Up on the Roof: A Review of Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down

Suicide is a funny thing. At least, it is in Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down. Unlike his earlier pop-culture riffs, High Fidelity and About A Boy, Hornby's glance into the lives of four suicidal characters takes a broader look at life, transcending issues such as relationships and maturity in an attempt to portray a multidimensional struggle that revolves around life and death.

The novel has a fluid narrative, thanks to short passages told from the points of view of the main characters - Martin, Jess, JJ and Maureen - in rotating fashion. The style not only moves the story along in a quick pace, it also keeps one interested in the characters by providing bits of information about why each one ended up on top of Toppers' House on New Year's Eve. That is, why they picked the most stereotypical night and the most popular building to jump off of in London to end their lives.

The gang, which forms rather organically with a little push from Jess, is a most unlikely one. Martin is a washed-up TV presenter, estranged from his wife and daughters after sleeping with a 15-year-old and landing in jail; Maureen is a middle-aged woman with a disabled - "vegetable" - son, Matty. She has withdrawn from life to take care of Matty and talks only to God; Jess is an 18-year-old with a propensity for getting smashed on drugs and booze, an inclination to abuse her parents and a loathing of long words and complicated sentences - as well as literature; and, JJ is an American rock-star-wanna-be whose failed band and relationship left him reminiscing about the not-so-good, good old days and delivering pizzas.

It's hard to see why any of the characters, minus Martin, would want to hurl themselves off a building. A Long Way Down is funny like that, it gets one contemplating what circumstances could/should/would justify or call for a seemingly quick and easy end to life. It's also funny because Hornby masterfully groups together four potentially stereotypical and boring, yet in their own right odd and interesting, characters. With their self- and outward-loathing stance on life, they are incompatible from the first moment.

Yet they get along. And they need each other like a comatose patient needs life support. Hidden in their interactions and sarcastic humor are hints of despair - of the same vein that any ordinary person might go through at one point or another in life. And though Martin, Jess, Maureen and JJ may be not be alike at all, one is apt to identify with parts of each character. Be it total financial, social and emotional ruin as with Martin, a completely unselfish life lived with remorse as with Maureen, teenage angst borne from a troubled family as with Jess, or plain, downright self-pity and denial as with JJ, one has been there.

Hornby gives his audience a chance to reflect on moments of doubt and despair through his characters. And, not to worry, just because the subject is rather grave does not mean you are spared Hornby's brilliant modern-culture observations or his penchant for showing off his knowledge of rock music and contemporary literature. Reading A Long Way Down will make you laugh, and, who knows, maybe you'll be laughing at yourself.

- Emre Peker @ 2:00 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Inter Alia #9: The Aquarian Age is All the Rage

A few weeks back, in a review of Christopher Sorrentino's Trance, I remarked upon the recent proliferation of novels about the counterculture of the 1960s and about its turn toward violence. The book reviews in this week's New Yorker would seem to confirm the trend. The lead item in the "Briefly Noted" column concerns Susan Choi's A Person of Interest, which takes as its point of departure a fictional version of the Unabomber case. Meanwhile, in an essay generous in both length and tone, James Wood reviews Peter Carey's His Illegal Self (about the child of SDS radicals) and Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions (about "swinging London's" revolutionary underground.)

Wood suggests, with characteristic perspicuity, that the Age of Aquarius offers novelists room to explore "ideological radicalism" without having to address September 11 and political Islam. To which I say: Right on! As we at The Millions have noted before, the world-historical developments of the last decade seem to demand novelistic attention; at the same time, they've become so freighted with symbolic and ideological meaning as to seem inhospitable to levity, or irony. DeLillo's Falling Man, to name one September 11 title, was hobbled by its temporal and emotional proximity to the events it considered. The farther it drifted from these events, the more alive its characters seemed.

It's worth noting, however, that the historical attraction of the Age of Aquarius predates the explosion of "ideological radicalism" into the public consciousness, circa 2001. Sorrentino, Choi, and (I'm guessing) Dana Spiotta began writing about the radical underground way back in the Clinton era, which marked, we were told, "the end of history." Which points to another, related reason why contemporary novelists may find the '60s so fertile. That was a time, it seems, when a classless society actually seemed like an achievable goal... when it was possible to argue, with a straight face, that "All you need is love." For a writer concerned to dramatize ideas, this sort of political ardor is hard to resist. (Think, e.g., of Dostoevsky.) Nowadays, as Hari Kunzru's narrator remarks, "Ideology's dead.... Everyone pretty much agrees on how to run things."

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:00 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Beautiful Children Goes Free

Random House has decided to take a bold move this week, making one of its hottest titles available for free download for a limited time. Charles Bock's debut effort Beautiful Children has set the literary world aflame, attracting glowing notices from the New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere, and nosing onto the NYT Bestseller List.

The download went live last night at midnight and is up until Friday night at midnight. The pdf of the book is also being hosted at Amazon for a limited time.

We got in touch with Jynne Martin, the book's publicist, to find out more about Random House's move to offer the book for free.

The Millions: Though big publishers are embracing technology in many ways, for Random House, releasing a new and popular book for free download seems like quite a leap. Why now and why Beautiful Children?

Jynne Martin: If it's good enough for Radiohead it's good enough for us! The online landscape is changing quickly, and we must take risks to find new ways to bring people to books. In this case we have a book we think is unique, fearless, and brilliant. Giving this book away for free online is a way to offer everyone a chance to read as much of the book as they want, and if readers love Beautiful Children as much as we do (and as many critics and early readers do), this will spread the word as widely as possible.

The Millions: Do you expect this to boost sales of Beautiful Children? Or is it simply an experiment to see what happens?

JM: We see this as win-win-win for everyone involved - readers, the publisher, and Charles. Of course we hope readers will love what they read, and want to own an old-world copy of the book for their shelf. But if they read it for free and don't like it and don't buy a copy, that's fine; it's no different than if they'd gone into Barnes & Noble and read the book in the cafe section and decided they didn't want to get it.

The Millions: What was Charles Bock's role in making this happen? Was it his idea?

JM: It was Random House's idea but Charles embraced it right away. After ten years typing in his basement with just his computer, coffee maker, and Axl Rose albums, wondering if any other human would ever read his book at all, he's more than thrilled to get his book out to the widest possible readership.

The Millions: Can we expect Random House to do this again in the future?

JM: It's certainly possible. We'll have to see how this one goes.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:23 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• Friend of The Millions, proprietor of Pinky's Paperhaus, and all around great gal Carolyn Kellogg has landed at the LA Times book blog Jacket Copy. We have little doubt that she'll do great things there.
• Following Heath Ledger's untimely death, BBC looks at the myriad ways in which Hollywood has dealt with losing an actor mid-production, dating back to 1937 "when Jean Harlow died, aged 26, during the making of Saratoga. With filming 90% complete, a lookalike and two Harlow sound-a-likes (voice doubles) took up where the star left off."
• Bookride is back with an intriguing look at the collectors' market for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. Don't miss this tidbit: "By the way sending books to authors for signing is something of a gamble - Thomas Hardy used to keep all the books sent to him neatly shelved in a spare room."
• Speaking of Garcia Marquez, Edith Grossman, the translator who has shaped the Latin American canon for English speakers over the last few decades, is profiled in bookforum.
• The New Republic offers the story behind the controversial New York Times John McCain/lobbyist story.
• The Morning News returns with its third annual Tournament of Books. Sadly, there will be no Bloggers' Pool this year (despite our being eager to participate again), but Coudal Partners is sponsoring a betting pool for charity this year. As of this writing, On Chesil Beach and Run have had the most money thrown their way.
• A cartoon drawn on the pages of Moby Dick
• And finally, McSweeney's offers up some sweet Ashton Kutcher fan fiction.

- Editor @ 8:54 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Short stories and the cell phone: An Interview with writer Barry Yourgrau

Although cell phone novels might at first appear to be a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, one of the form's pioneers is a South African transplant to the U.S., writer Barry Yourgrau. Barry's book "Keitai Stories," a collection of short "flash" stories, was released for cell phones by a prominent Japanese publishing house, before making the transition to print.

Currently, Barry lives and works in New York City, where he's hard at work on a series of popular children's books (NASTYBooks). He has also released several volumes of literary fiction, performed his short stories in venues as diverse as MTV and NPR and starred in a movie based on one of his books, The Sadness of Sex.

The Millions sat down with Barry (electronically, but no cell phones were involved) to chat about his work in Japan, whether cell phone novels can work in the U.S. and how he writes short stories.

The Millions: You've been writing short stories for cell phones in Japan. When did you start? How did you come up with the idea?

BY: Got the idea when visiting In Tokyo for the first time in 2002, I saw kids surfing the Internet on cell phones (keitai). I thought my stories, which are generally very short, would be just right for cell-phone reading. Especially if I made 'em even briefer. (Which is an interesting exercise: as Woody Allen says somewhere, a general note to improve any comic writing is, Make It Shorter.)

I suggested to my Japanese translator and editor that I write a book for first-serializing on keitai. They agreed enthusiastically. I figured I'd hit on a real format innovation; turns out I was part of a huge wave of keitai writing. Though my stuff is literary; most other keitai writing is pretty schematic and manga-derived - and while their individual segments are short too, they're parts of long novels!

The Millions: What has the reaction been?

BY: Delightful. 100,000 readers accessed the stories (Keitai Stories) online. The book has done well, though not in those same numbers, granted; nor in the millions that best-selling "keitai novels" have sold. My translator (Motoyuki Shibata, a renowned literary figure in Japan) thought it some of my best work! My editor too... Go figure. But we just serialized my kids' book, NASTYbook, on keitai before pubbing in Japan. It wasn't written for keitai, a normal book. But works fine on keitai....

The Millions: Do you think it could work in the U.S.? If not, what's different about Japan that makes cell phone novels/stories viable?

BY:I don't see why it wouldn't work in US. But there is a difference; namely, that kids and younger folk in US access the Internet on computers and use computers for online reading etc. Japanese and Asian kids use cell phones; online computer connection is costly (I believe) - and there's not much privacy at home, homes and rooms are tiny. People don't coop up at home like in US.

The Millions: What's different about writing for cell phones?

BY: For me, not much, other than the driving imperative to go shorter. So you really get to experiment with the essentials of what makes a narrative work - from prose poems to script-like description to just dialogue. But what makes the keitai writing in Japan successful in the market place (other than subject matter, material for young girls written by young women) is interactivity - readers can comment and writers will change storylines in direct response. I was thinking of doing something like this, but it's hard from US to Japan, and time consuming.

The Millions: Your stories have a tendency to turn to the bizarre or experimental. What are your influences? Where do your ideas come from?

BY: Bizarre, sure. "Experimental," hmmm... I think of myself as a quite conventional writer, albeit with a twist.... I riff on established genres and forms the way comedians send up things. I got started writing my own pseudo-dream-journal items. I read Cocteau's remark that in order to make fantasy work, the details have to be extra-concrete. I had been working after college as a newspaper reporter (very slow and disorganized one). So I used some "newspaper" style features in my writing, e.g., having all dialogue "tagged" by speaker, never just standing by itself. My earliest big influence was Raymond Carver, I discovered Will You Please Be Quiet Please in the library I think in 1975? Blew me away. We had a brief correspondence: I wrote a short fan letter, he wrote back a nice short reply (mentioning something about trying to give up drinking...); I cracked open a tall beer and dashed back a single-spaced page and a half outpouring of my hopes, dreams, enthusiasms. Naturally that was end of our correspondence, I never heard back.

Isaac Babel I loved too, plus fine crime writing, Hammett and Chandler. And Woody Allen's early standup routines. Lots of short poetry. The crime writing stuff is important: cause it's such propulsive writing. Like joke-writing. Or writing for the screen. Twilight Zone made a big impact on me, I realize. Basically I write like a confessional poet, using surreal narrative and cinematic tools. On a mini scale.

My ideas I just get. That's how my brain works. I never have used my own dreams for inspiration - to me that's "cheating." Like I say, I riff fantastically on established things. My book, Haunted Traveller, for instance, is all my riffs on existential exotic far-flung writing, Chatwin et al. I finally read Paul Bowles after writing the book. Jeez, now I know where my ideas came from! (Actually, I had read and been much affected by his Mohammed Mrabet translations - short, semi-fabulous, and marvelously brutal). And I've been reading Borges a good deal recently too...

The Millions: In reading other interviews with you, I've noticed you travel a lot. For work, fun? Do your travels provide context/inspiration for your stories?

BY: I've traveled a lot in the past few years with my partner, Anya von Bremzen, who writes about food and restaurants around the world. (A happy gig for her, and me, indeed). These trips don't really feed my inspiration. Ok, a bit. But I'm more Raymond Roussel type - he wrote Impressions of Africa by locking himself in a hotel room in Africa and writing without stepping outside. All in the mind.

The Millions: How do you write? Is the process different when you write for cell phones?

BY: I write my fiction longhand first. I need the pencil/pen in hand to connect to emotions. I then type up. For the first several books I used a typewriter, now I'm (late) on computer. But I find the computer too suited to Flow, not the weight of the individual word. I've half a mind to switch back to a typewriter.... I like to note that I wrote some of my little cell phone stories for Japan while staying in Madrid. I worked in the Grand National library, walking in daily to write little jokey tales about karaoke (say) or haunted vending machines (say) after passing under the big portrait of Borges in the hall.

The challenge for Japan cell phone writing was connecting the work to a (1) Japanese and (2) younger audience. So I trolled the Internet for Japanese trends. Most useful.

The Millions: So you were conscious that you were writing for a Japanese audience. Did that affect your writing in ways other than your choice of subject?

BY: Yes, very aware. I tried to write with simple but flavorsome constructions (always a good idea, no?). And I used details of a Japanese kind. For instance, I made a wizard's spellbinding soup not chicken soup, say, but mushroom soup with big chunks of shitake.... Also, the karaoke story: I had to figure whether Japanese young readers would know who Neil Sedaka is. (Don't how I finally decided...). But not huge issues, as you can see.

The Millions: When the recent article about cell phone novels came out in the New York Times, a lot of people suggested that this trend might represent the future of the novel. What's your take?

BY: I think it might be part of the future of the novel. Not just the format, but the interactivity. In Japan, these books emerge from pools of people on web pages, all posting and getting notes. But I for one think the "old novel" still has lots of life.

The Millions: You mentioned you tend to write short (flash?) fiction. Does this "genre" have its own conventions? How is writing "flash" fiction different from writing novels or other types of short stories?

BY: I started writing very short just because it suited me. Then I later discovered a trend called "flash" fiction or "sudden" fiction. I had nothing to do with any movement as such, and always use the term with fingers crossed behind my back. I've always enjoyed compression in writing, and in art. Among my favorite reading are commonplace readers, such as Auden's wonderful collection. Tidbits that enfume the imagination. Regarding the genre of very short fiction, I wouldn't begin to make general pronouncements. I only know how I work. I find the form an endlessly rich sources of possibilities, of narrative gambits. I find very short items, when good, expand in the reader's imagination. I sometimes, say, like to break off a story right before it's resolved - at a surging cliffhanger. Let the reader finish things up. Next step for me will be to link the stories into a larger narrative somehow - without taking away their sense that the universe is starting afresh in each story.

The Millions: A lot of people would argue that this kind of fiction is much better suited for our "modern" world, with its short attention spans, etc. Any thoughts?

BY: I think that, too, in a hopeful way. And I like the idea of bringing "literary" stuff into the pop world of short attention spans. Stuff based on my stories for MTV twenty years ago, for example. I think getting fiction across multiple "platforms" (pardon the media speak) is great. I always perform my work, and we did a movie version of my book The Sadness of Sex (some of it is online at Spike.com). I used a wonderful line from Jerome K. Jerome for one of my books: "The thoughts we can understand are very little thoughts... All greater thoughts are undefined and vast to our poor childish brains." And just to note: I'm not a "new media" maven or a techno head, at all. I mean, when I wrote cell phone stories for Japan, I didn't even own a cell phone (nor did my translator). But I think my sensibility works sympathetically, as it happens, with techno stuff, certainly the trend to be "short."

The Millions: Any plans to bring the cell phone stories to the States?

BY: I'd like to. I've started talking to a company that's begun putting a range of books online for cell phones. At this point, my book of keitai stories for Japan, Keitai ("i-mode") Stories, only exists as such in Japan. But I tweaked some of its stories and put them in my most recent kids' book, Yet Another NASTYbook (HarperCollins 2007). I suggested promoting the book by saying it used some cell phone stories from Japan. I was told this wasn't a great idea, people didn't like books that had earlier appeared elsewhere. So we didn't mention the cell phone background. But maybe not a bad idea? Obviously I think so, I'm doing it here.

The Millions: We had a review of a book of flash fiction from China on the site about a year ago. Apparently it has a huge following in China and Taiwan. Ever thought about publishing there?

BY: Yes, my books (other than keitai one) are well translated in Taiwan. Looked like a mainland China publisher was going to bring one out a few years ago, but then disappeared. But may be time again. My books in general are published in Japan, in the conventional literary manner. I have a wonderful translator, Motoyuki Shibata. His "stable" includes Paul Auster, Richard Powers, Millhauser, Kelly Link, etc. He's a friend and cohort of Haruki Murakami, who's also an influential translator of American lit (did a hugely successful translation of Catcher in the Rye). Now I'd like to get into Korea, that's next on my list.

The Millions: And is there anything else you'd like to talk about?

BY: Yeah. I just saw MacBeth at BAM. Patrick Stewart is a magnificent powerhouse. But Lady MacBeth was a letdown, to my eyes, and dragged. Emmett White, the young actor playing Banquo's son, was super!

- Ben Dooley @ 8:07 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Books as Objects

The cover of this past week's New Yorker, "Shelf of Life" by Adrian Tomine, could be a visual entry in our "Books as Objects" column. An avid reader of the magazine (NOT our fearless editor and self-professed NYer junkie, Max) examined the cover art and observed that it carried a "cynical" message. It's a panel cartoon depicting the progress of a young writer, her agent and enthusiastic publisher, the production of the book itself on an assembly line, its display in a store, a young man reading it on a park bench, then discarding it in a cardboard box, as you often do see - books in cardboard boxes sitting at the curb, waiting to be picked up by a lucky passerby and thus passed from one open mind to another - in places like Brownstone Park Slope.

Except in the cartoon, the passerby is a scruffy man in an old army coat who takes the book, and, in the final frame, is shown tossing it into an oil drum fire, he and another man making warmth on what appears to be a dark, snowy night.

Is this a cynical take on the commodification of art? A morality play? Or dark comedy, book burning for the general good? Or perhaps it's just harsh reality: for some, a book's best use is as fuel for a fire that will help them through a cold night when they have nowhere to go. I did notice that there appeared to be other potential tinder in that cardboard box, including the box itself. Maybe our homeless vet did read our young author's work and found it worthy of the burnbarrel. Whatever the message, and I think the cover is open to a wide range of overlapping interpretations, it certainly says one thing with emphasis: books are objects to be consumed, one way or another.

- Noah Deutsch @ 4:45 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

On Our Shelves: 45 Favorite Short Story Collections

To wrap up Short Story Week here at The Millions, we conducted an informal poll of our contributors, asking them to name their favorite English-language short story collections. The results form a kind of subjective bibliography, a personal pantheon of 45 favorite collections. We've added links to our blurbs and reviews where appropriate. We hope this list will be useful, or at least interesting; feel free to add your own picks, and blurbs, in the comments box below.

The List:

• Triumph of the Egg, and Other Stories by Sherwood Anderson (especially "Unlighted Lamps")
• Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth
• Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme (blurb)
• Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender (especially "End of the Line")
• Too Far From Home by Paul Bowles (review)
• Nice Big American Baby by Judy Budnitz
• Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver
• The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (especially "Goodbye, My Brother")
• Lady With Lapdog and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov (review)
• Drown by Junot Diaz
• The Coast of Chicago (two votes) and I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek (blurb)
• The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg by Deborah Eisenberg (review)
• Jazz Age Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald (review)
• Across the Bridge, From the Fifteenth District, and The Pegnitz Junction by Mavis Gallant (review)
• In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass (two votes) (blurb)
• Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol
• In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (two votes) (review)
• The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon
• Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
• All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones (two votes) (review
• Dubliners by James Joyce (two votes)
• Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap (review)
• Hard to Admit and Harder to Explain by Sarah Manguso
• The Collected Stories by Katherine Mansfield (especially "Bliss")
• The Secret Goldfish by David Means
• Collected Stories by Leonard Michaels
• Other Electricities by Ander Monson
• Demonology by Rick Moody
• Self-Help, Like life, and Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
• The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro (especially "My Mother's Dream")
• Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer
• Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
• Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger (two votes)
• Civilwarland in Bad Decline and Pastoralia by George Saunders (review)
• Aquaboogie by Susan Straight
• Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut (two votes) (review)
• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
• Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories by Oscar Wilde
• Excitability: Selected Stories 1986-1996 by Diane Williams

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 5:47 PM ~ comments: 15 ~ Links to this post

 

Short Story Week Links

• Did you read a short story today? He did.
• Samantha Hunt scribbles on bar napkins.
• Deborah Eisenberg not only writes great stories; she also gives a great interview.
• A Peter Markus story - free! - at failbetter.com.
• A Ben Fountain story - free! - at The Barcelona Review.
• Bookslut chats up Elizabeth Crane.
• Death is dead (via Conversational Reading).

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 5:13 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Short Story Week: And May We Also Recommend

Recommended Collections:

The Coast of Chicago and I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek

Dybek owns a specific part of the literary universe, a several square-block section of the south side of Chicago. He focuses on that, hones it, and reproduces it beautifully. His stories - sentimental (but not sappy), funny, and moving - describe a world where cultures and generations rub against each other, sometimes producing sparks. If you don't read collections in order, or if you happen upon Dybek's stories in an anthology, start with "Hot Ice," "Pet Milk," or "Orchids."

Sixty Stories, by Donald Barthelme and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass

Both of these are challenging collections, or at least they were for me, yet both are also adventurous and mind-altering. Barthelme, who has experienced a renaissance of late, did more with the form of the story than anyone I can think of. His stories - brief, wild, audacious - will cure whatever boredom might have possessed you. Gass' stories, typically quite long, describe the emotionally bleak and unforgiving Midwest, with its brief moments of untold beauty buried within quotidian horrors. At one moment, a Gass character might be counting the peas in his pot pie; in the next, he's contemplating freedom in the backyard. The titular story contains what is, at the moment, my favorite sentence: "It's true there are moments--foolish moments, ecstasy on a tree stump--when I'm all but gone, scattered I like to think like seed, for I'm the sort now in the fool's position of having love left over which I'd like to lose; what good is it now to me, candy ungiven after Halloween."

Recommended Stories:

"The Christian Roommates" from Early Stories by John Updike

An ode to the classic freshman double. This story pretty much was my first year of college. I played it pretty straight in high school, and had my mind completely blown open by all the nuts I met in school, including my freshman roommate [God bless you, Glen, you beautiful bastard]. Updike captures that so well that the first time I read this, I couldn't believe it had been written before I was born.

"The Fall of Edward Barnard" from The Collected Stories of W. Somerset Maugham

Sort of a precursor to The Razor's Edge, this is the story of a man who goes to Tahiti to find his best friend, Edward Barnard, who's fallen off the grid and who also happens to be engaged to his best friend. I spent two years of my life trying to adapt this story for the screen to no avail. If I were pressed, I'd say this is my favorite story.

- Patrick Brown @ 7:54 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Anthologies Evolved

When I was 16 or 17, it felt like Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather were my own personal discoveries. I had read through all of Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, and T.C. Boyle after discovering their books and then working steadily through their bodies of work until there was nothing left to read. (And it's amazing to think about how much time I had to read - time that I set aside for reading - back in those days.)

Empty-handed, a self-taught reader as yet unaware of many literary greats, I turned to anthologies. They were plentiful at used bookstores and I was already enamored of the form thanks to the New Yorkers lying around the house and to my adolescent thoughts of becoming a writer. What I quickly realized is that these books could open me up to a new world (almost the whole world, really) of literature. Delightful little tomes like A Pocket Book of Short Stories packed an incredible punch, introducing me to the likes of Balzac, Chekhov, Ring Lardner, Somerset Maugham, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, and Cather - the table of contents is a chronicle of the weight of my discoveries. These discoveries would be made to seem mundane in college when I was instructed in the importance and context of these writers' bodies of work, but discovering them first, in these beat up, little pocket paperbacks, bought for a dollar or two, was a revelation. Looking through all the tables of contents at the amazing, no frills "Miscellaneous Anthologies" site is like a walk down memory lane, not to mention an unparalleled catalog of the highlights of the form.

I ended up collecting quite a few of these anthologies, which I suspect are still ferreted around my parents house, as I can't seem to find any on my bookshelves now. As my reading horizons broadened, I saw that these anthologies were nearing extinction, brought on by the combined declining market fortunes of both short stories and the declining prevalence of pocket-sized (or mass market) editions of literary fiction.

Nowadays, most short fiction anthologies you'll see fall into three categories: academic (Norton, et al), yearly series (e.g. Best American and O. Henry Prize), and thematic. The latter two categories more and more have become known for the involvement of "celebrity" editors, typically big name authors who can grab a little press for the books. For example, Best American was edited by Stephen King in 2007 and Ann Patchett in 2006.

Likewise, celebrity editors are at the helm of a pair of themed anthologies already released this year. Jeffrey Eugenides has put together My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro. Of course, who's ever seen a contemporary short story that plays out like a fairy tale? As Eugenides told NPR, "I started to realize that not only the love stories that I liked, but actually the love stories that everybody liked, had a certain bittersweet quality to them. The stories in this collection are by no means tragic, but in order to even get to a measure of happiness, the characters usually have to go through a lot of difficulty." That sounds about right.

The Book of Other People, Zadie Smith's anthology effort, is even more "low concept" (not necessarily a bad thing) than Eugenides's. We are told her only instruction to her contributors - which include the likes of David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, and a generous sampling of the McSweeney's set - was to "make somebody up." USA Today quips "just when you're ready to howl in frustration at the anthologification of the book world - I've seen the best minds of my generation, live blogging about recipes that inspire them - along comes The Book of Other People," but ultimately the verdict is that the book has flashes of goodness, as is echoed by the Washington Post: "Variety -- in approach, style and, in some cases, quality -- is certainly on display here."

At the very least, there's much to applaud in the creativity of Eugenides and Smith in compiling these books, and, for that matter, in the yearly anthologies for insisting by their very existence that the year's "best" short story is something that matters. However, the idea of carrying a varied compendium of literary goodness in one's pocket appears to have gone by the wayside, consigned to the dusty shelves of second-hand shops. For those in the know, a treasure trove of short fiction is there for the taking.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:07 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Short Story Week: Some Recommended Short Fiction

"The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane (from Open Boat and Other Stories)

This 1898 story, about the last survivors of a shipwreck as they fight for the safety of land on a soaked and cold dinghy, contains one of my favorite sentences in all of short fiction: "It was probably splendid, it was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber." That repetition of "probably" gets me every time.

"Merry-Go-Sorry" by Carry Holladay (from Prize Stories 1999: The O. Henry Award)

It's a shame that Holladay hasn't yet published a collection, for This tale of a town affected by the killing of three young boys, told in a fluid omniscient narration, is strange, ambitious, and beautiful. We venture into the minds of the accused killer, of the girl who writes him letters, of the cops investigating the murders, and so on and on, until a complicated world has emerged on the page.

"Do Not Disturb" by A.M. Homes (from Things You Should Know)

This story concerns a wimp of a husband and a bitch of a wife. She gets cancer, and she gets meaner. What now?

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link (from Magic for Beginners)

In this wild story, a family moves from a cramped Manhattan apartment to a big haunted house outside the city. Objects start to feel "wrong" and must be discarded; there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rabbits on the front lawn; the wife cannot stop painting the rooms; the daughter sleepwalks; the husband won't return home from work. Just as the story begins to create a coherent universe, the narrative embraces something new and strange, and the reader must remake meaning once again. It's a big, messy, playful collision of a story.

Stay tuned for more recommended stories from The Millions later this week.

- Edan Lepucki @ 7:53 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Adventures in Consciousness: A Review of Deborah Eisenberg's Under the 82nd Airborne

In the fiction-writing course I took my junior year of college, a professor assigned a story by Deborah Eisenberg, a writer of whom I'd never heard. We'd been studying the art of dialogue, and I knew enough to admire the characters' hesitations and evasions, but somehow the story didn't quite ignite for me. This is a polite way of saying that I was impatient and stupid, and a bad student to boot - I think I must have skimmed the reading in the half-hour before class, still hung over from the previous night. Later, in graduate school, I had a chance to hear Eisenberg read a newer story, and the sound of her voice - surprised and surprising, hilarious and human - made me regret everything my undergraduate arrogance had hidden from me. Well, I've spent the years since making up for lost time. After ripping through 2006's Twilight of the Superheroes, twice, and then All Around Atlantis (1997), I managed to track down a $32 print-on-demand paperback of The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg, which combines her first two collections, Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986) and Under the 82nd Airborne (1992). (Surely it's time for these to be reissued separately. Paging FSG Classics!) As I started in on Under the 82nd Airborne - the last remaining unread stories - I found myself slowing down, like a kid conserving candy. This gave me some time to think about why Eisenberg's work affected me so strongly, and why she had vaulted, during that 2005 reading, directly to the head of my list of favorite writers.

Eisenberg writes slowly - 28 stories in about as many years - but her body of work hardly feels insubstantial. Rather, each of her unhurried narratives attains the philosophical and psychological depth of a novel. Where a more conventional writer persuades the reader through the accumulation of realistic detail, Eisenberg pays minute, almost Proustian attention to the phenomenal space in which those details occur. She understands that to be human is to be continually "thrown into" the present, and so her characters seem as surprised to find themselves caught up in stories as we are to find them there. Visual features - animals, faces, furniture - list and loom out of defamiliarized landscapes. The characteristic mood is a kind of beguiling bewilderment.

In "A Cautionary Tale," for example, a protagonist named Patty is subletting a studio in an apartment building full of mildly deranged New Yorkers.

When she went back down the hall, there was no sign on the floor of Mrs. Jorgenson or her blanket, but as she passed the spot where they'd lain a psychic net seemed to be cast over Patty, and later, trying to sleep, she flopped about, struggling, unable to disengage her mind from the phantom form of supine Mrs. Jorgenson. How tender Mrs. Jorgenson's puffy ankle had looked, where it was exposed by her rolled-down stocking.

There is a kind of deadpan comedy here, the clash of linguistic registers ("flopped" vs. "supine") undercut by the rhythmic banality of "Mrs. Jorgenson," but there's also a great compassion, both for Mrs. Jorgenson and for tender, mixed-up Patty. The imprecisions - "a psychic net" "phantom form" "puffy ankle" - are echt Eisenberg: not loose writing, but an attempt to capture on the page the looseness of consciousness. That is, we can see Patty's world only as clearly as Patty can herself.

The sum of Eisenberg's comedy and her compassion is a rich and old-fashioned irony, which seem part of her authorial birthright, as natural to her as breathing. Two other legacies carried over into Under the 82nd Airborne are an ear for the eccentricities of speech (interjections like "well" and "obviously" leaven even third-person narration) and a gift for audacious, dreamlike metaphors. The two align neatly in a later scene from "A Cautionary Tale." Patty's new roommate, a dilettante named Stuart, has decided that they should have intercourse. She rebuffs him in a passage I can't resist quoting at length:

"I'm not attracted to you, Stuart"

"You would become attracted to me if you were to sleep with me," he argued affably.

"But I'm not going to sleep with you," she said.

"Don't you see the beauty of it, Patty? It's sound in every way - politically, economically, aesthetically. You and I would be an entire ecology, generating and utilizing our own energies."

"I'm not here to...to provide physiological release for you," she said.

"Why not? I'm here to provide it for you. Listen, you're going to start suffering from pelvic distress one of these days. There could even be colonic or arterial consequences, you know."

It wasn't fair, Patty thought - Stuart obviously felt entitled to win every argument just because he knew more words than she did. She could only repeat herself stubbornly while he continued to whine and orate, disguising his little project in various rationales, until it seemed that one wolf, in different silly bonnets, was peeping out at her from behind a circle of trees.

As wonderful as this is - his "little project!" "silly bonnets!" - Under the 82nd Airborne might represent merely a refinement of the technique of Transactions in a Foreign Currency, were Eisenberg not such an ambitious writer. Where the earlier collection plumbed the emotional depths of doomed romances and urban anomie, Under the 82nd Airborne strikes out for thematic territory the feckless Stuart can only gesture at: the political, the economic, and the aesthetic. As "A Cautionary Tale" unfolds, the dialogue will open up to admit long, idea-rich speeches from Stuart and from several intellectual foils. And in the stories that follow, Eisenberg will throw her urban characters into settings that force them to confront cultural difference and the ugliness of privilege.

The most haunting of these, the title story and "Holy Week," draw on the time Eisenberg spent abroad in the 1980s. Throughout Central America, the Reagan administration was funding a series of proxy wars against Soviet-backed revolutions, and Eisenberg and her partner, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, spent time touring the affected countries. Shawn wrote directly and wrenchingly about his experience in a one-man drama called The Fever. In fiction, however, such directness can easily give way to didacticism. The method of Under the 82nd Airborne allows Eisenberg to avoid this trap. As in "A Cautionary Tale," we stay rooted in the consciousness of the protagonists, with little authorial intrusion. Characters can speak directly about politics, but Eisenberg refuses to privilege or denigrate their positions. Her wayward Norteamericanos are no more mixed-up than Patty, and she extends them no less of her sympathy and humor.

Absent any clear "message," the chief effect is a radical raising of emotional stakes. When Patty makes a mess of her life in New York, she is the one who suffers. When Dennis, the peripatetic food journalist of "Holy Week," fails to challenge the system that has put him in Honduras (or anyway, I think it's Honduras), a whole country suffers with him. In each case, Eisenberg does not pretend to have solutions. "All right," Dennis thinks at the end of "Holy Week."

Yes, the planet is littered with bodies...But will it improve, the world, if Sarah and I stay in and subsist on a diet of microwaved potatoes? Because I really don't think - and this is something I'll say to Sarah when she's herself again, I suppose - that by the standards of any sane person it could be considered a crime to go to a restaurant.

Nested within massive geopolitical conflicts, the tensions between men and women like Dennis and Sarah start to seem very much like dirty wars, the collisions of irresistible forces and immovable objects.

Under the 82nd Airborne's dialectic of power and powerlessness anticipates the themes and settings of subsequent Eisenberg productions including "The Lake" and "Flaw in the Design," and, in its diary-like arrangement, a story like "Holy Week" presages the formal adventurousness of "Twilight of the Superheroes." But, even as it consolidates its strengths, Eisenberg's fiction continues to leave room for "enormous changes at the last minute" (in the formulation of Grace Paley, a writer Eisenberg sometimes resembles). The most wonderful thing about her short stories - the thing I wish were true of my own - is that it's impossible to guess, from sentence to sentence, what might come next.

As a kind of salute, then, I'll close with a semi-non sequitur: The Friday after Thanksgiving last year, my wife and I found ourselves gridlocked on the New Jersey Turnpike. Our rented car and the tens of thousands stretching ahead and behind us were probably sputtering out enough greenhouse gases to kill several dozen polar bears and maybe a rare species of cancer-curing Arctic flower. Patience continued - well, continues - not to be among my virtues. I was halfway through Under the 82nd Airborne, so I took it out and began to read aloud, and there, in the failing light at the heart of the Eastern Seaboard, we finished the book. I can't say the world changed, obviously. But for as long as those stories lasted, there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:02 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

The Elusive Thread of Memory: The Displaced World of Mavis Gallant

Jean-Paul Sartre visited Montreal in the 1940s for a speaking engagement. In marked contrast to the socially progressive nature of much of Quebec today, Quebec then cowed under the unyielding hand of the Church. Hostile to Sartre's visit, the media barons instructed their reporters - perhaps tacitly, perhaps not - to be as unwelcoming as possible to this existential antichrist, so that he'd turn on his heel and leave.

They succeeded, and he left, but not before encountering a young journalist (and budding writer of fiction) who asked Sartre how much of himself was in his latest protagonist. Sartre, courteous and well-mannered, replied to the young Canadian woman (then writing fiction in secret): "You are in every character you write."

It should come as no surprise, then, that in the sixty odd years since her exchange with Jean-Paul Sartre, Mavis Gallant, now 85 and living in Paris since 1950, has populated her stories with characters who are intelligent and thoughtful, clever and complex. Ex-pats, émigrés, displaced persons, and transients - the moved, the removed, and those on-the-move - have all sprung from Gallant's fertile imagination, arriving fully formed on the page, in stories that betray both a keen, unsentimental, journalist's eye and a humane artistic vision.

In From The Fifteenth District, an anthology of stories which were originally published in The New Yorker in the mid- to late 1970s, some characters are tethered by the thread of memory to people from the past, or simply to another time or another place. Other characters have managed to sweep the ghosts away. In the story "The Moslem Wife," Netta Asher and Jack Ross, cousins whose ex-pat British families have run hotels in the south of France for decades, marry and begin to run the hotel, but are then estranged when Jack's wanderlust leads him to America before the outbreak of the Second World War. Netta soldiers on as the impending war drives away those around her. Then there's an evacuation, and upon Netta's return, the Italian army has taken over sections of the hotel, reducing Netta to a squatter in her own home. Still later, long after the war has ended, Jack returns. Exchanging war stories, Netta contrasts Jack's connection to the present with her own raging memory of the past. Gallant writes:

Jack, closed to ghosts, deaf to their voices, was spared this... She envied him his imperviousness, his true, unhysterical laughter...

I was always jealous. Not of women. Of his short memory, his comfortable imagination... I have a dark, an accurate, a deadly memory...

Memory should at least keep you from saying yes twice to the same person.

The Second World War casts its shadow over many of the stories in this collection. In "The Four Seasons," thirteen-year-old Carmela serves as nanny to the Unwins, an ex-pat British family residing on the Ligurian coast. The Unwins and their fellow Britons living nearby remain naively convinced that neither Mussolini nor Hitler want war. For the Unwins, life in southern Europe is business as usual. Meanwhile, Carmela's understanding of English is a detail that she has cleverly hidden from her employers: "Among the powerful and strange, she would be mute and watchful."

In "His Mother," the émigré tale is flipped around, Gallant's eye turning to the family left behind. A grandmother, living in Budapest, her son having long ago transplanted to Glasgow, receives frequent letters from her son, with photos of his new Scottish family. She and other mothers of émigrés engage in a sort of one-upmanship. Points to the mother of the son who has immigrated to the most idealized locale. Points for frequency of letters, for quantity and quality of the stamps. It's a bittersweet story - she's the ghost left behind, the memory which begins to fade.

In the collection The Pegnitz Junction, Gallant places us in Europe, West Germany mainly, in the years and decades following the Second World War. The story "The Pegnitz Junction," a novella really, takes place during one excruciatingly long day. In the final hours of a Paris getaway vacation, Germans Christine, her friend Herbert, and his young son little Bert have been summarily evicted from their lodgings at the crack of dawn. The story is essentially the train journey home, but this is a journey like no other.

Christine is the central character, and we read not only her thoughts, but due to her ability to channel the thoughts of those around her, we hear their thoughts, we read their lives. Christine has no control over this phenomenon, she regards it as "interference" with her own thoughts. It's an inventive conceit, as we eavesdrop on some very private thoughts, like those of a German girl, passing herself off as American in her own country, "ashamed of being thought German by other Germans." We even get into Herbert's own mind, and learn that his late mother had been arrested and put in a camp when he was a boy. Gallant writes:

She had gone into captivity believing in virtue and learned she could steal. Went in loving the poor, came out afraid of them; went in for the hounded, came out a racist; went in generous, came out grudging; went in with God, came out alone.

We're in Paris, 1963, for "Ernst In Civilian Clothes," a story from the same collection. Ernst and Willi are old friends. Ernst, part Austrian, part German, former soldier turned Legionnaire, is staying with Willi in Paris but is on the verge of being deported, trapped as he is in a bureaucratic cul-de-sac. And his memory is broken:

Willi's gas heater flames the whole day, because Ernst, as a civilian, is sensitive to weather. Ernst will let Willi pay the bill, and, with some iridescent memory of something once read, he will believe that Willi had free gas - and, who knows, perhaps free rent and light! - all winter long. When Ernst believes an idea suitable for the moment, it becomes true.

For a third of the collection Across The Bridge, ex-pat Gallant looks back to mid-century Montreal, to the social-climbing Carette family. In "1933," we meet Madame Carette, widowed at 27, with two young daughters: Marie and Berthe. By the time of "The Chosen Husband," sixteen years later, another inheritance has allowed the family to move (again), each time rising in social standing. The Carettes are trying to marry off Marie. Though Marie is hopelessly in love with a Greek young man, the Carettes have other ideas:

In the life of a penniless unmarried young woman, there was no room for a man merely in love. He ought to have presented himself as something: Marie's future.

So they orchestrate the arrival of Louis Driscoll: part French Canadian, part Irish Catholic. Acceptable.

For every generation of Driscolls, (Louis told Madame Carette), there had to be a Louis, a Joseph, a Raymond. (Berthe and her mother exchanged a look. He wanted three sons.)

The remaining two Carette stories bring us up to date with Marie in middle age, then Marie as a grandmother - her son transplanted to Florida. For most of this anthology, though, we're back in Gallant's adopted France. In the story "Forain," we meet Blaise Forain, friend and publisher to a roster of émigré writers, shopping around Cold War stories to a post-1989 audience. One such writer, Adam Tremski, has just died, and was to be buried in the one good suit that he owned:

He had never owned another, had shambled around Paris looking as though he slept under restaurant tables, on a bed of cigarette ashes and crumbs.

There's a wonderfully candid CBC Radio interview with Mavis Gallant, recorded recently by Eleanor Wachtel for her Writers & Company series. You can listen to by going here. Scroll down, and then follow the instructions for audio. And a 1988 interview for the Aurora journal can be read here. In both, she discusses the craft of the short story; in the audio interview she peppers the conversation with anecdotes about her childhood in Montreal, her exchange with Sartre, and her dealings, early in her career, with an evil, thieving agent who pocketed her payments from The New Yorker, telling the magazine that she had moved to Capri!

Maybe some things are indeed best left forgotten.

What most émigrés settled for now was the haphazard accuracy of a memory like Tremski's. In the end it was always a poem that ran through the mind - not a string of dates.

- Andrew Saikali @ 8:48 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Expat Laureate: Paul Bowles's Too Far From Home

The short story was but one of many writing genres embraced by author Paul Bowles, known also for his novels, travel essays and poems. The influential American writer drew the admiration of other literary giants such as Tobias Wolff and Norman Mailer, who said Bowles "let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the Square... the call of the orgy, the end of civilization." That aptly describes the content of the dozen short stories found in Too Far From Home: Selected Writings of Paul Bowles. The selected stories were written over a span of approximately 25 years, beginning in 1950.

As an expatriate who lived for many years in Tangier, Bowles's writing not only demonstrates a keen understanding of the Western traveler ("A Distant Episode"), it also shows how he comprehended the varied inhabitants of Morocco ("The Delicate Prey") more than any other American or European writer of his time. From the dunes of the Sahara desert to the peaks of the Atlas Mountains, Bowles effortlessly enters the minds of a people living in the French Protectorate (1912-1956).

Bowles masters a range of narrative techniques in a variety of settings. While he's perhaps best known for The Sheltering Sky - a novel adapted for the screen, starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger - Bowles is also at ease with stories set in the Caribbean ("Pages from Cold Point") and elsewhere. In one story ("The Circular Valley") he even adopts a type of meta-narrative by giving voice to a spirit that moves in and out of the consciousness of birds, fish, humans and reptiles to experience emotions in different forms of life.

Bowles's short stories are indeed very brief. The longest in this collection is 28 pages ("The Time of Friendship"), and most are less than half that. The brevity is a testament to his word economy. Characters are developed quickly and fully in the opening pages, and in each tale the protagonist is faced with nothing short of a profound, life-altering event - emotional, physical or both. When necessary, Bowles does not shy away from the harsh realities of life outside "civilization."

The man moved and surveyed the young body lying on the stones. He ran his finger along the razor's blade; a pleasant excitement took possession of him. He stepped over, looked down, and saw the sex that sprouted from the base of the belly. Not entirely conscious of what he was doing, he took it in one hand and brought his other arm down with the motion of a reaper wielding a sickle. It was swiftly severed. A round, dark hole was left, flush with the skin; he stared for a moment, blankly. Driss was screaming. The muscles all over his body stood out, moved.

Some readers may find it frustrating how Bowles often uses foreign words - Arabic, French and Spanish - when the English translation is insufficient. But not only are such occurrences sporadic, they also lend a certain authenticity to conversations between a melange of characters.

- Timothy R. Homan @ 7:16 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

On Brevity

In 1886, Anton Chekhov wrote a letter to his brother enumerating the following requirements for his own writing:

1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of political-social-economic nature
2. Total objectivity
3. Truth descriptions of persons and objects
4. Extreme brevity
5. Audacity and originality; flee stereotypes
6. Compassion

I like to present this list at the start of any fiction writing class because it's wonderful conversation fodder. Everyone has one they cherish (for me, it's compassion), and one they revile (as my students recently pointed out to me: Can anyone every be totally objective? Isn't the fleeing of stereotypes stereotypical?). After a discussion of this list, I have my students replace one or two of Chekhov's rules with their own. Popular answers include: passion; avoidance of adverbs; write what you know; write what you don't know; and humor. I always add "Bold use of metaphor" - whatever that means. If I were to revise Chekhov's list, I'd take the "extreme" out of "extreme brevity." Too wordy.

Perhaps Chekhov hadn't read Edgar Allan Poe's famous 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, in which he advised, "Extreme brevity will degenerate into epigrammatism." I have a feeling that Ernest Hemingway did catch this warning, though, for when he was challenged to write a story in six words, he took old Poe to task with this:

"For sale: baby shoes, never used."

I love Hemingway's story - how it attests to the power of implication! For a long time, I thought it very sad, until author Antoine Wilson schooled me otherwise. Now I appreciate it even more.

As pointed out on this blog a few days ago, Smith, the online magazine devoted to storytelling and personal narratives, is publishing a compendium of 6-word memoirs by various authors (some of them were previously compiled in the 2007 edition of The Best American Non-Required Reading.) My favorites include Drew Peck's "Ex-wife and contractor now have house" (which follows in Hemingway's footsteps of implication), and Bob Redman's "Being a monk stunk. Better gay" (for its musical qualities). All entries are fun, and they make you want to try writing one.

I myself am terrible at the six-word story, autobiographical or not. Perhaps that's the real reason why I don't want the "extreme" in my "brevity." I use as few words as a story requires - but sometimes a story requires a lot of words. Isn't that what writers of the long short story - such as Alice Munro or Deborah Eisenberg - might tell you? But Poe warns against this, too, for "the sin of extreme length is even more unpardonable."

Uh oh.

- Edan Lepucki @ 10:44 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Short Story Week at The Millions: A Brief Introduction

Recently, the innovative literary magazine One-Story launched a campaign to "Save the Short Story." As the essay below suggests, we at The Millions found this effort admirable, and also puzzling. Is "the short story" even a single thing? And, if so, does it need saving? On both questions, the evidence seems mixed. We can agree, however, that short stories seem to have lost some of their prominence in the popular imagination. Mainstream book coverage tends to track the agendas of the publishing industry; those agendas, in turn, tend to be driven by coverage. With our "Short Story Week," we aim to subvert the cycle. Between now and Friday, we hope

• to revisit the work of living masters,
• to celebrate the writers who paved their way,
• to talk a bit about teaching the short story, and writing it,
• to link to interesting short-story sites and periodicals
• to provide a selective bibliography of our favorite story collections,
• and, as always, to hear from you.

In short: we hope you enjoy it. We'll be linking to the week's installments below.

• Inter Alia #8: Whither the Short Story?
• On Brevity
• Expat Laureate: Paul Bowles's Too Far From Home
• The Elusive Thread of Memory: The Displaced World of Mavis Gallant
• Adventures in Consciousness: A Review of Deborah Eisenberg's Under the 82nd Airborne
• Some Recommended Short Fiction
• Anthologies Evolved
• And May We Also Recommend
• Short Story Week Links
• On Our Shelves: 45 Favorite Short Story Collections

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:41 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Inter Alia #8: Whither the Short Story?

I.
In the ongoing conversation about the future of literature, novelty is a rare thing. For at least forty years, American novelists and critics have been worrying about the fate of the novel - and of reading itself - and though the finer points of the argument have changed, the basic contours have stayed remarkably constant. Electronic mass media poses a threat - or at least a serious challenge - to literature; the novel functions as a kind of coal miner's canary, a bellwether for the health of the culture at large.

I'm sympathetic to the need to assert some kind of narrative control over the technological revolution, but I had assumed the stance of a weary spectator at the "death of the novel" when, in the fall of 2007, a diagnostic shift piqued my interest. Suddenly, it seemed, it was the short story that was ailing. Witness Stephen King's introduction to the Best American Short Stories anthology:

[American short fiction,] if not quite dead on the page... [has become] airless, somehow, and self-referring... show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open."

Or witness the introduction to the second issue of the literary quarterly Canteen, which took issue with King's assessment. Or witness another excellent lit-mag, One Story, whose "Save the Short Story" direct mailings reached me alongside pleas from Planned Parenthood to save reproductive rights and from the ACLU to save civil liberties.

II.
Though the hue and cry seems abrupt, the conditions for the short story's endangerment have been developing for a quarter century. Once-reliable "general interest" venues like Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post have disappeared from newsstands. The New Yorker long ago ended its practice of running several stories per issue. Esquire has drifted away from the stringent editorial commitments of Gordon Lish. Harper's confines itself, more or less, to a stable of old hands. The Atlantic recently cut its monthly fiction offerings altogether, in favor of a single annual "fiction issue" (part of a series of missteps that included putting Christopher Hitchens on the masthead and spending 30 back-of-the-book editorial pages helping people with too much money figure out how to spend it.) In 2007, fewer than 100 short-stories were published in the traditional general-interest outlets.

At the level of the little magazine, the current trend seems to be toward ever-more print outlets with ever-smaller circulations... good for building the C.V.s of aspiring writer-academics, but bad for generating consensus around work of surpassing distinction. And the economics of running a print magazine outside the institutional shelter of the academy are inhospitable to longevity, as we can see from the recent folding of the print editions of Grand Street, Pindeldyboz, Ballyhoo, and numerous others. Websites such as failbetter.com have begun to fill the gaps, but it will be some time before online publication supplants print as a commonly accepted arbiter of the good and the beautiful.

Not surprisingly, things get even grimmer when we turn to the publishing houses. I won't claim that my own inability to sell a collection of short stories is attributable to anything other than their own shortcomings, but I will note how many complimentary rejection notices from publishers tend to end with phrases like "...but you know how hard it is to market book of short stories" or "of course, a novel would be more marketable." It is nearly impossible to imagine a word-drunk ephebe moving to New York to become a short-story writer, as so many New Yorker contributors did at mid-century. Given the prospects for remuneration, you'd be better served to move to wherever the cost of living was cheapest - North Dakota or Guatemala.

Interestingly, however, the transformation of the literary marketplace has not dampened the supply of short stories. If anything, the opposite. In the aisles of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Book Fair last weekend, I passed literally thousands of aspiring novelists looking to publish their short stories. It became obvious that my preliminary sketch of distribution mechanisms for the short story had failed to account for a technology even more important than the Internet: the photocopier.

The photocopier is the single indispensable technology for the rise of the graduate creative writing program - there are now more than 350 - and the graduate creative writing program is without question the single biggest contributor to the boom in short story production. The pedagogical staple of M.F.A. programs is still the workshop, and the workshop requires complete, coherent, and (above all) short bits of fiction that can be photocopied and distributed to eight or 10 classmates. Chapters of novels, shorn of context, are difficult to work with. Stories on the short side - 3,000 to 5,000 words - are best, if one wants to avoid pissing off one's peers. The ideal workshop story can be digested in a week, returned to the writer with comments, and improved. How? Through the application of a certain set of principles of what the short story should be. We call these principles, collectively, "craft." In the fiction workshop, "craft" is king, simply because it's teachable. Thus writing teachers, themselves former M.F.A. students, tend to talk about Chekhov and Flannery O'Connor as if it were their formal balance, rather than their deep strangeness, that brings their stories to life.

Think about the numbers: 350 fiction programs. 3,000 new graduates per year. Each taking let's say four workshops, each of which requires three submissions. That's 36,000 short stories for each graduating class of writers, who have worked to convince each other that the top 1% of short stories - those that come closest to generating workshop consensus - may be published in a literary magazine. A literary magazine whose readership may largely comprise writers looking for a place to publish their short stories. "Guarded self-consciousness" starts to look like a mathematical inevitability. Perversely, then, the greatest danger to the short story may be the very institution that's sustaining it.

III.
Yet, even if the foregoing manages to capture something true, I've neglected all the factors that guarantee that the short story will survive in the 21st century... and even thrive. First, there is the durable insanity of writers, which a proper education channels, rather than cures. To be sure, some workshop students are angling for literary celebrity, and others rightly see graduate school as a comfortable alternative to a desk job. But my own experience suggests that a significant fraction of M.F.A. candidates write short stories because, like Chekhov and O'Connor, they are helpless not to. These are the writers I want to read.

Second, there is the competitive pressure on editors to create venues for the short story that stand out in a crowded marketplace. In addition to the upstart publications mentioned above, recent years have seen the advent of such forums as McSweeney's, Zoetrope: All Story, The Oxford American, 9th Letter, A Public Space, Black Clock, and NOON... This is not to mention the continued excellence of Conjunctions, Witness, Callaloo, ZYZZYVA, and The Paris Review, to name a few.

Finally, the very shortness of the short story ensures its necessity in our new century. Like the sonnet, it is both a form and a discipline, but the short story also offers its acolytes remarkable freedom. Because the reader absorbs it in a single sitting, it has the capacity, like Seamus Heaney's swans, to "catch the heart off guard and blow it open." And for the writer, there is the possibility that anything may happen on the page, in a way that there isn't, quite, in a novel. I think of my favorite living practitioners of the short story - David Means, Edward P. Jones, Diane Williams, and Deborah Eisenberg (about whom I'll be writing later this week) - and I remember a series of surprises, like colored scarves drawn from the sleeves of magicians. That is, I see cause for celebration.

Perhaps "saving" the short story simply means to read it, devotedly, and to write it, when called, and otherwise to let the market sort itself out. We could do worse than to follow the example of Henry James - no short-story slouch himself - who wrote, "We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:34 AM ~ comments: 9 ~ Links to this post

 

A Poet on the Road

Jon Sands is a poet residing in New York City. A Cincinnati native, Sands was a finalist at the 2007 National Poetry Slam. He is currently touring across North America. Sands used to write poems on the bellies of his cabbage patch dolls, and he still does. More about Jon and his poetry CDs and chapbooks is available here.

A regular day, for our purposes, we can call it a Tuesday

Morning: First I wake up, which usually consists of a bit of an eye flutter, then piecing together whose couch I've just been sleeping on. This takes longer than you might imagine because it seems that (and I've never scientifically confirmed this) when your surroundings are constantly changing, your dreams go from crazy to "manic+crazy." When it is a good dream, I cure cancer or become poet laureate of the Milky Way. When it is a bad dream, inevitably, monsters eat my spleen or someone has died. I had a dream a few nights ago that I had killed a man. It was the aftermath of the event (police handcuffs, my mother's face, the moment you know your life will never be the same). I should say, I don't murder people, which makes nightmares like this one all the more disturbing. So my surroundings are pieced together - more often than not - it is the house or apartment of a wonderful person who has volunteered their couch to a traveling artist. I cannot emphasize the importance of these people enough. Without friends (or acquaintances or the person you just met at the bookstore) who put up their houses, the majority of our nation's touring artists would not be able to travel the way they do. If I am lucky (which sometimes I am not) I'm able to grab a piece of toast or something that has been toasted before I go off to town.

How I got here: I was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, a child of the Midwest. I moved to New York City in 2006 as a response to the feeling in my stomach and loins (mostly my stomach) that I am good at writing and performing poetry. For a few months, I was swallowed by a city that has stomached more than a few of the bright and ambitious. I resurfaced in April of 2007 when I won a Poetry Slam (a performance poetry competition) at LouderARTS-New York City. This put me in a series of semi-finals and ultimately finals that determined which 5 poets in a sea of thousands would represent this prominent venue at the 2007 National Poetry Slam in Austin, TX. When the smoke cleared, this little boy with a big voice from the Midwest was joined by four of his heroes (Rachel McKibbens, Roger Bonair-Agard, John "Survivor" Blake, and Oveous Maximus. Team LouderARTS-NYC went on to place 3rd at the 2007 National Poetry Slam (a competition of some 80 teams throughout the country). From there, in a short time span I was able to transition to a full time paid touring artist. This is now day number 47 of my North American "Being Human Being" winter tour.

Daytime: The work I get paid for generally happens at night. This means I have full days off in new cities. As it happens, inexplicably my body has an undeniable tractor-beam-like pull towards the hippiest, organic-est coffee shop in town. So I go, I eat something, I drink LOADS of coffee and generally write the majority of my poems in said environment, and if we're being perfectly honest I also waste more hours than I wish to admit on websites like myspace.com (black holes for hours of your time. I swear, I log onto the Internet with the sole purpose of posting a new show on my online calendar and 2 hours later I'm reading all about the movie interests of some girl I haven't seen since the third grade... It's disgusting). Many of the days on the road are completely variable though, depending on where you are. When I was in Hawaii for instance, the hippie-coffee-shop-work time took a big hit in favor of the climb-volcanoes-and-surf time. This is tricky because the only way to do this job successfully is to realize that if you do not put in the necessary hours (many many hours) to continue to create the art you make, then eventually, no one will pay you to make it any longer (and in my more frantic states, it generally follows that you will die a sad-washed-up-confused-lonely person, unloved and forgotten, though I'm sure the straits aren't quite that dire). There is a genuine fear that somehow inexplicably you will stop creating, and for the best I've talked to, this is one thing that drives them each day to pick up their instrument of choice, the idea that today will not be the day I fall off, will not be the day my mind runs dry. I try and envision the untouched corners of poetry I have not scratched and then (sometimes blindly) go searching for them. Suffice to say, the balance between experiencing the places through which you are traveling and maintaining an efficient discipline with your work is not always the easiest task when your surroundings change daily, and you have the attention span of a baby giraffe.

Nighttime: As it stands now, my tour is divided into three different types of gigs: 1) Colleges and Universities 2) Showcases & 3) Open-Mic/Poetry-Slam features. The ratio between these three certainly varies depending on which poet you talk to, but I would say half of the gigs I do fall under the third category. This is when a poetry slam or open mic pays you to come to their venue and do a 15-30 minute set. These venues are all over the country. You may not know it, but just around the corner I'm sure someone is reading a poem on any number of topics to anywhere from 15-1,000 people. To say these venues are variable is the understatement of the universe. Now I should say, spaces where people can share the work they've created, regardless of what that work is, are an essential part of any artistic community. Great communities seemingly create better work and a greater understanding of how you fit into the world in which you live. That said, you never know what you will find when you walk into an open-mic venue. In one, venue I saw a woman face a crowd filled with hundreds of raucous poetry slam enthusiasts with a genuine portrayal of her struggle to find religion (or Christianity) coming out of a house with very liberal agnostic parents (the quote that stuck the most was "sure honey, whatever helps you be less of a slut"). Needless to say, I had always felt this particular offset of ideas would be the other way around, and I am always pleasantly surprised when a room full of people gets led down a path that displays a perspective they were not previously aware of. That said, in one venue, I got to sit through a four minute a capella version of Billy Joel's "Piano Man" sung off key and off paper (and to my utmost surprise, without a hint of irony) by a teenager expressing his right to free speech. The lows have a tendency to get pretty low. At some point in time during the night the organizers bring me on stage for a set which looks something like this. Every night, without doubt, before I go on stage I find a large cup of coffee and a dark corner. I have taken to placing my hand on my heart and thanking whatever is out there that I have the opportunity to speak. When you tour (especially if you're not U2, or Beck, or The Rolling Stones), every gig takes on the mental work of a job interview because you never know who is watching. Many times you are the only person in the room who you have known for more than a few hours, which in some ways makes it easier to be swallowed by your work. My life is then funded both by the money from the event organizers and colleges, as well as the sale of both chapbooks (smaller publications of one's most recent poetry) and cds. Some nights I get to stay out for a bit and have a drink or a round of pool. Other nights I'm back in the bus, plane, or car heading towards another city (usually thinking how nice it would be to have a drink and a round of pool) just to do it again tomorrow.

- Editor @ 1:09 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Media Madness in the City of Brotherly Love

It's tough times for newspapers in many American cities and Philadelphia is no exception. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News were bought by a group of investors under the name Philadelphia Media Holdings following the split up of the newspapers' former parent Knight Ridder. Already in decline due both to the cuts of its corporate owners and the negative climate for newspapers, the pair of papers has struggled even further under their new owners.

Earlier this month, Inquirer book editor Frank Wilson departed and described the machinations of newspaper management that led him to step down. The story is fairly familiar to anyone who has followed the industry over the last few years.

While cost cutting and streamlining have become almost mundane at America's newspapers, a new story emerging regarding one of Philadelphia's most storied journalists is a bit more strange. As reported by Steve Volk for Philadelphia magazine, the newspaper company is now going after Pete Dexter, a one time Philadelphia journalist who has gone on to have a fruitful career as a novelist. Last year, he hearkened back to his days as a newspaper columnist in Philadelphia and elsewhere by publishing a collection of his old columns, Paper Trails.

However, there must've been some miscommunication along the way because Philadelphia Media Holdings is now asking for a chunk of Dexter's $60,000 advance, which Dexter gave to his editor Rob Fleder who did all the work of digging through the archives at compiling the collection. Meanwhile, the book's paperback release has been delayed. In the above-linked article, it appears as though Dexter and Fleder acted in good faith, though the introduction to Paper Trails does describe the somewhat cavalier attitude with which Dexter and Fleder approached the book. In it, the reader is told that the 82 columns and articles we are about to read will lack dates and any indication as to where they first appeared because, basically, Dexter and Fleder didn't want to dig them up. This adds to the collection's charm but doesn't exactly lend an aura of due diligence.

Regardless, it's hard to get behind what Philadelphia Media Holdings is doing here. By Philadelphia magazine's account, the paper is attempting to intimidate Dexter and his agent, with little regard for the papers' already bad reputation. One would think a compromise could have been reached over a relatively minor sum.

As an aside, earlier this week, we looked at books for fans of HBO's Deadwood. I would say that Paper Trails is a must read for fans of another HBO hit, The Wire. I posted my thoughts on Paper Trails early last year.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:01 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Curios

• NPR offers a nifty gallery that accompanies the publication of this quirky collection: Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.
• The Coen Brothers have signed on to helm the film version of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. The big-screen version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found (though it's reportedly been in the works for years).
• Elsewhere in book-to-movie news, Ian McEwen is pleased with the film version of his novel Atonement.
• Poet and critic Reginald Shepherd reflects on becoming a blogger. "Until a couple of years ago, I barely knew what a blog was, and certainly had never seen one," he writes. But it proved quite fruitful: "it sometimes seems that my blog has done more to raise my profile than all my more-than-fifteen years of copious publishing put together."
• Five reasons not to give up books (the paper ones, as opposed the digital counterparts.)
• I think it's an ad for a video game, but this video contains some masterful soccer kung fu.
• None of us at The Millions is affiliated with Princeton, but this list of the school's most influential alums is interesting in a random sort of way.
• Th