Paperback Writers: Of Seals and Tigers

The paperback edition of Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall, which won The Story Prize a few months ago, is out. We're always pleased when the official seal for the winner of The Story Prize appears on the cover. This version includes an added bonus: the story that won the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, "The Deep," which isn't included in the hardcover version.

The paperback edition of one of the other finalists for The Story Prize, Suzanne Rivecca's Death Is Not An Option, will be out in a few days. Personally, I miss the striking tiger/child's arm design* of the hardcover and don't really understand the multiple choice options the paperback presents. When in doubt, go with 'd.'

The paperback for the third finalist, Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, probably won't be out until September or so.

* Here's my theory: Since Rivecca's story collection came out last year, two tiger-themed books (The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua) hit the market and the best-seller list, causing Rivecca's publisher to back off from the Panthera tigris image. However, I think the actual tiger content in Death Is Not an Option stacks up pretty well against the competition.

The Story Prize Finalists Are Racking up the Honors

When Story Prize winners or finalists achieve other honors, we're always happy for them. We're pleased on a personal level because we get to know and like these authors. Further honors also reaffirm our choices. And we hope that the books that are finalists for or win The Story Prize get into as many readers' hands as possible. Every honor helps in that regard.

So I was excited when Anthony Doerr, who just won The Story Prize, also won the the £30,000* Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for "The Deep." The story first appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story's Fall 2010 issue** and is in the April 10 edition of the Sunday Times Magazine.** Of course, I would have been equally excited if Yiyun Li, who was also a finalist for the Sunday Times Award, had won.

As it happens, this year's finalists have been racking up the honors since we held The Story Prize event on March 2. Yiyun Li and Suzanne Rivecca were also up for the Northern California Book Awards on Apr. 10. Suzanne was a finalist for PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction, is a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award (even though she's more of a tiger person), and also won a Rome fellowship in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.***

If there's any downside to our finalists and winners achieving other honors it's that certain prizes can overshadow† The Story Prize—but not too many of them, in our view. The Pulitzer Prize is one, and will announce its winners and finalists on April 18. Nonetheless, if Tony, Yiyun, or Suzanne win, we'll be very happy for them. Plus, one real test of a book award is how well its winners and finalists hold up over time, and winning other awards increases the chances that this will happen.

* The equivalent of $49,155 at current exchange rates. Though this eclipses the $20,000 top prize for The Story Prize, we've been mentioned in all of the press coverage and at least have the advantage of a decidedly more succinct name than The Sunday Times EFG Bank Short Story Award.

** It is not one of the stories in Memory Wall, The Story Prize winning collection. For now, you have to buy one-day access to the Sunday Times site for $2 or purchase the back issue of Zoetrope for $8 to read "The Deep." Coincidentally, that same issue of Zoetrope included a story by Mary Swan, whose "The Deep" was the first-prize winner in Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards. In that volume, 2006 Story Prize winner Mary Gordon introduced Swan's story. 
*** Anthony Doerr is a past winner.
† By this, I mean that it could supplant mention of The Story Prize on book covers and in author biographies.

Webcast: The Story Prize Awards Ceremony 2011 | The New School

The video for The Story Prize event on March 2 is up on The New School's YouTube page and will soon be on FORA.tv. The director of The New School's graduate writing program, Robert Polito, introduces the evening. The three finalists—Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca—read from their work and discuss it onstage with the director of The Story Prize, Larry Dark. The event culminates with the announcement of the winner, Anthony Doerr for Memory Wall, by the founder of The Story Prize, Julie Lindsey.

Suzanne Rivecca: What the Judges Had to Say About Death Is Not an Option

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were bookseller Marie du Vaure, Granta editor John Freeman, and author Jayne Anne Phillips. We include the citations in congratulatory letters we present to each finalist, along with their checks ($20,000 to the winner, $5,000 to the other two finalists). To protect the confidentiality of the judges' votes and the integrity of the process, we don't attribute citations to any particular judge.

Here's what the judges had to say about finalist Suzanne Rivecca's Death Is Not an Option:

Suzanne Rivecca's stories are truly “illuminated lamentations . . .  testimonies of harm” that continually startle and surprise. These stories of female sensibility speak to our times with ironic, brilliant strength, their voices linked by a young writer's empathetic genius. Rivecca's unhappy, discerning, always inquiring protagonists journey to various hearts of darkness, crossing cultural, religious, sexual, and generational boundaries with wit and angelic rage. Each seems a soul pulsing with linguistic energy and exhilarating intelligence. Rivecca reminds us that we are all connected, similar to our very molecules and erratic genes, inextricably bound by desire, shame, guilt, and ecstatic possibility. Death Is Not an Option becomes an impassioned directive about how to read, how to write, and how to live.

photo © Eric Richards

Scenes from The Story Prize Event: Suzanne Rivecca, Anthony Doerr, and Yiyun Li

Finalists Suzanne Rivecca, Anthony Doerr, and Yiyun Li at the reception

We endeavor to make The Story Prize event a celebration of the short story form, and the three finalists—Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca—were totally in the spirit of that yesterday. Even though one person is ultimately singled out, our intention is to honor all three authors equally until the moment of that announcement. Tony, Yiyun, and Suzanne were extraordinarily gracious and forthcoming in discussing their work. And all were great fun earlier in the day and at the reception afterwards, as well as being congenial and supportive of one another, as the photo above shows.

They also had a lot of interesting things to say.

Anthony Doerr, for instance, in answer to a question about the preponderance of older women in Memory Wall, talked about how his grandmother, who had Alzheimer's disease, came to live with his family when he was in high school and how, in his teenage self-absorption, he had been somewhat oblivious to her condition.

Yiyun Li discussed how her characters stubbornly resist being swept along by the tide of history—even though that often results in loneliness and isolation rather than the easy gratification and happiness that conformity can bring.

And Suzanne Rivecca revealed how a PBS show about Walt Whitman's first-hand experience of slavery when he traveled to New Orleans in 1848 and a trip her father had taken to the South in the 1960s, together spurred her to write a novel about Whitman's sojourn.

Thank you again, Tony, Yiyun, and Suzanne!

More pictures and links to coverage of the event will follow here, on our Web site, and via Twitter. And in a week or so, we'll post video of the evening

photo © Eric Richards

Next Stop for The Story Prize Finalists: Storyville

Exciting news: Each of the three finalists for The Story Prize—Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca—will have a story from their nominated collections appear on Storyville in the weeks ahead, leading up to the March 2 event at The New School in New York city. What is Storyville? It's an app for iPad or iPhone that each week delivers a short story directly to a subscriber's device. The stories come from published collections, and an author statement accompanies them. The app also interacts with Twitter and Facebook.

The creator and publisher of Storyville, Paul Vidich, is no stranger to this blog. He has twice contributed guest posts about digital distribution. Most importantly, he's a a short story writer and evangelist, who spent more than a year developing the idea for this app.

The $4.95 price for a six-month subscription to Storyville allows readers to sample a substantial number of story collections. In this case, I hope a taste of Doerr's Memory Wall, Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and Rivecca's Death Is Not an Option will lead readers to buy the books.

For our part, we're offering Storyville pairs of tickets to The Story Prize event to give away each week that one of these stories runs. That means a few subscribers will get to see the authors read from and discuss their work live on-stage, taking readers on a trip from the newest platform for stories to the oldest.

Presenting The Story Prize Finalists: Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca

We're very excited to announce the three finalists for The Story Prize, which we selected from among 85 story collections submitted by 57 different publishers or imprints in 2010. They are:

• Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr (Scribner)
• Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li (Random House)
• Death Is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca (W.W. Norton)

It was another great year for short fiction, and the decision was, as always, a very difficult one to make. In the weeks to come we'll also present a long list of other notable story collections published in 2010, which will be hard to narrow down to a manageable number of books. 

The Story Prize event will take place at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 2. That night, the three finalists will read from and discuss their work on-stage. At the end of the event, Julie Lindsey will announce the winner.

Advanced tickets online through SmartTix or through the New School box office, by phone (212-229-5488) or email (boxoffice@newschool.edu). If you want to call for tickets, please note that the box office is closed until Jan. 24. After that, hours are from 4 to 7 p.m. Mon.-Thurs. and 3 to 6 p.m. on Fridays.

In the weeks ahead we'll be posting more about the finalists, their books, and the upcoming event. We'd especially like to thank the 71 authors who contributed guest posts to this blog. It was, to my mind, a successful experiment, and a we plan to do it again in 2011.

Rivecca Goes Seriously Comic

In the 43rd in a series of posts on 2010 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Suzanne Rivecca, author of Death Is Not an Option (W.W. Norton), answers a critic who takes her to task for treating a serious subject with humor. 

After I gave a reading in Bainbridge Island, Washington, a woman from the audience approached me. First she told me I’d pronounced the word “ravine” wrong. Then she asked me about “Very Special Victims,” the story I’d read from, which was about a sexual abuse survivor’s attempt to reconcile her past with her present-day romantic and social relationships. “You seemed like you were trying to make the subject matter into a comedy,” she said. In a crabwise, passive-aggressive way, she was letting me know she was not amused. “Was it supposed to be funny?” she went on. “Are you trying to make people laugh with this subject matter?” If she had approached me as a person sincerely trying to understand why I refused to treat the subject with the humorless sanctimony of a Law and Order episode, I might have been willing to engage with her. But this woman was not trying to start a dialogue. I recognized the place she was coming from, and it was a hushed realm of pursed-lipped, squeamish disapproval. And it wasn’t molestation she was expressing disapproval of. It was the way I’d written about it. She was making it clear to me, with the wearily prim certainty of someone duty-bound to make such things clear to the ignorant and brash, that what I had done was not acceptable.

In answer, I said something about how every single experience has the potential to contain the full spectrum of human reaction and emotion, and that that spectrum includes humor, whether it’s socially palatable or not. She kept staring at me with owl-eyed severity. She seemed surprised that I hadn’t backed down. Then she said, begrudgingly, “Well, you’re good with descriptions.” I said, "Thanks."

When I was in writing workshops, I was often accused of using humor as a crutch. When I deliberately wrote a humorless, utterly joyless story about a nun who fell down and broke her leg, my offering was greeted with somber, measured approval. Not because it was a good story (it wasn’t), but because I had successfully subverted my natural inclination to perceive and articulate life’s absurdity. My feat was treated as a self-abnegating act of moderation and self-discipline. It’s the way Robin Williams always gets patted on the head for his restraint when he’s acting in a subdued drama and thus forced to replace every irritating, hammy tic in his repertoire with a beard and a vaguely British accent. He’s no better; he’s just quieter.

“Very Special Victims” isn’t about how funny molestation is. It’s about how absurdity and the ridiculous are found everywhere, and how sometimes the only vestige of power and agency left to us lies in laughing at what we’re not supposed to laugh it. This tendency is the opposite of flippancy. It’s actually deadly serious. It shows that you’re still alive and that you’re still yourself. 

Whenever I start worrying about people taking offense at the way I approach certain subjects, I think of that documentary footage of Bob Dylan where he’s getting booed at the Newport Folk Festival for going electric. The entire audience hates him, and he’s about to launch into “Like a Rolling Stone,” and he suddenly turns to his band and matter-of-factly tells them, “Play it fucking loud.” And they do.