Wells Tower: What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the book or books they like best. This year's judges were author A.M. Homes, critic and blogger Carolyn Kellogg, and librarian Bill Kelly. Here's what one of our judges had to say about Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned:

This collection represents a significant achievement in the short story form. Wells Tower brings a distinctive, original voice whose power is at once reminiscent of the great practitioners of the short story (Cheever and O'Connor come to mind) while being uniquely his own. His fine balance of visceral tension, absurd and quirky humor, and richly drawn characters serves to showcase his immense talent. The plot is almost always secondary in these stories. Rather, the reader is drawn in because of the raw, essential energy created by the interaction between (and often within) characters as though by a gravitational force. Tower is able to draw characters with a deft, almost sleight-of, hand. He takes the old writer's edict "show, don't tell" one step further—his keen eye for observational detail direct the reader's attention, however briefly, to the minutiae in the background of the scene he has painted. Once the perspective has returned to the foreground, the characters then appear three-dimensional, more nuanced and fully rendered. This is the kind of writing that rewards close reading and rereading. As with all forms of magic, we are compelled to pull open the curtain in order to see how the illusion is created.

Wells Tower is a deliberate, knowing author, completely in control of his stories. One notes the careful choice of language, each word selected for its specificity and efficiency. One senses that, like Chekhov's, a Tower story is no more and no less than it could otherwise be. These stories are a pleasure to read because they elicit reader participation—the dialogue is spot-on yet suggestive of all things left unsaid, the humor is wry with a sly, sophisticated wink and the subtle building of tension elicits a sensation similar to that of a spring about to be sprung. There is a physicality to these stories that leaves a mark on the reader. One feels so completely engaged, so immersed in the story that it is tempting to suggest that our own energy has somehow been tapped in order to bring the story to life.

photo © Eric Richards

At the Signing Table (and Other Photos from The Story Prize Event)

© Eric Richards

Before the The Story Prize event on March 3, 2010, at The New School University in New York, finalists Victoria Patterson, Wells Tower, and Daniyal Mueenuddin signed stacks of books for our bookseller McNally Jackson (which still has signed copies available). To see more photos, please visit our Web site.

Early next week we'll post the judges' citations for the three books we honored that night: Patterson's Drift, Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, and the top prize winner, Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.

Scenes from The Story Prize: Wells Tower, Victoria Patterson, and Daniel Mueenuddin

© Eric Richards

The finalists for The Story Prize (L to R) Wells Tower, Victoria Patterson, and Daniyal Mueenuddin (the winner), had lots of interesting things to say, both on-stage and off.

Mueenuddin for instance, told me in a private conversation that he built and oversees a school for some 200 children from around the village where his farm in the southern Punjab region is located, partly as an alternative to the fundamentalist madrasas that are popping up all over his native Pakistan.

On-stage, Patterson confessed that in her struggles to find time to write she would sometimes leave her children in the church school on Sundays and sneak out to go home to work (earning an undeserved reputation for piety).

Tower discussed seeking a magazine assignment to write about carnival people, in the hope of proving the stereotype wrong. Instead, however, he found carnies to be every bit as unsavory as they are reputed to be—maybe more so (as in his story "On the Show").

Thank you Daniyal, Tory, and Wells for being a part of The Story Prize's sixth award night.

Here are some links to coverage of the event:

• The New York Times Arts Beat and Paper Cuts blogs
• Reuters
• The L.A. Times Jacket Copy Blog (in a post by Story Prize judge Carolyn Kellogg)
• GalleyCat
• CBC
• AP

Adendum: More press...

• The New Yorker's Book Bench blog
• Poets & Writers (including a video interview with Daniyal Mueenuddin)
• Teeth Maestro (a Pakistani dentist's blog)
  

Four Questions For Story Prize Finalist Wells Tower

Note: Story Prize finalists Wells Tower, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and Victoria Patterson will read from their work and discuss it onstage on March 3 at The New School. At the end of evening we will announce the winner of the $20,000 top prize. Tickets are available from SmartTix.

How long was Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned in the making, and what were some of the obstacles you encountered along the way?
Soup to nuts, I guess the writing took about seven years, and I suppose the chief obstacle was the traditional one: the knotty problem of figuring out how to make readers care, in a short space, about people who don't exist. Another weird problem I had while I was writing the stories was that I was beginning a career in long-form magazine work at the time, which caused some problems with the fiction. For a large-ish magazine story, you go spend a few weeks reporting, generate a huge volume of notes and then cook the whole mess down to a handful of scenes and contextual arguments, etc. For a while, I was trying to do the same thing with short stories. I'd write huge, meandering drafts, sometimes upwards of a hundred pages, thinking I could somehow cook them down into something brief and meaningful. It never worked. For me, short stories have to begin by cramming a humble idea into a small space. If ruptures and herniations occur, so be it, but if I start by giving the story a lot of large, vague leeway, it usually turns into something dumb, bland and vile.

What do you like about the short story form? Is it the form that comes most naturally to you as a writer?
I respect the form for cutting us so little slack. Readers often approach a short story suspiciously.They know they're being asked to embark on a brief relationship, one that won't give them days or weeks of enagement, as a novel does. A "Why should I care about you? This is just a quick fling" sort of deal, which leaves us with the challenge of devising stories that matter much, and quickly, without contrivances or bad emotional syrups. You can't waste time or language in a short story. I like that rigor. Keeps you honest.

I don't know that it's a form that comes naturally to me. I still find it extraordinarily difficult. But it's been a great laboratory, a fine medium for an apprenticeship. Starting with short stories, I was able to make lots of useful mistakes in a short span of years. Unlike a novel, you can throw away a short story and it doesn't break your heart.

Is there someone you show your work to first? At what stage do you do this, and what kind of feedback are you looking for?
I often show work to my younger brother, Joe, who is a shrewd reader, and whom, because he is my brother, I trust not to stop being my friend if I show him something awful. Often, I don't show him, or anyone, drafts until I've done everything I can to them, and I need an impartial diagnosis of whether to continue the steeplechase or make for the glue factory.

What’s next for you?
A novel.

Story Prize Finalists Mueenuddin, Patterson, and Tower Are All Over the Place

Here are some links to essays by, interviews with, and other miscellanea from the three finalists for The Story Prize—Daniyal Mueenuddin, Victoria Patterson, and Wells Tower. Remember, all three finalists will read from their work and discuss it onstage at The New School, in New York City, on Wed., March 3 at 7:30 pm. And at the end of the evening, we will announce the winner.

Daniyal Mueenuddin

• Ron Hogan's prescient introduction* to Daniyal Mueeduddin writing about a story by Turgenev in January 2009 on Beatrice.com.
• An interview on NPR's Morning Edition in November 2009.
  
• Tour dates for the paperback edition, Jan. 19-25.

Victoria Patterson

• "On Selling Out" on The Nervous Breakdown.
• "The Perils of Fiction" on The Millions.
• "Homage to John Updike's Rabbit, Run" on Three Guys One Book.

Wells Tower

• His story "Executors of Important Energies" on Five Chapters (which you can read as one installment).
• "House Dutiful" on the radio show This American Life (at the 36:44 mark), in which he reads from an essay, "The Restoration," he wrote for The Washington Post in 2005.
• Contributions to The Believer.

Of course, the best way to experience these collections is to read Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Patterson's Drift, and Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

* I erroneously characterized this as an interview when this was first posted.

Three Debut Writers Are Finalists For The Story Prize

After reading 78 short story collections in 2009 and seriously considering a dozen or so strong candidates, Julie Lindsey (the founder of The Story Prize) and I selected the finalists for The Story Prize in early January. It's always difficult for us to narrow down our choices to just three collections and it seems to get harder every year. But, as always, we're excited about our choices. This year's finalists for The Story Prize are:

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (W. W. Norton)
Drift by Victoria Patterson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

What's particularly exciting is that all three are debuts--a first for The Story Prize. In fact, in the previous five years of the award, only 2 of 15 finalists were the authors' first books: 2004/05 finalist The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day and 2005/06 winner The Hill Road by Patrick O'Keeffe.

All three of these collections are exceptional and rewarding reads. Look for more about each of them here. In the days ahead, I'll also be releasing a list of other notable short story collections from 2009. In the weeks leading up to our event, I hope to spotlight some of these books in addition to the finalists.



This year's event, by the way, is at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 3, at The New School in New York City (66 West 12th Street). That night, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Victoria Patterson, and Wells Tower will read from their short story collections and discuss their work onstage. At the end of the evening, Julie Lindsey will announce the winner. 



For information on buying general admission tickets, which cost $14, go to SmartTix.com and search for "Story Prize" or contact The New School box office at boxoffice@newschool.edu or 212- 229-5488.

For those of you in New York, our official bookseller, McNally Jackson, will be giving away a limited number of tickets in the weeks leading up to the event. And for those who can’t make it, a Web cast will appear on FORA.tv several weeks later.

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 Conventional Wisdom On Short Story Collections Is Wrong

Last night, after the Happy Endings reading at Joe's Pub in New York, I introduced myself to Wells Tower, whose collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, has gotten great reviews and is selling very well. The temptation is to say "selling very well for a short story collection," but most authors of any book would be happy with comparable sales; it made it onto The New York Times extended best-seller list, as well as the American Booksellers' extended list, and I'm sure others. Of course, Wells and I started talking about short story collections, and he told me how earlier on some had tried to discourage him from writing a short story collection. He also said that he'd been told it would be better if it were a book of themed or connected stories. Luckily for readers, he pursued his own vision. And the results have been critical and commercial success.

Of course, I've heard anecdotes like this countless times. The conventional wisdom among editors and publishers is that short story collections not only don't sell but they won't sell. Jhumpa Lahiri has proven that theory wrong twice, and Tower, with his first book, is doing the same--and with no major book award, no Oprah, no previous following, and no film versions of his work. Maybe now agents, and especially editors, will put the old truisms to rest. A great short story collection can do well if you get behind it (kudos to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Towers' publisher). So please stop discouraging writers from doing what they do best. I've seen too many natural short story writers forced into writing novels, when all we should really ask from artists is that they give us their best, no matter the form--even if that form happens to be short fiction.