. And I also had the anchor of Cambridge, a place I know intimately, as a counterpoint. By May of that year, after almost a decade of trying to set a story in Antarctica, this new story, titled—what else!—“Antarctica,” was finished.

I also tell my students that whenever we are actively writing what we don’t know, chances are we are also writing what we do know at the same time—even if our story is set on a space station or during the Crusades, probably some aspect of the emotional topography is familiar. It is often that “emotional autobiography” that gives life to imagined worlds, that gives the strange the necessary force, the human weight. In the case of “Antarctica,” it was that intersection between the very personal and the very foreign that allowed the story to take flight.