Courage and Prose: A Night with McSweeney’s at the Housing Works Bookstore Café

By Patrick Thomas Henry

Writing prose requires courage, and reading prose equips us with bravery. Three McSweeney’s authors conveyed this at “McSweeney’s Presents: Diane Williams, Ben Marcus, and Deb Olin Unferth,” held at the Housing Works Bookstore Café in New York, on the evening of March 12. The message is appropriate, given Housing Works’s efforts to foster a healing community for those afflicted by the dual scourges of HIV/AIDS and homelessness. Amanda Bullock, the Bookstore Café’s events director, spoke briefly about Housing Works and its mission before introducing each of the evening’s readers; the publishers, Bullock said, had donated the books being sold at the event.

At the podium: Deb Olin Unferth, Ben Marcus, and Diane Williams

Unferth, the first to take to the podium, read from her memoir Revolution (Henry Holt 2011). The bright and candid sound of Unferth’s voice amplified the sarcasm murmuring throughout her prose.  Unferth shared an excerpt from a section entitled “Good Ideas,” which related her flirtation with Christianity—a conversion spurred by her then-boyfriend, George. This riled Unferth’s Jewish family, which retaliated in kind: with devout Judaism. Exasperated at the family’s desperate affair with faith, Unferth’s sister lamented the costs of an imposed religious education: “Three days a week I had to go.  While everyone else was having fun. One day you and your God will pay.” Writing of this kind requires soul and bravery because the material is personal, but this sort of prose needs to be open enough that its inherent irony resonates. The audience’s laughter confirmed the power of Unferth’s understated irony.

Ben Marcus, the evening’s second reader, redirected the evening from soulful nonfiction toward relentless fiction. Marcus read from his novel The Flame Alphabet (Knopf 2012), set in an alternate reality where children’s toxic language literally sickens adults. The novel is a parable for how society collapses when we cannot stomach others’ attitudes, and Marcus couches this dramatic tension in Sam and Claire’s struggles with their daughter Esther. But Marcus is not without sensitivity: Sam and Claire yearn to communicate with Esther, to celebrate her birthday and express their love with such endearments as “Sweetie”—even if Esther retaliates that such an appellation is “a word used for pets” and is like her parents “throwing up on” her. What Marcus generates, here, is the reciprocal danger of language: Words can poison, and a response can further toxify a relationship. But this novel is courageous in its adamant belief that we must try to communicate, to find a cure for sickening rhetoric.

Ironically, only words can grant that solace. Diane Williams, the last of the evening’s three readers, took to the podium and read selections from her new collection of flash fictions, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty (McSweeney’s 2012). She prefaced her reading by noting that she finds courage in short stories.  Williams demonstrated that short stories do embolden us against the catastrophes of daily life through the pieces “The Emporium,” “On the Job,” “Arm under the Soil,” “Enormously Pleased,” and “Lord of the Face.” “On the Job,” for instance, transforms a man’s decision to buy a belt buckle into an instructive moment through an extended horseracing metaphor. The protagonist resembles “a man whose leader has failed him time after time,” who simply wants to find a way back into the race of life, so he buys a snazzy belt buckle and goes home to his wife. The man needs this woman and her support—he is like “a horse that could not ever get out of its neck-high stall on its own”—and yet he cannot make himself sincere with his wife. The stories in Vicky Swanky revel in this kind of deceptive simplicity: plots that appear linear, brief encounters, chance observations, a looming image or metaphor. Yet, Williams manages to contrive a hinge in each of these stories, images like the belt buckle in “On the Job,” which open the pieces to reveal how Williams’s characters survive in this world.

Prose, no matter how simple or straightforward it seems at first, requires writers with bravery and soul enough to address the ironies of daily life. Because of this, however, writing at its best rewards readers by supplying them with courage, with the knowledge of how to face an increasingly complex world.

The Story Prize Event: Get Your Program

We produce a full color, eight page program for each Story Prize event, and this time, thanks to our designer—Rolling Stone Senior Art Director Steven Charny—an original illustration by Tomar Hanuka graces the cover. Hanuka was one of four artists who helped create the award winning animated film Waltz with Bashir.

To photograph the event, we've enlisted Beowulf Sheehan, who takes exceptional portraits of writers and musicians. You'll see some of the pictures from the event on this blog and on our Web site in the days that follow.

In addition, we've eliminated the intermission to keep the event moving. And we've upgraded the private reception afterward. Once again, leading independent bookseller McNally Jackson will be selling copies of the books.

Of course, we're most excited about our three finalists: Don DeLillo, Steven Millhauser, and Edith Pearlman, who will read from their work and sit down to talk with me at The New School's Tishman Auditorium on March 21 at 7:30. I imagine this will be the only opportunity to see these three great writers at one event. Tickets (general admission $14, student $10) are going fast. Those who can't make it will have to wait for the video that The New School will post a couple of weeks later.

Illustration: Tomar Hanuka

Patricia McNair's Storied Life

In the 62nd in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Patricia McNair, author of The Temple of Air (Elephant Rock), reveals her sources.

I sit with my husband at a restaurant, and across the way near a large, haunting, abstract painting on a brick-face wall, another couple lean in toward one another, then away. The man leaves his hand on the table between them, palm up; the woman pulls her shoulders back and crosses her arms over her chest. She is weeping.

I lived in a house in a small subdivision between two lakes in Iowa, and the wife of the couple next door was badly scarred. A deep caving in of flesh was where bone and muscle should have been, but wasn't. I found out later that her husband shot half of her face off. A hunting accident. They gave up hunting. She stopped eating meat.

On a huge Ferris wheel—one with swinging cages instead of bench seats—I watch as a father lets his little boy, an infant, crawl around the floor of the ride, putting his head against the bars that are supposed to keep us safe.

When I worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, there were twin brothers who—in their forties, perhaps fifties—still dressed alike and lived together. They were each single, never married. One was the nice one. One was not.

In my teens I babysat for a girl with Down's Syndrome. She was younger than me but actually quite a bit larger, heavier. One afternoon while she settled in for a nap, I dozed on a couch in the den. I woke up when the girl was on top of me, hitting me.

Friends tell me stories: There’s a woman with a double mastectomy and a man working in her house; a mother tried to give up eating in order to find enlightenment; a woman suspected her husband of cheating only to find out he was distracted by his serious (and secret) illness. I listen carefully and store it all away, just in case. One writer friend knows what I am up to, and so she prefaces her stories—the really good ones—with: Now, you can’t have this one; this one is mine.

They are all ordinary moments from my ordinary life, really, but ones that stay with me, draw me to them and through them in search of narrative. I gather these instances, never quite sure when they will present themselves to me, unbidden at times, or at others, dragged out from the murky shadows of memory. I sit with my pen and my journal, or my fingers on a keyboard, and scan through those things I have witnessed, I’ve been told, I’ve noted, and I wonder about still—days, years, sometimes decades after this happened, after that occurred.

Here—in each day I make my way through—is where story lives. The couple pulling apart at the table, the scarred wife, the endangered child, the odd twins, the big girl and her babysitter, the man in the house, the longing mother, and the distracted husband each have found a home in my linked collection, The Temple of Air. They are no longer the people I saw or was told about, they are no longer the people I knew. They have become others, characters created, who populate the pages of the stories I’ve imagined in the lives I’ve discovered.

It is this, this moving from watching, gathering, storing away, to writing it down that changes things. What was real, what really happened, no longer matters, at least not to me. It is an interesting tension, this pull between observation and imagination, this balance of seeing it happen and making it happen. This place that is settled somewhere between what is real and what is imagined is where I come to do my work; this is where I live my storied life.

Why We're Happy That Our Finalists Are Finalists For Other Book Awards, Too

On Feb. 21, I learned (via Twitter) that the three finalists for The Story Prize this year are also finalists for two other book awards. Don DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda and Steven Millhauser's We Others are among the five finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. And Edith Pearlman's Binocular Vision is one of five finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It's also up for the National Book Critics Circle Award (as announced earlier) and was a finalist for the National Book Awards in November.

One reason we established The Story Prize partly was that we believed the major U.S. book awards for fiction hadn't often enough recognized short story collections—and that the form deserved its own award. Rarely does a story collection win these prizes. PEN/Faulkner has the best track record in this regard, having given its fiction prize to two story collections in the past two years: Sherman Alexie's War Dances in 2010 and The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg in 2011, as well as three others in the past 20 years—for a total of five winners.

If you don't count Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which the publisher maintained was a novel, The Pulitzer Prize last went to a story collection in 2009—Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge. Before that, it most recently went to a story collection in 2000, when Jhumpa Lahiri won for Interpreter of Maladies. But those are the only two books of short fiction that have won in the past 20 years—even 30 years. The last short fiction winner before 2000 was The Stories of John Cheever in 1979.

A short story collection hasn't won the National Book Awards since Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever in 1996, and the last story collection to win before that was Ellen Gilchrist's Victory Over Japan in 1984. However, readers did choose The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor as the best book in the NBA's first 60 years in 2010. And more short story collections seem to have been among the finalists in recent years.

Excluding Egan's book last year, the last story collection to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction was in 1998--Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman. Gina Beirault's Women in Their Beds, a 1996 winner (and also a PEN/Faulkner winner), is the only other story collection to win the NBCC award for fiction in the last 20 years. In my opinion, short story collections are harder for critics to write about, which is one reason I think this award is a tough one for short fiction entries to crack.

In any event, we're happy that all three of this year's finalists for The Story Prize have a shot at winning other awards, too, because we believe in these three books and wish them—and short story collections in general—as much favorable attention as possible. Good luck all.

(You can see DeLillo. Millhauser, and Pearlman read and discuss their work at The Story Prize event at The New School on March 21.)

Outstanding and Notable 2011 Collections

So many of the short story collections we read for The Story Prize in 2011 were skillful, engaging, and well-deserving of a wider readership. We could only choose three books as finalists. However, we read several other 2011 collections we considered to be worthy of attention. We found these seven books, in particular, to be outstanding:

• Steve Almond, God Bless America, Lookout Books*
• Charles Baxter, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, Pantheon
• Siobhan Fallon, You Know When the Men Are Gone, Putnam/Amy Einhorn
• Caitlin Horrocks, This Is Not Your City, Sarabande Books 
• Maureen McHugh, After the Apocalypse, Small Beer Press
• Daniel Orozco, Orientation and Other Stories, Faber & Faber
• Jim Shepard, You Think That's Bad, Alfred A. Knopf

And we highly recommend these notable collections (though many others we read could also have been on this list):

• Alethea Black, I Knew You'd Be Lovely, Broadway Books
• Lou Beach, 420 Characters, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Shannon Cain, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press
• Seth Fried, The Great Frustration, Counterpoint/Soft Skull
• Laura Furman, The Mother Who Stayed, Free Press
• David Galef, My Date with Neanderthal Woman, Dzanc Books
• Dagoberto Gilb, Before the End, After the Beginning, Grove Press
• Diane Goodman, Party Girl, Autumn House Press
• Alan Heathcock, Volt, Graywolf Press
• Patricia Henley, Other Heartbreaks, Engine Books
• Michael Martone, Four for a Quarter, FC2
• Ana Menendez, Adios, Happy Homeland, Black Cat
• Sabina Murray, Tales of the New World, Black Cat 
• Edna O'Brien, Saints and Sinners, Little Brown
• Miroslav Penkov, East of the West, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Helen Phillips, And Yet They Were Happy, Leapfrog Press
• Shann Ray, American Masculine, Graywolf Press
• Adam Ross, Ladies and Gentlemen, Alfred A. Knopf
• Elissa Schappell, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, Simon & Schuster
• Andrew Scott, Naked Summer, Press 53
• Danzy Senna, You Are Free, Riverhead Books
• Emma Straub, Other People We Married, Five Chapters/Riverhead Books
• Melanie Rae Thon, In This Light, Graywolf Press
• Lynne Tillman, Someday This Will Be Funny, Cursor/Red Lemonade
• Colm Tóibín, The Empty Family, Scribner

* [Author links are to guest posts on The Story Prize blog. 

Book links are to IndieBound or other bookselling outlets.]

Official Announcement of the Finalists: DeLillo, Millhauser, and Pearlman

THE STORY PRIZE ANNOUNCES ITS 2011 FINALISTS:

Three celebrated authors, whose collections span decades-long careers, vie for the richest top prize of any annual U.S. book award for fiction.

The Story Prize, an annual award for books of short fiction, is pleased to honor three outstanding short story collections chosen from among a field of 92 books that 60 different publishers or imprints submitted in 2011. The three finalists are:

• The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo (Scribner)
• We Others by Steven Millhauser (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books)

The idea that the short story is a beginner’s form, one that novice writers cut their teeth on before turning to the more ambitious work of writing novels, is a common misconception. This year’s finalists for The Story Prize show that—to the contrary—top fiction writers often remain devoted to the demanding form of the short story throughout their careers.

Although The Angel Esmeralda is Don DeLillo’s first short story collection, the nine powerful stories, published between 1979 and 2011, echo quintessential career-long themes. The 21 ingenious stories in We Others by Steven Millhauser include seven newly collected pieces alongside selected work from four previous collections, going back to 1981. Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision combines 13 new stories and 21 previously collected stories, dating to 1976, from a career short story writer whose brilliant work has only recently captured much-deserved attention.

The Story Prize was established in 2004 to honor short story collections, which other major book awards for fiction often overlook, and is underwritten by the Chisholm Foundation. Although the audience for short story collections may be smaller than those for popular fiction and nonfiction, stories continue to inspire passionate and devoted followings in the U.S. and throughout the world.

The Story Prize’s annual event will take place at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 21. General admission tickets are $14, and student tickets are $10.

That night, the three finalists will read selections from their work, after which Director Larry Dark will interview each writer on-stage. At the end of the event, Founder Julie Lindsey will announce the winner and present that author with $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. The two runners-up will each receive $5,000.

Previous winners of The Story Prize have been The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat, The Hill Road by Patrick O’Keeffe, The Stories of Mary Gordon by Mary Gordon, Like You’d Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard, Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin, and, most recently, Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr.

About the authors

Don DeLillo is the author of fifteen novels, including Falling Man, Libra, and White Noise, and three plays, in addition to the story collection The Angel Esmeralda. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2006, Underworld was named one of the three best novels of the last twenty-five years by The New York Times Book Review, and in 2000 it won the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction of the past five years.

Steven Millhauser is the author of numerous works of fiction including Martin Dressler, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, and Dangerous Laughter, a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year. His work has been translated into fifteen languages, and his story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the 2006 film The Illusionist. His most recent collection, We Others, comprises seven new and fourteen selected stories, written over the past thirty years. He currently teaches at Skidmore College and lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Edith Pearlman is the recipient of the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of short fiction and the Wallant Award for fiction considered to have significance for the American Jew. She has published more than 250 works in national magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize. She is the author of four story collections: Binocular Vision, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award; Vaquita, winner of the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature; Love Among the Greats, winner of the Spokane Fiction Award; and How to Fall, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Founder Julie Lindsey and Director Larry Dark selected the finalists for The Story Prize. This year’s judges are award-winning author Sherman Alexie, professor of Comparative Literature and translator Breon Mitchell, and curator of the Los Angeles Public Library's ALOUD Reading Series Louise Steinman.

For more on The Story Prize please visit our Web site at www.thestoryprize.org, read the official blog at www.thestoryprize.blogspot.com, follow twitter.com/thestoryprize, or visit our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Story-Prize-Award-News/110867455604011

Here They Are, The Story Prize Finalists: Don DeLillo! Steven Millhauser! Edith Pearlman!

We're pleased to announce the books and authors we've chosen as this year's finalists for The Story Prize:

• The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo (Scribner) 
• We Others by Steven Millhauser (Alfred A. Knopf) 
• Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books) 

These are outstanding books by skillfull and accomplished authors, and we're thrilled to have them as our finalists. We read 92 short story collections from 60 different publishers or imprints in 2011. Quite a few would have made excellent finalists. It's always hard to choose just three books, and it will be just as difficult (if not more so) to compile a short list of other notable collections we read in 2011. Nonetheless, we plan to post our short list in a week or two.

A fine list of finalists: DeLillo, Millhuaser, and Pearlman

The Story Prize’s annual event will take place at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 21. General admission tickets are $14, and student tickets are $10. That night, the finalists will read from and discuss their work onstage. At the end, Julie Lindsey (Founder of The Story Prize) will announce which of these three deserving authors gets the top prize. Our three judges—Sherman Alexie, Breon Mitchell, and Louise Steinman—are reading the books and will determine the outcome.