American Short Fiction blog

I’ve been thinking a lot about Contemporary American Fiction (CAF, if you will) this week. We’ve had these circular discussions going at the bookstore about, you know, overrated writers and underrated writers (ahem); everybody’s been making their own lists so that everyone else can refute them flatly, and loudly. And there’s of course talk about Jonathan Franzen and the Great American Novel/Novelist question, and what exactly Lev Grossman might be angling for with this article, (not to mention his Time list from the end of last year of the Top Ten Books of the Decade). Frankly, it’s all getting to be a bit much. The books we’re arguing over—even the supposedly overrated ones, or the ones dubbed critical successes—are not the books people are buying in droves. I’m droning on about how unsettling it is to CAF that Mr. Franzen was named the Great, they’re arguing about Junot Diaz, and meanwhile ten copies of The Help or The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo or Twilight walk out the door. Something seems amiss in the realm of literary fiction, and the problem isn’t emanating from comments pages.

So I’ve been relaxing far from the Internet scuffles and the literary publishing blogosphere, away from our daily rants and arguments[1], enjoying the new issue of ASF (plus Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness and Daniil Kharms’s Today I Wrote Nothing) when all of the sudden, Sunday morning I open my email to find an installment of “Work in Progress,” FSG’s new newsletter. It contains none other than a video of (guess who?) Jonathan Franzen talking about (guess what?) the state of CAF and the contemporary novel. Oy. There’s no escaping it.

I was dismayed by the video[2] not for what he said, exactly, but for how simply, patly he summed things up, like his characters, his novel, the purpose of reading and the novel (and he didn’t stick to lit in his generalizations, either). See for yourself. And so I went seeking some good old-fashioned, wordy, convoluted perspective in an interview with David Foster Wallace, the first one to pop up on YouTube, which just so happened to cover—oh hey—CAF, its readers, and the novel. Whaddayaknow.

In the interview[3], he aligns CAF and its readership (albeit 10+ years ago) with contemporary classical music and its following.  Actually, he spends a while just trying to put a number on people who care about CAF, or more specifically so-called serious books.  He throws out half a million, then settles on probably a million people in America who care about this stuff.  That’s perspective for you.  That’s humbling.  Especially, in my case, for a bookseller.

This minority aside, I think people should keep talking about the divide between popular literature and serious works—and especially the way the two are lately striving to imitate each other to stay afloat in the struggling publishing economy. I’m thinking of popular books that take themselves seriously, for example, or serious, difficult works that seem totally apathetic. You can see it in cover design, blurbs, press from the publisher, book trailers. Serious, gut-wrenching works have covers and trailers that say, “This book’s a joke!” (Gary Shteyngart, anyone?) while trite romantic comedies that actually read themselves to you are hailed as provocative pieces. Don’t believe me? Remember when Nicholas Sparks compared himself to Hemingway? We still joke about sneakily shelving his books in the Classics section. Right by Muriel Spark.

For whatever reason, books that bridge the seriousness divide from either side, no matter how superficially, seem to sell the absolute best. I can’t tell whether this dual trend’s effect is homogenizing for CAF or ever more polarizing. Suffice to say I’ll be on the lookout. One thing I can tell you, though. Whatever it is they pick up, people are still reading.  Maybe that’s where the conversation should start.

[2] Of course I watched it; I want to like him so badly!  Instead it affirmed my long-held belief that writers are better off not talking.

[3] Which I’ve decided not to link to.  Franzen and Wallace both bring up the necessity of finding quiet and stillness in order to read, and watching an author interview on YouTube seems like the antithesis of that.

Music has never let me down so maybe it’s the heat that has me talking silly. But this August and September, I say we throw the book at Lollapalooza 2010, Ozzfest UK, and Hungary’s Sziget Festival.

I say let’s thrash, head-bob, and chillax to those headlining bands on our trusty iPods while we spend our economy-squashed, ice cream-truck-driving summer job money on something novel. Like, say, hitting one of the world’s most amazing writing festivals.

There’s the Library of Congress National Book Festival, for example.

When? Saturday 25, September 2010

Where? on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., between 3rd and 7th

Cool come-on: Hear and hobnob with more than 70 headlining writers, including Isabel Allende, Brad Meltzer, Katherine Paterson, [Texas Book Festival 2009 Literary Death Match judge] Jane Smiley, Scott Turow, David Remnick and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. Plus, it’s free and open to the public.

More info: http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/

Not far enough out for you? Try the Brooklyn Book Festival.

When: Sunday, 12 September 2010 – with special events on September 10, 11, and 12

Where: Brooklyn Borough Hall, 209 Joralemon St., Brooklyn

What the Brooklyn Book Festival has to offer:  With nearly 100 emerging and already emerged sparkling and devastating authors BBF is a huge, premiere, free public event for book lovers.

Cool come-on: Themed readings

More info: http://www.brooklynbookfestival.org/BrooklynBookFestival/festival.html

Still not far out enough for you? How about . . .

The Edinburgh International Book Festival

When? Saturday, August 14, through Monday, August 30

Where? Charlotte Square Gardens, Edinburgh, Scotland

What the Edinburgh International Book Festival has to offer: Edinburgh, UNESCO City of Literature, itself isn’t enough? How about 17 days, 750 events, 800 authors, over 40 different countries represented?

Cool come-on: It coincides with the Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as well as the other festivals which comprise the Edinburgh Festival.

Another cool come-on: As the press release goes, “We are the largest public celebration of books in the world.”

More info: http://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival

I’d stage-dive to all that. You?

Much has been made of literature’s ability to transport readers to other worlds. As the famously reclusive Emily Dickinson wrote: There is no frigate like a book/To take us lands away./Nor any coursers like a page/Of prancing poetry. Even those of us less housebound than Ms. Dickinson can appreciate the imaginative entrance that books allow into unfamiliar emotional and geographic realms.

Summer, especially, finds readers seeking escape, and right now the Internet is jam-packed with summer reading lists that promise a bit of respite from the workaday world. For those seeking the vicarious thrills of armchair travel, the New York Times offers this list of recently published travel writing. Billing historical fiction as “the ultimate summer getaway,” NPR recommends a list of novels sure to carry readers through both space and time.

Escaping into the pages of a book is lovely. But reading, I think, also has the wonderful ability to put us into closer contact with our immediate surroundings. Though (as Meredith Blake argues over at the New Yorker) summer doesn’t always mark a dramatic shift in what we read, rising temperatures do usually mean a change in where we read. With any luck, even the most harried and desk-bound among us will find time in the coming months to savor a story or two in true summer reading fashion: on the beach, under a shady tree, or (my personal favorite) poolside, a cool, refreshing drink in hand.

Indeed, the where of summer reading seems just as important as the what of it. Over at the L.A. Times’ Jacket Copy blog, book lovers recall favorite summer reads, and the places–a crowded public pool, a plane to Ireland–they first encountered them. And in last Sunday’s special summer reading issue of the New York Times Books section, authors offered up their memories of books discovered by chance on summer vacations (Dogwalker author Arthur Bradford recalls reading Charles Portis’s “Dog of the South” near Austin’s Barton Springs Pool!).

As I scan my own bookshelf, I realize that I’m reminded not only of the imaginary landscapes contained between the covers of the books, but also of the particular place where I read each one. Holding my worn copy of Lolita I’m transported to the unseasonably warm spring of my senior year of high school that I spent sunbathing on my parents’ lawn perplexed and awed (but mostly perplexed) by Nabokov’s dense language. A couple of summers ago, I carried Tropic of Cancer with me to cafés all over Paris, and I took silent, self-satisfied delight in Miller’s every mention of a restaurant or street name I recognized. And I will never forget reading Joan Didion’s Run, River in the apartment I rented in L.A. my first year out of college, the El Niño-year rain playing a loud and inexhaustible dirge for the myth of an always-sunny California on the metal carport outside my window.

I like to think of these memories as constituting a map of sorts, a smattering of coordinates that add up to something like a personal literary geography. Sure, some of the sites are mundane (my old green couch dominates the topography like Mt. Everest). But some strike me as quite remarkable for the irreproducible synergy that is created between the site of reading and the site of fiction, or (to appropriate Willa Cather’s phrase) the city of place and the city of feeling.

This summer, as I make my way through the ever-growing stack of books in my office, I’m eager to add new landmarks to this map. I’m excited to explore the fictional worlds of the stories I’ll read, but I’m also ready to find the yet-undiscovered places around town, where, with my head in a book, I can experience the strange kind of escape that is being simultaneously both here and there.

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This is the first in a series of posts exploring the relationship between place and fiction. Do you have a favorite place to read in Austin or beyond? Let us know.

Does Grammar Girl even need an intro?

I’ve taken a liking to Mignon Fogarty’s warm, funny podcasts on grammar and usage, and now I’m happy to discover her books as well.

Get the podcasts (iTunes or podcastpickle). So many choices. What are your favorite episode?

We’re thrilled to announce that, starting today, American Short Fiction will be offering podcasts. Every other week, we’ll be chatting with contributors and digging into their stories.

Here’s our first one. It features an interview with Marie-Helene Bertino and an excerpt of her hilarious and moving “Carry Me Home, Sisters of Saint Joseph,” which is in our Spring 2010 issue.

You can subscribe to our podcasts via iTunes for free. (Visit the iTunes store and search for American Short Fiction. We’ll come up under the heading Podcasts. Or just follow this link.) We’ll be bringing new stories and insights from writers every other week. Upcoming episodes will feature Jeff Parker, Matt Bell, and Laura van den Berg.

Or it could land you a Golden Grant, anyway.

General Mills wants to give you the gold to increase your job-seeking stamina. The company is giving away 12 boxes of Golden Grahams to 75 people a week for three months.

To win a box, you must share your funny (or depressing) job search story in 122 characters or less (that’s shorter than a tweet!). General Mills and the Golden Grant team might then animate your story into a silly little video.

See winning stories here. Read the rules here.

If you’re wondering how this little gimmick will help you actually get a job, don’t ask us. We’re writers, too.

Some ads are misdirected, unenlightened, or just, well, cursed with Taint and Wrong. Like Caribou Coffee Company’s “Taste our passion in every cup.”

Call me a prude, Caribou, but I bet your passion is the last thing America wants in its coffee.

Some ads you appreciate like your bff for their perfect combination of clever and honest and utterly dependable, as with Ford’s “Crazy Smart.” Others, like Dodge Sports’ “Man’s Last Stand,” cut a new edge on the old gender and domesticity joke.

A few ads even leak into the pop culture lexicon as surely as media-saturated nitrous oxide makes the rounds at a Friday night pizza party, manufacturing joy and repetition ad nauseum (whoa, now there’s a pun). I mean, who can forget these doozies: Miller Lite’s “Taste’s great/less filling” and Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?”

And some ads you fall in love with. Forever. Like Coca-Cola’s “The Kid and Mean Joe.” Because of its fully realized world. Its exactly right details. Its timing. Its depth. Its narrative arc. And its respect of you—your smarts, your humor, your emotional center.

Just like the best stories.

No wonder advice by giants in the advertising world–from ideas to editing—fall right in step for fiction writing. In both worlds, every word counts, and craft is critical. You’ll get good results only if your audience buys in.

See more advice from the giants of advertising at suite101.com’s “Recommendations for writing effective ad copy.”

[Thanks to ad men Peter Levin and Larry Conely at Team Detroit for the inspiration for this post.]

At the Guardian, James Lasdun unpacks Chekhov.

. . . the unpredictable shapes of his stories (ask yourself, as you read them, where they might be going: it’s almost always impossible to guess, and yet when you get there it feels inevitable and entirely natural), the endings that “solve” nothing in the conventional sense but do indeed finalise the “correct presentation” of the problem—all this is premised, not on some simple ambition to strike a new note, but on a new way of looking at reality that required new methods to express it. . .

Has Chekhov influenced your work? What Chekhov story makes you whimper/laugh and why? Do you wish Brits would embrace the z in words like finalize?

Nicholas Baker in the New Yorker, musing on the Kindle 2:

Yes, you can definitely read things on the Kindle. And I did. Bits of things at first. I read some of De Quincey’s “Confessions,” some of Robert Benchley’s “Love Conquers All,” and some of several versions of Kipling’s “The Jungle Book.” I squeezed no new joy from these great books, though. The Gluyas Williams drawings were gone from the Benchley, and even the wasp passage in “Do Insects Think?” just wasn’t the same in Kindle gray. I did an experiment. I found the Common Reader reprint edition of “Love Conquers All” and read the very same wasp passage. I laughed: ha-ha. Then I went back to the Kindle 2 and read the wasp passage again. No laugh. Of course, by then I’d read the passage three times, and it wasn’t that funny anymore. But the point is that it wasn’t funny the first time I came to it, when it was enscreened on the Kindle. Monotype Caecilia was grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words.

The article is worth reading. Can the iPad’s sharp, colorful screen someday replace the almighty book? How upset are you that it’s called the “iPad”?

Here’s what I love about history: you only get a piece of the story at one time.

In 1952, LIFE got the whole story, short though it was, of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea before it was published in book form, along with some photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt of the Cuban fishing village, Cojimar, which is the book’s setting.
What LIFE didn’t get, back then, was close to two dozen unpublished pics of “Papa” himself, the fisherman who could very well have been the titular “old man,” and lots of commentary by the photographer himself.

'Old Man and the Spear' (photo: Alfred Esienstaedt)

But we get them now—including the doozy titled “Hemingway, Full Clothed.” Of it Esienstaedt says, “Even clothing Hemingway proved difficult. When the time came to shoot what was intended to be the cover for LIFE, the author wanted to wear nothing but shorts. ‘Don’t you think people want to see me like this? You know, I’m a very virile man.’” The photographer agreed, then strongly suggested a nice yellow shirt.

Other beauties that finally make their appearance: a particular old man and a spear.