What the Judges Had to Say About Elizabeth Strout's Anything Is Possible

photo © Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were Susan Minot, Walton Muyumba, and Stephanie Sendaula. 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.

“Elizabeth Strout is a bewitching writer. What does she do that is so stunning? Her stories are quiet and straightforward and then they thwack you on the back of your head. The intelligent prose is seemingly humble but elegant in its subtlety and enchanting in its overall effect. Her wit has such a sharp blade you barely feel it until after the slice. She is a specialist in the reticence of people, and her characters are compelling because of the complexity of their internal lives, and the clarity with which that complexity is depicted. It is a sublime pleasure to read her, whether she draws you into a relatively undramatic scenario or a situation in which the stakes are high. Elizabeth Strout weaves her tales gracefully and you don’t know how deep she is going until you are suddenly overcome. She makes you feel. And then she makes you think, about nothing less than who we are and how we live our lives.”

“Anything is Possible is one of those books that stays with you long after you've finished reading. Strout has a gift with words, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the lives of her rural Illinois characters. Each of them leaves a haunting and lasting impression, from the Barton siblings to the Nicely sisters. A worthwhile collection on love, loss, family, and the concept of home.”

Elizabeth Strout's Anything Is Possible is the 14th Winner of The Story Prize

photo © Beowulf Sheehan

We're pleased to announce that Elizabeth Strout's Anything Is Possible (Random House) is the winner of The Story Prize for books published in 2017. The other finalists this year were authors Daniel Alarcón for The King Is Always Above the People (Riverhead Books) and Ottessa Moshfegh for Homesick for Another World (Penguin Press). At the event at The New School, all three finalists read from and discussed their work on-stage. Strout received $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. As runners-up, Alarcón and Moshfegh each received $5,000.

Congratulations to Elizabeth Strout and Random House!

In the days and weeks to come, we'll post the judges' citations for the three books, photos from the event and after party, and a link to the video.

The Story Prize Finalists: Daniel Alarcón, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Elizabeth Strout

We're pleased to honor as finalists for The Story Prize three outstanding books published in 2017, chosen from 120 entries representing 93 different publishers or imprints. It was a deep field with a lot of worthy story collections—more so than usual. The finalists are:

Authors extraordinaire: Daniel Alarcón, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Elizabeth Strout

• The King Is Always Above the People by Daniel Alarcón (Riverhead Books)
• Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press)
• Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

The King Is Always Above the People by Daniel Alarcón portrays citizens struggling to belong to or hoping to escape from an unnamed South American country. The stories in Ottessa Moshfegh's Homesick for Another World unflinchingly depict women and men seeking meaning in off-kilter circumstances. Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout navigates the bleak terrain of a rural Illinois setting, depicting the haunting effect of the past on the present lives of its characters.

This year's judges—author Susan Minot, author and critic Walton Muyumba, and librarian Stephanie Sendaula—will decide the outcome.

The annual award event will take place at the New School’s Auditorium at 66 West 12 Street in New York City at 7:30 p.m. on Wed., Feb. 28. Tickets cost $14. That night, Alarcón, Moshfegh, and Strout will read from and discuss their work on-stage. At the end of the event, Julie Lindsey will announce the winner and present that author with $20,000 along with an engraved silver bowl. The two runners-up will each receive $5,000. The Creative Writing Program at The New School co-sponsors the event.

In the weeks ahead, we'll announce this year's winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award. We'll also publish an index of guest posts from 2017 authors and a long list of other exceptional collections we read last year.

Matthew Lansburgh Finds Time to Feed His Soul

In the 20th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Matthew Lansburgh, author of Outside Is the Ocean (University of Iowa Press), discusses the process of writing and publishing his work.

What is the best piece of writing advice you've ever received?
When I was a student in NYU's MFA program, I was lucky enough to be able to work with Zadie Smith. She read an early version of what became Outside Is the Ocean, and we met for coffee twice. She gave me a lot of helpful feedback, but one of the best pieces of advice I gleaned from our meetings was the importance of putting your work aside so you can come back to it with fresh eyes. She told me she sometimes puts drafts of her work in a drawer for several months before picking them up again. I now try to do the same thing, and I've found it to be incredibly helpful.

Did the stories in your collection go through many drafts?
I started working on Outside Is the Ocean over a decade ago. The stories I worked on when I began the project went through a huge number of drafts. I revised some of them dozens and dozens of times. The last stories I wrote—"Buddy," "Outside Is the Ocean," "Amalia," and "Clear Waters Below"—went through fewer revisions. I guess the earliest stories were the vehicles I used to learn how to write a story.

Were there times when you felt like giving up on the book ?
Without a doubt. For many years, I kept coming back to the project again and again, trying repeatedly to tackle various problems. Occasionally, a journal would publish one of the stories, and that gave me a boost of confidence. Most of the time, however, it felt like I was just wandering blindly through an endless desert without a compass or sense of when my journey would be over.

What's your writing routine like? 
Unfortunately, I've never been one of those people who's had a set writing schedule. I admire people who are disciplined enough to get up at 5:30 every morning and write for six hours. I've spent most of the past twenty years working full-time as a lawyer, however, so there have been many long stretches during which I just didn't have the energy to make meaningful progress. I did most of my writing in spurts—vacations, weekends, residencies. Currently, my day job allows me to work just three days a week, so I'm able to devote a lot more of my energy to something that feeds my soul rather than drains it.

Have you shared your work with friends and family?
My partner Stan has been there from Day One, and he's read so many drafts of most of the stories, that he could probably recite certain passages by heart. I've told my siblings about the book, but I still haven't shared the news with my mother. Although it's fiction, some of the dynamics mirror dynamics in my own family, and I'm not sure what my mother's reaction would be. In general, she's very supportive of my writing, and she often asks whether I've written anything I'd be willing to share with her. On the other hand, she and I have had a challenging relationship, and I'm afraid some of the stories might be unsettling to her. People who've read the collection say they find the portrait of Heike to be very sympathetic and nuanced. My hope is that one day my mother will read the stories and see the tremendous love Stewart has for his mother.

What are you working on now?
A few years ago, I started writing a novel, the tone and subject matter of which are quite different from Outside Is the Ocean. The new book is a lot funnier and zanier than the story collection. It has a strange cast of characters—including a woman with wings who works at Coney Island—and the protagonist is a complete misfit.

Has the transition from stories to a novel been difficult?
I think all writing is difficult. One of the things I love about the writing process is that I can always create new challenges for myself, new problems to solve. In some ways these two projects aren't as different from one another as one might imagine. The stories in my collection are linked and, like Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, examine the lives of a recurring cast of characters from various perspectives. So it posed some of the same challenges I'm facing in writing my novel. 

Jodi Paloni on Stranger Stories

In the 18th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Jodi Paloni, author of They Could Live with Themselves (Press 53), looks at stories that turn on the appearance of a stranger.

Some of my favorite stories are the ones in which the main character is minding his or her own sweet and sorrowful business when a newcomer arrives on the scene, some outsider, a stranger. The interloper isn’t always altogether unexpected, but in most cases, the impact of the “unfamiliar” is pivotal to the narrative arc. Three stories that readily come to mind are, “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, “Pharmacy” by Elizabeth Strout, and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates.

Strout's "Pharmacy": Prescription for high impact?

In each of these stories, the protagonist is completely drawn in by the secondary character. The secondary character becomes, in a matter of speaking, larger than life, while the main character becomes distracted from his or her interior conflict. The outsider provides what the story needs, but in the end, of course, the main character is the one altered.

In my own writing, first drafts tend to start out as twenty or more meandering pages in which my protagonist thinks back on some tragic event. While she is beautifully conflicted, she isn’t doing anything to alter her plight. That’s when I start to think about the higher-stakes situation, both actual and emotional.

Here’s my go-to list of the good advice I’ve been given…

1. Put a character in an opening scene where there’s no easy exit. See what happens. Whatever you do, don’t let her out. 
2. Don’t leave her alone for too long. 
3. Ask the question, “What if…?” Only add, “What if…in walks a stranger? 
4. Give the stranger a quality that juxtaposes the protagonist’s current state of being.

In “Cathedral,” a blind man, friend from the narrator’s wife’s past, becomes the narrator’s houseguest. It takes a non-seeing person’s literal limitations to expose the protagonist’s shadow side, his figurative inability to see. In “Pharmacy,” a pharmacist hires a twenty-something woman, new to town, to work by his side. Her freshness–––youth and optimism–––forms the mirror that exposes the protagonist’s struggle, a waning life alongside an embittered wife. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” the character traits in the antagonist are twisted and heightened to the extreme so that the protagonist, a teenage girl who is in acute want, can bump up hard against her alter ego.

Contradictions interest readers. Employment of a stranger–––as shadow, as mirror, as anima/animus, the Jungian flip side of a previously unrevealed subconscious–––may bring on a full range of impact. But what intrigues me the most about the device is how the stranger, in the end, is not so very strange, but instead becomes something quite recognizable in the protagonist.

Impaneled

(L to R) Story Prize Director Larry Dark (yours truly) with authors
Susan Minot, Rick Moody, and Elizabeth Strout (via Dusty Spines)

The three authors who participated in last night's tribute to The Stories of John Cheever at the Center for Fiction, turned out to have strong, sincere connections to Cheever's work. Elizabeth Strout read "The Worm in the Apple" and told how important the stories were to her development as writer. Rick Moody read from "The Jewels of the Cabots" and discussed how the late stories in the book convinced him that indirection could be an effective narrative technique for him. And Susan Minot brandished a faded, hardcover copy of the book with her ratings of various stories in the table of contents, ranging as high as seven stars. She noted that the story she was going to read from, "The Sorrows of Gin," only rated three stars back then, but her estimation of it had grown. I, too, brought my first copy of the book—a 1978 mass market paperback with off kilter pages. And Rick Moody had his original copy, as well. He read the very Cheeverian inscription his father had written to him, suggesting that Rick, a mere teen at the time, might never be as good a writer as Cheever—kind of like saying he might not measure up to Chekhov.

The Center for Fiction did a great job with the event, which ended with a panel discussion and questions from the audience. I say we do it again in 25 years.

Happy 100th Birthday, Mr. Cheever

Yesterday—May 27—would have been John Cheever's 100th birthday, and I like to think that I have the day off form work for that reason. In fact, maybe Memorial Day should be an annual occasion to remember writers whose work is, well, memorable. After all, May is Short Story Month.

I would be remiss if I didn't also reiterate that this Thursday night, May 31, at the Center for Fiction, The Story Prize will be co-presenting a tribute to The Stories of John Cheever. Susan Minot will read from and discuss JC's "The Sorrows of Gin." Rick Moody will focus on "The Jewels of the Cabots." And Elizabeth Strout will read from "The Worm in the Apple." If you're going to be there (and I hope you are), I would highly recommend reading/re-reading these three stories.

The 92nd Street Y offered it's centennial tribute to John Cheever, with a focus on the man himself. With the exception of Michael Chabon's spirited reading of "The Enormous Radio," the program was almost entirely dedicated to the writer and not his work. Biographer Blake Bailey read excerpts that focused on Cheever grappling with his fame. Susan Cheever read from her father's diaries, admiring the gorgeous prose that permeated even work that wasn't written for publication. And Allan Gurganus, Cheever's former student and more, read the last few sentences of "Goodbye, My Brother," and spoke at length about personal encounters with his mentor.

I'm glad the 92nd Street Y did this. Now we can focus on the reason we even remember this man 100 years after his birth—his fiction and, in particular, his stories. Call me romantic, but I would be taking note of this occasion even if I'd never seen the photos of John Cheever's handsome, craggy face or heard recordings of his exaggerated patrician accent, or learned about his troubled family relationships and his personal demons. For most of us, the stories transcend the life.

Short Story Month: Minot, Moody, and Strout Read Cheever at The Center for Fiction on May 31

May is National Short Story Month, and this year (for once) The Story Prize has something planned. Thanks to New York's Center for Fiction, we're going to be co-presenting a reading to celebrate The Stories of John Cheever, a collection you'll find on the shelves of many passionate readers and writers of short fiction.

Why a Cheever reading now? Because he will have been 100 on May 27. John Cheever, the man, has gotten a lot of attention in recent years, with the release of his diaries and a highly-regarded biography by Blake Bailey. In fact, the 92nd Street Y is having an event on May 17 with Bailey, Michael Chabon, and writers and offspring Ben and Susan Cheever. So when The Center for Fiction's Executive Director, Noreen Tomassi, and I discussed having an event there, we decided to put the focus on what is probably Cheever's greatest legacy—his short stories.

(L to R) Susan Minot, Rick Moody, and Elizabeth Strout

On May 31, at 7 p.m., at The Center for Fiction, authors Susan Minot, Rick Moody, and Elizabeth Strout will each read from and discuss a Cheever story. Minot's choice is "The Sorrows of Gin," Moody will read from "The Jewels of the Cabots," and Strout will focus on "The Worm in the Apple"—all interesting selections from among an oeuvre that includes "Goodbye, My Brother," "The Enormous Radio," "The Five-Forty-Eight," "Reunion," and "The Swimmer."

Susan Minot, Rick Moody, and Elizabeth Strout each have New England roots—as did Cheever. And the work of all three has affinities with his. I'm expecting a memorable and fitting tribute to a great writer with a continuing and widespread influence on other writers—a nice way, we hope, to close out a month celebrating the story form.

Narrating 9/11: Crisis and Community in American Fiction

By Patrick Thomas Henry

Ten years later, the September 11, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the United Airlines Flight 93 crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, still cloud over the American imagination. The resonant images—the exhaust-black sky over the cindering, collapsing Twin Towers, or the plume of flame jetting from the Pentagon’s side, or the ash pit in Shanksville where the plane crashed—have metamorphosed into cultural touchstones, vividly re-evoking the tragedies. Pundits and politicians have analyzed and capitalized on the attacks, while America’s fiction writers, essayists, and poets have shouldered the Atlas-like task of re-witnessing these events and guiding us, as readers and human beings, through the devastation.

The news media instilled an unsettling reality—a sense of helpless paralysis—in those distanced from the sites. CNN, and other news agencies streamed the footage of the Towers disintegrating on a disturbing loop; newspapers were hardly better, centering the destruction of the iconic Towers on their front pages. In Elizabeth Strout’s novel-in-stories, Olive Kitteridge (2008), the eponymous character prepares to visit her son in New York and trembles from the psychological shock of observing—from a safe distance in Portland, Maine—the devastation:

. . . back when those planes ripped through the towers, Olive had sat in her bedroom and wept like a baby, not so much for this country but for the city itself, which had seemed to her to become suddenly no longer a foreign, hardened place, but as fragile as a class of kindergarten children, brave in their terror.

Strout’s effortless glide into Olive’s subconscious demonstrates a key intent of 9/11 writing as a genre: 9/11 narratives do not re-create the tragedy but process its vast scope into something that shapes a community of similarly spirited readers. Olive, a former teacher, likens New York’s inhabitants to kindergarten students valiantly grappling with something beyond their understandings. This pings a rare dent of sentiment into Strout’s ornery protagonist, and 9/11 transforms into a metaphor for how Olive might repair her relationship with her son.

Re-building families from the ground up recurs throughout 9/11 narratives, including novels such as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). A portion of DeLillo’s novel was published as a short story entitled “Still-Life” in the April 9, 2007, edition of The New Yorker; the excerpt tracks Keith and Lianne, an estranged couple, as they resume their domestic routine after Keith narrowly escapes the carnage at Ground Zero. We learn, as Keith rekindles a relationship with his and Lianne’s son Justin, that the collapse has founded in Keith a desire to better understand his world, even as terrible possibilities lurk in the unknown:

Keith as well was going slow, easing inward. He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection . . . drawing things out of time and memory into some dim space that bears his collected experience. . . . Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand awhile and look.

DeLillo reminds us, though, that this vigilance is meant to counteract paranoia, to re-forge those ties that matter most. Notably, the section of “Still-Life” containing the above quotation concludes with Justin snapping Keith from his reverie with the statement, “We go home now.”

9/11 narratives shift readers from cataclysm to fostering communities by propelling us from terrified stasis into tentative yet meaningful activity. This often occurs through fragmented narratives moving between multiple points of view. Strout displaces Olive’s reaction by placing her trip to New York after the attacks, and DeLillo’s work exhibits these tendencies as the novel reacts to 9/11 in the following days. Perhaps one of the most splintered 9/11 stories, Deborah Eisenberg’s “Twilight of the Superheroes” ping-pongs between a post-9/11 New York, the pointless paranoia of Y2K, and an array of homes and art galleries. This frequently reminds the reader of art’s import in coping with any suffering. Eisenberg’s story generates momentum, urging her characters forward and reminding her readers in the concluding clause—“and then the children turned the page”—that better futures await the next generation.

9/11 writings—a genre too broad to fully describe in this brief piece—do not commemorate disaster, but memorialize how to persevere. If the genre possesses a shortcoming, it is that the lessons of 9/11 fiction extend beyond New York’s city limits. (I write this as a long-time resident of central Pennsylvania, one who was astutely aware of how the crash in Shanksville transformed the region overnight.) Regardless, no guides were better suited to the task of re-imagining America than our favorite stories of the past decade. Fiction, particularly in catastrophe’s wake, brings us together as thinking and emoting human beings in a way that nothing else does.

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.

A Short Story Collection (Olive Kitteridge) Wins The Pulitzer Prize

Good news: Elizabeth Strout has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction for her short story collection Olive Kitteridge. It's the first collection to win the Pulitzer since 2000, when Jhumpa Lahiri won for Interpreter of Maladies. Olive Kitteridge, was a close contender for The Story Prize and one of our notable books of 2008. I hope this award puts it into a lot more people's hands.

I don't keep up with the chatter, but I doubt many people expected Olive Kitteridge to win the Pulitzer, even though it made a lot of year-end best books lists and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle awards. Book awards are highly subjective, and the choices largely depend on who's doing the choosing. This year's jurors were writer R.H.W. Dillard, journalist Susan Larson, and librarian Nancy Pearl (who was a judge for The Story Prize a few years ago). The other two finalists were Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich and All Souls by Christine Schutt. In any event, 2008 had several exceptional story collections, and I'm glad one of them has won a major book award (besides The Story Prize). Congratulations, Elizabeth--keep those stories coming.

Updates: More Honors for '08 Collections; Franco-phile or Franco-phobe?

All right, we're (almost) ready to (maybe) put last week's Story Prize event behind us (kind of). Here are a few short-fiction related items that have come up in recent days or that we were too obsessed to point out in the last few weeks. Of particular note: 2008's bumper crop of short story collections is still making news, as is an upcoming collection from a scruffy young talent. And the Pulitzers are yet to come (Apr. 20).

• Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth is the Europe and South Asia Regional winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. The overall winner will be announced on May 16. (Go, Jhumpa!) And Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them is in the running for the Best First Book.
• Tomorrow night the National Book Critics Circle will announce their award winners. Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, as previously noted, is among the fiction finalists.
• Joan Silber's The Size of the World is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction.
• Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's Ms. Hempel Chronicles was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award, which Joseph O'Neill's Netherland won.
• Actor James Franco sold a short story collection to Nan Graham at Scribner. He's currently a student in the MFA program at Columbia University. The stories are set in Palo Alto, Calif., whose high school he paid a visit to in November, 2007, in search of material (see photo). No doubt name (and face) recognition didn't hurt, but let's not be too hasty to pre-judge. Franco will be bringing some extra attention to short fiction, and that's generally a good thing.

Strout's Kitteredge Is a Finalist for the NBCC Book Award for Fiction

Congratulations to Elizabeth Strout, whose story collection, Olive Kitteridge, is among the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards. (Of course, we're pulling for it to win.) The other four books are novels: Roberto Bolaño's 2666, Marilynne Robinson's Home, Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project, and M. Glenn Taylor's The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. It's good to see that a university press is also in the mix (the publisher of Taylor's novel is West Virginia University Press).

Olive Kitteridge is an excellent collection and one of The Story Prize's other notable books of the year. It also made a lot of 2008 best books lists, second only to Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, according to our unscientific tally of mentions.