Carol Houck Smith, We'll Miss You

One of the nicest people in publishing and a truly great editor, Carol Houck Smith, died on Nov. 29 in her Manhattan apartment at the age of 85. She worked at W.W. Norton, where her authors included Andrea Barrett, Ron Carlson, Joan Silber, and many others.

The picture to the right is from the reception following The Story Prize event in February 2007.
Carol had particularly wanted to be there that year because one of the finalists was Rick Bass, whose first short story collection, The Watch, she had edited.

Carol was a supporter of The Story Prize from the start, responding with warm encouragement to the announcement of the launch in January 2004, attending a small cocktail party for editors and publishers that spring, and coming to the first event in 2005, in support of her author, Joan Silber, who was a finalist for Ideas of Heaven--a great book made better through Carol's taste and wisdom, as everything she edited was.

I had first spoken with Carol several times in early 2001, when I was putting together Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards. I had decided to include three novellas* in that volume, one of which was Andrea Barrett's "Servants of the Map," the title story of a collection set for publication in 2002--several months after the O. Henry Awards volume would be out. To my surprise, Andrea Barrett informed me, a few days after I called to tell her that I'd chosen her story for the O. Henry Awards, that her publisher, W.W. Norton, did not want to give permission to publish "Servants of the Map" because they were concerned that it would cannibalize sales of Barrett's collection. In four previous years, I had never had an author or publisher turn down a chance to be in the anthology.

Andrea suggested I speak with her editor. So I called Carol Houck Smith and had a long conversation in which I did my best to persuade her that inclusion in the O. Henry Awards would likely help Servants of the Map reach an even larger audience (a somewhat shaky argument because after winning the National Book Award for her story collection Ship Fever in 1996, Barrett's books no doubt outsold the O. Henry Awards by a wide margin). Carol explained Norton's position, but she also listened with an open mind--something rare in my experience. In the end, Carol convinced Norton to allow us to include the story. I think what may have persuaded her wasn't my arguments but my passion for that particular story, which matched her own.

What I didn't know until later, was that Carol had "retired" several years before this. That didn't stop her from going to work every day and continuing to edit and nurture writers' careers. She was, throughout her career, a tireless advocate for poetry and fiction, a frequent presence at writing conferences, someone who constantly sought out and nurtured new talent, and a trusted editor and friend to many writers. Carol, we're going to miss you--the literary world is going to miss you.

* The other two novellas/long stories that year were Mary Swan's "The Deep" and the full version of George Saunders' "Pastoralia," both of which also ended up being the title stories of collections.

Addendum: Here's more.

Good Times

This week's New York Times Book Review includes six full reviews of story collections (if you count Andre Brink's Other Lives: A Novel in Three Parts, which I do) out of a total of nine books of fiction. It sometimes seems as though story collections don't receive enough review attention, so this is encouraging.

The other five collections in the Sept. 7 issue were:
Fine Just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx
Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright
One More Year by Sana Krasikov
The Nightingales of Troy by Alice Fulton
Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan (reviewed by lit blogger Maude Newton)

I've only read one of these so far, but all six reviews made the books seem worth reading, and I'm looking forward to the other five, assuming they're entered for The Story Prize. Reviews are obviously important because they make readers aware of particular books. And for a lot of people (at least in the New York area), if it's not reviewed in the Times, it doesn't exist. So if story collections are going to hold onto and gain readers, getting this kind of attention is crucial.

A Logical Extension

Book awards tend to play it close to the vest--perhaps for good reason. Falsely raising authors' expectations or giving away the fact that certain books might or might not be receiving serious consideration are two possibilities prizes definitely want to avoid. And those may be among the reasons most awards don't post blogs. So why are we starting a blog for The Story Prize? Because our mission is broader than handing out an award each year. The purpose behind our book award is to promote short fiction--to encourage writers to write stories, publishers to publish them, and readers to read them. And blogging is a logical way to extend that mission.

One thing we won't do is slam a collection, story, or author. Sometimes, I may get up on my soapbox in response to news. For instance, I previously contributed a couple of posts to the National Book Critics blog, Critical Mass. One was on the state of short fiction (obliquely in response to Stephen King's introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2007), and the other was to comment on judge Zadie Smith's decision not to choose a winner in the Willesden Herald Short Story Prize. I'll continue to respond here to events and situations relating to short fiction and literary awards as they occur.

What this blog will do, of course, is offer news about The Story Prize, for instance who our judges will be and details of our annual event. And once we announce our finalists in January, we plan to post profiles of and Q&As with each of the three authors. We also would like to occasionally offer brief interviews with writers, editors, critics, publishers, agents, booksellers, and librarians. And we want to make room for occasional guest posts as well. Along the way, we hope we'll be able to call attention to some good stories and collections and add another voice in support of short fiction.