Other Outstanding 2012 Collections

When you read 98 short story collections in a year, as we did in 2012, a variety of factors beyond what's on the page contribute to the impression you form of any particular book. These include: the amount of time you have to read each (many arrive close to our July and November deadlines), the order you read them in, where you are when you read them, your own biases (some you're aware of, some you're not), even the state of mind you're in when you pick a particular book up. Although over time a consensus can form about certain authors (e.g., Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, and William Trevor) or short story collections (Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find, J. D. Salinger's Nine Stories, or Dennis Johnson's Jesus' Son) whose excellence isn't in doubt, reading is largely subjective.

That makes it hard to choose three short story collections as finalists, one for The Story Prize Spotlight Award, and a list of other outstanding collections beyond those four. Which is to say that the absence of a book from a list like this isn't a reflection of its quality. Every author who published a short story collection in 2012 succeeded against the odds, accomplished something exemplary, and deserves to take a bow, as did the 65 publishers and imprints that put out the books we read.

Here then are twelve worthy titles, beyond our three finalists and The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner:

• Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie (Grove/Atlantic)
• Hush Hush by Steven Barthelme (Melville House)
• Safe as Houses by Marie-Helene Bertino (University of Iowa Press)
• Little Sinners by Karen Brown, (University of Nebraska Press)
• Astray by Emma Donoghue, (Little, Brown)
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Windeye by Brian Evenson, (Coffee House Press)
• She Loves Me Not by Ron Hansen, (Scribner)
• The Doctor's Wife by Luis Jaramillo (Dzanc Books)
• Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain by Lucia Perillo (W.W. Norton)
• The Book of Mischief by Steven Stern, (Graywolf Press)
• Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty by Diane Williams, (McSweeney's Books)

Steven Barthelme Aspires

In the 40th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Steven Barthelme, author of Hush Hush (Melville House), explains why he doesn't call himself a writer.

I became a writer in about 1989 but that only lasted for a brief period, a few years, until I wasn’t anymore. At first, when I was 17 and on through about 30, I would not call myself a writer because it seemed something too fine and too accomplished, something wonderful that I aspired to but didn’t qualify for. Actually it was longer than that, it wasn’t 30, I felt the same way even after publishing a book of short stories, getting a job as a professor of English teaching creative writing. The only time I ever felt that I was a writer was a brief period of a year or two, when I was about 42, after a fancy literary agent got me a contract at Random House to publish a novel and a second collection as well as to reprint the first collection in Vintage Contemporaries. I probably felt that I could stop holding my breath then. None of that ever happened, of course. I wrote the novel, which wasn’t much good, and Random politely declined to publish it; the other commitments were contingent, and so evaporated. I went back to my previous sense of things, in which, truth be told, I was more comfortable, as a person who aspired. Someday I would succeed, at writing something good, and at publishing as well.

For many years now, when people at a doctor’s office, or in the casino at a blackjack table, ask what I do, I tell them I teach school. It is, after all, how I pay the freight. The people at the university have the good grace not to ask if I’m qualified to teach what I teach, as any professor knows that almost none of us are, in God’s eyes. But my understanding about writing stories has deepened only very recently, and it’s only now that I grasp the thing better. I’m not a writer. I’m some English teacher, a guy who is fond of television and mows the lawn, likes steaks and cars and cats, sleeps badly, who sometimes plays the instrument, likes words, likes sentences, likes typing.

Of many things I wish I had written, one thing for which I hold a fixed awe and a fierce envy, and which is also germane here, is a preface James M. Cain wrote to one of his novels [The Butterfly]. The preface ends with these more or less flawless sentences: “Yes, I have actually mined coal, and distilled liquor, as well as seen a girl in a pink dress, and seen her take it off. I am 54 years old, weigh 220 pounds, and look like the chief dispatcher of a long-distance hauling concern. I am a registered Democrat. I drink.”