A Visit from the Goon Squad: Is It Candy or Is it Gum?

First things first: Congratulations to Jennifer Egan on winning the Pulitzer Prize for her story collection, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Yes, you heard it right: I'm calling Goon Squad a story collection. We didn't get it as an entry for The Story Prize*, and I didn't push to get it (nor The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman—likewise a story collection), but I recently read Egan's book for my book group, and the thirteen chapters are definitely stories. Do they work together to create a whole greater than the sum of their parts? Yes, but so do a lot of story collections. 

Novel or story collection—which is it? This brings to mind the great philosophical conundrum of my childhood: Are Razzles candy or gum? As the slogan says: "First it's candy, then it's gum." The answer for Goon Squad is similar. It falls into both camps: First it's a story collection, then it's a novel. As you read the stories, the connections among them strengthen and create a satisfying whole. In fact, it's a lot more successful at being two different things than Razzles ever was.

Here's the thing: Any good story collection will have commonalities that make the book a single, cohesive work. Nonfiction and fiction, stories and novels, poems and stories exist along a continuum. A book, like a person, can be more than one thing, and even more than two things. For instance, a collection of prose poems could also work as a story collection and as a novel and have aspects of a memoir. A nonfiction book can also verge into fiction (I'm looking at you Greg Mortenson). The same goes for genre—a book can crossover among different ones. The stories in Goon Squad have elements of science fiction/alternative reality—as did this year's Story Prize winner, Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall.**

The point is this: Labels are for marketing. Books are for readers, and labels shouldn't place limits on a book's reach. A Visit from the Goon Squad was one of the best novels published in 2010. It was also one of the best story collections, among many good ones we read in 2010.

* We, of course, remain very enthusiastic about the three books we did choose as finalists for The Story Prize (Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr (which won), Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li, and Death Is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca). I can't say we would necessarily have picked A Visit from the Goon Squad as a finalist (Olive Kitteridge came very close, but we didn't choose that, either). Still, I wish we'd had a chance to consider it.

** The same could be said of the work of Chris Adrian, Kevin Brockmeier, George Saunders, and many others who usually fall into the literary camp. Maureen McHugh's Mothers & Other Monsters, a Story Prize finalist in 2006, seemed to carry the alternative history label, but it's also a very literary collection that deserves more attention (as do books by other authors that Small Beer Press publishes, such as Kelly Link and Karen Joy Fowler).

The Story Prize Finalists Are Racking up the Honors

When Story Prize winners or finalists achieve other honors, we're always happy for them. We're pleased on a personal level because we get to know and like these authors. Further honors also reaffirm our choices. And we hope that the books that are finalists for or win The Story Prize get into as many readers' hands as possible. Every honor helps in that regard.

So I was excited when Anthony Doerr, who just won The Story Prize, also won the the £30,000* Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for "The Deep." The story first appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story's Fall 2010 issue** and is in the April 10 edition of the Sunday Times Magazine.** Of course, I would have been equally excited if Yiyun Li, who was also a finalist for the Sunday Times Award, had won.

As it happens, this year's finalists have been racking up the honors since we held The Story Prize event on March 2. Yiyun Li and Suzanne Rivecca were also up for the Northern California Book Awards on Apr. 10. Suzanne was a finalist for PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction, is a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award (even though she's more of a tiger person), and also won a Rome fellowship in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.***

If there's any downside to our finalists and winners achieving other honors it's that certain prizes can overshadow† The Story Prize—but not too many of them, in our view. The Pulitzer Prize is one, and will announce its winners and finalists on April 18. Nonetheless, if Tony, Yiyun, or Suzanne win, we'll be very happy for them. Plus, one real test of a book award is how well its winners and finalists hold up over time, and winning other awards increases the chances that this will happen.

* The equivalent of $49,155 at current exchange rates. Though this eclipses the $20,000 top prize for The Story Prize, we've been mentioned in all of the press coverage and at least have the advantage of a decidedly more succinct name than The Sunday Times EFG Bank Short Story Award.

** It is not one of the stories in Memory Wall, The Story Prize winning collection. For now, you have to buy one-day access to the Sunday Times site for $2 or purchase the back issue of Zoetrope for $8 to read "The Deep." Coincidentally, that same issue of Zoetrope included a story by Mary Swan, whose "The Deep" was the first-prize winner in Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards. In that volume, 2006 Story Prize winner Mary Gordon introduced Swan's story. 
*** Anthony Doerr is a past winner.
† By this, I mean that it could supplant mention of The Story Prize on book covers and in author biographies.

Webcast: The Story Prize Awards Ceremony 2011 | The New School

The video for The Story Prize event on March 2 is up on The New School's YouTube page and will soon be on FORA.tv. The director of The New School's graduate writing program, Robert Polito, introduces the evening. The three finalists—Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca—read from their work and discuss it onstage with the director of The Story Prize, Larry Dark. The event culminates with the announcement of the winner, Anthony Doerr for Memory Wall, by the founder of The Story Prize, Julie Lindsey.

Yiyun Li: What the Judges Had to Say About Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were bookseller Marie du Vaure, Granta editor John Freeman, and author Jayne Anne Phillips. 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.

Here's what the judges had to say about finalist Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl:

In deceptively simple prose, Li plumbs the depths of the human soul, managing through her lonely characters to put us in touch with our own yearnings. China is the setting for most of the stories in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, but they could be happening anywhere, so strong is Li’s empathy for her characters and the universal sense of humanity she conveys. "Kindness," the long story that begins the collection, sets the tone for the entire book presenting a seemingly uneventful life that hones in on the utterly gripping interior drama of its narrator. Each story that follows opens gently like a flower and ends—to our astonishment—in full bloom. Li’s fine and careful work shows that simple can be profound and depth of feeling trumps elaborate machinations. To be so wonderfully in control and yet so keenly attuned to emotion is a rare gift indeed.

photo © Eric Richards 

Suzanne Rivecca: What the Judges Had to Say About Death Is Not an Option

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were bookseller Marie du Vaure, Granta editor John Freeman, and author Jayne Anne Phillips. 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.

Here's what the judges had to say about finalist Suzanne Rivecca's Death Is Not an Option:

Suzanne Rivecca's stories are truly “illuminated lamentations . . .  testimonies of harm” that continually startle and surprise. These stories of female sensibility speak to our times with ironic, brilliant strength, their voices linked by a young writer's empathetic genius. Rivecca's unhappy, discerning, always inquiring protagonists journey to various hearts of darkness, crossing cultural, religious, sexual, and generational boundaries with wit and angelic rage. Each seems a soul pulsing with linguistic energy and exhilarating intelligence. Rivecca reminds us that we are all connected, similar to our very molecules and erratic genes, inextricably bound by desire, shame, guilt, and ecstatic possibility. Death Is Not an Option becomes an impassioned directive about how to read, how to write, and how to live.

photo © Eric Richards

The Story Prize Event: Read All About It

Here are some links to coverage from The Story Prize event:

Reuters

Associated Press

The Los Angeles Times' Jacket Copy 

The New Yorker's Book Bench 
Shelf Awareness

Electric Literature, The Outlet

Open Letters Monthly, Like Fire 

Poets & Writers, G&A: The Contest blog 

Fiction Writers Review

Book Fox 
WNYC's Talk to Me (with audio of the event)


Thanks to all. We'll update this list as we learn of more.

Anthony Doerr: What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Memory Wall

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were bookseller Marie du Vaure, Granta editor John Freeman, and author Jayne Anne Phillips. 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.

Here's what one judge had to say about Anthony Doerr's Story Prize winning collection Memory Wall:

Anthony Doerr’s incandescent collection of stories is a poignant elaboration on the idea of how memory affects the course of our lives, and how it acts as the true portal to our own selves. Each story is a tribute to the irrepressible need of humans to draw on remembrance in order to shape their future. When confronted with the alienating pain of loss or disappointment, the protagonists compensate for that void in projecting their recollections of that experience onto the canvas of their new daily reality. As such, and through the solicitous and careful artistry of the writer, these characters are able to recreate a stronger self, and they move on through a last reshaping process, even if that means facing their very own end and erasure. It is the shimmering space between the two planes of reality and memory that Doerr captures with immense sensitivity.
  Doerr is adept at evoking a variety of places and different times in history, conjuring sharp settings in which the fragility of his characters is played out. The diversity of backgrounds underscores his poetic skill at illustrating his themes of emotional distancing and the resilience of hope. While he displays a rare imagination in the handling of his subjects, he maintains a beautiful and quiet grace in his precise, spare style, providing a harmonious resonance to all of the stories. Memory Wall is an astonishing work that bears the signature of a writer of remarkable talent and impressive maturity.  It leaves the reader deeply moved and carrying the indelible impression of having witnessed compassion in the making.

And another judge observed that:

Anthony Doerr has long been fascinated with the natural world. He has a botanist’s broad vocabulary, a trail guide’s solo instincts. But there has always been a division – especially in his fine and very funny book on trying (and failing) to write in Italy, Four Seasons in Rome, between our lives, and the lives of, say, crustaceans. As if the natural world were out there, fleetingly glimpsed, constantly being pushed aside by the so-called everyday world. Doerr has finally broken down that boundary with this extraordinary collection of stories, Memory Wall. It is the work of a writer who has absorbed the natural world so deeply he can write with its metaphors. Or to put it another way: this book creates its own ecology. Instead of water, there is longing, and instead of air, there is memory. Within these parameters, Doerr unspools the lives of men and women who are haunted by the past’s proximity. In the brilliant title novella, a woman in South Africa undergoes a dangerous procedure which allows her failing memories to be restored to their original state in replayable cartridges—only to have them stolen. Other stories take place in Estonia, Germany, Korea, and Wyoming, as if Doerr is making a political point that not only are our memories ourselves, they are the bedrock in which nations plant their strongest roots. The heroes of these stories are equally wide-ranging—from Holocaust survivors to a storied sturgeon which reappears, long after people assumed it was dead. They all stand before the same existential dread – erasure, and the vanishing of memory. “Every hour,” Doerr writes in “Afterworld,” “all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. This astonishing collection identifies what needs to be preserved. And brings us right to the water’s edge, where the sand bags are being put down.

photo © Eric Richards