Amy Hempel Has Won The Rea Award for the Short Story

Amy Hempel is this year's winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, which is given annually to a living American or Canadian writer whose published work has made "a significant contribution in the discipline of the short story as an art form." The $30,000 award is not given for a particular collection or even a body of work but rather for the originality and influence of the author's work. A three-member jury of writers (which I'll supply when I get that information), chooses the winner.

The award started in 1986 and its winners are a who's who of American and Canadian short story writers. Last year's winner was Stuart Dybek. The photo to the left was taken at The Story Prize event in February. That's Story Prize Winner Jim Shepard (before he knew he was the winner) leaning over to greet Hempel, whose attention seems elsewhere. Congratulations to Amy Hempel for achieving this honor.

Update: It turns out the jury for the 2008 Rea Short Story Award consisted of Sheila Kohler, Margot Livesy, and the aforementioned Jim Shepard, which makes the choice of photo even more opportune.

Alice Munro at the New Yorker Festival

Here, from the New Yorker Festival blog, is a post by Andrea Walker, boiling down to bullet points part of an onstage conversation between Alice Munro and The New Yorker's fiction editor Deborah Treisman, which took place on Friday night, Oct. 4. Munro, despite the praise (deserved) that writers, editors, and critics have lavished on her for many years, remains modest and amusingly self-effacing.

Steven Millhauser's Diminutive Ambitions

This Sunday's New York Times Book Review features "The Ambition of the Short Story" a back page essay by Steven Millhauser. I'll let it speak for itself and simply recommend Millhauser's short fiction to anyone who hasn't read his work before. He's a brilliant miniaturist and fabulist, though also much more than that. His novel Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright is an amazing book.

Millhauser currently has a collection out called Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories. In addition, he has published four other story collections: In the Penny Arcade, The Barnum Museum, Little Kingdoms, and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories. The title story of that last book was the second prize winner in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards, brilliantly introduced by judge Mary Gaitskill. Millhauser may be best known to a wider audience for his story "Eisenheim the Illusionist," which was the basis for the film The Illusionist.

Hey, Don't Leave Out Short Story Collections

It's October, and you know what that means. No, I don't mean fall foliage, Halloween, Oktoberfest, the World Series, scintillating political debates, or the continuing collapse of the financial markets. We're talking National Reading Group Month--at least according to the Women's National Book Assn. They even have a list of Great Group Reads, but, alas, it doesn't include any short story collections. I can think of at least a dozen books that would fit the bill.

Snubbed Again! It's Starting to Feel Personal

Well, it's old news now, but Oprah Winfrey didn't choose a short story collection for her book club, as we had hoped, and hasn't done so since she began featuring books in 1996. But she's not alone. I'm often disappointed to find story collections left off important lists of recommended books.

For instance, the American Booksellers Assn. Fall '08 / Winter '09 Indie Next List for Reading Groups has a grand total of zero short story collections on it out of ten books in the featured list and an additional 51 books recommended by independent booksellers. This year alone authors such as Kevin Brockmeier, Stephen King, Jhumpa Lahiri, Steven Millhauser, Joyce Carol Oates, Cynthia Ozick, Annie Proulx, Joan Silber, and Tobias Wolff have published collections, and there have been some outstanding debuts and books of short fiction by unsung writers, too.

The National Endowment for the Arts Big Read program also doesn't include any short story collections among it's distinguished list of great American books. Wouldn't classic American collections by the likes of Raymond Carver, John Cheever, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley, Dorothy Parker, Edgar Allen Poe, J.D. Salinger, Jean Stafford, Eudora Welty, and dozens of others (including a slew of living writers) make for good reading and discussion? Even an anthology that features stories by several of these writers would make for a nice big juicy read.

I admire the passion independent booksellers have for literary fiction, and the Big Read is a worthwhile program, but how are we going to get short story collections into the hands of readers if some of our leading cultural arbiters don't recommend them?

2 Out of 5 Under 35

The National Book Foundation has announced its "5 Under 35" event, and two of the five authors were selected for short story collections. In a nutshell, five previous national book award finalists or winners select and introduce five writers under 35 at an event in Manhattan that includes an emcee and a D.J. Young writers, editors, publishers, agents, and journalists are invited to attend. The idea--and it's not a bad one--is to reach out to a more youthful audience.

There's usually a short story collection or two among the bunch, and this year is no exception. Francine Prose has selected Sana Krasikov's One More Year: Stories , and Mary Gaitskill chose Nam Le's The Boat . Last year's winner of The Story Prize and National Book Awards finalist, Jim Shepard, picked a novel, Fiona Maazel's Last Last Chance--not that there's anything wrong with that.

Now, the question is: Will there be a story collection or two (or more) among the National Book Award finalists announced on Oct. 15 in Chicago? I can think of a few excellent candidates based on the reading we've done so far this year.

Writerly Opinions: The Influence of Anxiety?

Whoever edits the Op-Ed section of the New York Times must have a lot of short story writers in his or her Rolodex. Today's "Week in Review" section features dispatches from swing states, including two from authors of recently published short story collections. Karen Brown, who wrote last year's Pins and Needles (Univ. of Massachusetts Press) reports from Florida. And Eileen Pollack, author of the recently published In the Mouth (Four Way Books) reports from Michigan. I'm a little electioned out myself and have long ago decided, but I hope this exposure sells a few copies of their books.

In the same section, Jonathan Lethem (Men and Cartoons), who has published a few story collections himself, has a column that links Batman movie The Dark Knight to recent events. During the primaries, short story writers Dave Eggers (How We Are Hungry) reported from California and Donald Ray Pollack (Knockemstiff) reported from Ohio. And in the past, Charles Baxter (Believers), Dan Chaon (Among the Missing), and Lorrie Moore (Birds of America) have also contributed op-ed pieces. I'm sure there are more examples I haven't dug up, and that's in The New York Times alone. Who says short story writers don't have influence?