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.

Some rights reserved by EJP Photo.

My urge to seek refuge from the blazing heat has me thinking, oddly enough, of winter, and those sufficiently blustery days when elementary school teachers declare “indoor recess.” No matter how vicious the conditions outside, those two words always sounded something like a prison sentence (No four square tournaments?! No endless games of No Touching Gravel?! No Truth or Dare behind the twisty slide?!). But now—let’s blame it on my inner goody-two-shoes, drawn out, no doubt, by the school supplies that are slowly edging out flipflops in the supermarket aisles—I’m beginning to think my teachers had it right: there are some days, in every season, that are best spent indoors.

Lucky for me, there are plenty of great coffee shops around town where I can hide out with a good book (or two: I’m currently working Doug Dorst’s The Surf Guru and Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage). Sipping hot coffee in the cool of my own personal indoor recess, I can rev up for the last few weeks of summer without breaking a sweat (although I probably won’t be wearing a scarf . . . yet).

Here’s what some of my fellow indoor readers were spotted taking in recently:

King Kong Theory, Virginie Despentes

The Ticking Is the Bomb, Nick Flynn

Until I Find You, John Irving

The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Foundation, Isaac Asimov

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

Bee Season, Myla Goldberg

I’m away from the bookstore this week.  I was so looking forward to a real break from eight hours on my feet dealing with people, but can I tell you a secret?  Boy, do I miss it.

That’s right.  I’m spending this relaxing Chicago vacation pining for my retail job.

It shouldn’t be a job that follows me home.  But I find it increasingly hard not to make book suggestions in everyday conversation.  Is this odd?   Someone tells me they’re feeling restless, they don’t like their job, or any other complaint and I’m already making a list of titles.

Recommending books is a diagnostic and, ultimately, prescriptive process a lot of the time.  You’re looking for something to read?  Tell me, what was the last book you read?  Ah.  And you found yourself bored by ho-hum Victorian historical fiction?  A hundred pages in and feeling lethargic?  Let me offer you something a little more epic.  Take David Mitchell’s new one with a side of Hilary Mantel and call me in the morning.  (Can I just say I love when people do that?  Follow-ups are the best.)

It isn’t always so simple to find a remedy, and the goal, obviously, is that the customer walks away with books.  This can go one of three ways:

1. They crave something brutally specific—“Hi, I need a cookbook to balance my dog’s Yin deficiency through diet”—to use a true-life example.  So I’ll pick a section (Pets?  Alternative Healing?  East/West Studies?) or track down an expert (Katie).  Bookstores are crawling with people who know everything about the things you’ve never heard of.

2. They want something broad, vague, generic—“I just want a page turner!”  “Give me a beach read!”  People really say these things!  Then it’s the ethically awkward let-me-steer-you-to-this-book-I-haven’t-read-but-that-everyone-so-highly-and-unanimously-adores game.   It’s a mainstream, cross-genre scavenger hunt (which quickly descends into who can read the back of the book faster), or it’s a handy go-to.  In 2010, that means hello, Stieg Larsson!

3. And then, of course, there is the rare and magical match.  They tell me they love what I love, read what I read, where to next?  It’s practically cinematic. These are the most fun—I feel like the Biblioracle over at The Morning News—but they’re the hardest for me as a bookseller.  Cause see, someone tells me they love experimental fiction, they wish Borges had written a novel, and what I want to do is lend them my copy of Cortázar’s Hopscotch. I have actually done this.  Insisted, “No, don’t buy it.  Just come in tomorrow and you can borrow mine.”  Or we don’t have, say, the particular Dostoevsky translation I’m telling you to buy, but I have it at home.  It’s a little underlined but come on, you can ignore that.  Ordering it would take a week!  This is much much more dire.

It’s a hard job to be away from.  So I quieted my nerves with a little pilgrimage to one of my all-time favorite places, Bookman’s Alley in Evanston.  Said hello to Roger Carlson and the freaky (read: real) stuffed wildcat head in Sports, ate a few gumdrops, swayed to what I’m convinced is an actual phonograph hidden somewhere in the stacks, and tried to decide if that snappy inscription in Graham Greene’s The Living Room was really written and signed by Anaïs Nin and therefore worth the $65 price tag.  Too risky, in the end.

I’m flying to Seattle tomorrow for a friend’s wedding. I’ve got my dress picked out and my quart-sized Ziploc stocked. Selecting reading material for a long flight, though, always poses something more of a challenge. Bring something too difficult and you find yourself watching some bad in-flight movie starring Nicolas Cage; too short, and you spend the last leg of your journey perusing Sky Mall.

A couple of days ago, while searching for a book to bring with me on my trip, I picked up Emma Straub’s charming (and appropriately titled) Fly-Over State—and ended up reading the entire thing.

The title story introduces us to Sophie, a New Yorker recently transplanted to suburban Wisconsin where her husband has accepted a teaching job. Sophie is a quiet, slightly off-kilter narrator who observes with curiosity and humor the predictable kinetics of her new neighbors’ daily routines. Surrounded by strangers and boxes, Sophie contemplates who she will be in this new life and how (literally) she’ll fill its empty spaces. Straub is spare and spacious in her telling of a story that, to me, is about the sense of possibility that transience—being in transit—engenders, however temporarily.

An excerpt from “Fly-Over State”:

We could have gone anywhere, that’s what we’d decided. Tucson. Miami. Detroit. Each time James presented me with a city, I’d walk to the bookstore on Seventh Avenue and sit down in the travel section. I’d find us a neighborhood, a coffee shop to frequent. I knew where we’d go for fun, to people-watch. There were the restaurants our parents would take us to when they came to visit; first mine, then his. There was the park I could take walks in, and the places we could meet for lunch during the day. The suits would take us there. I never imagined we’d actually leave New York.

“Fly-Over State” has me thinking about the places planes take us—new cities, new jobs, new lives. And about the places they don’t. The fly-over places, appearing first as pinpricks of light as we approach them from above, and growing into the discernible landmarks of any number of hypothetical lives: traffic patterns, cul-de-sacs, swimming pools, before receding again, far, far below.

At just 77 pages, this slim, two-story volume won’t weigh down a carry-on. But it’s also just too easy to devour in one gulp, so be careful or you might finish it before you even board the plane.

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This post is part of a series exploring the relationship between place and fiction. Got a favorite story about being on the move? Let us know.

Photo by Michael Coté. Some rights reserved under Creative Commons.

Despite predictions of rain, we enjoyed some pretty nice weather here in Austin this recent holiday weekend. On Monday, after all the fireworks had been launched and all the sparklers sparkled, I headed down to Barton Springs Pool to spend some quality time with my current summer reading project: David Foster Wallace’s Girl With Curious Hair.

I wasn’t the only one toting a book inside my beach bag. From classics by Steinbeck and Fitzgerald to current bestsellers like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, and from decidedly beach-y reads to more challenging works like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, the spectrum of poolside picks was impressive.

Here’s a sampling of what folks were reading last weekend:

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald  (Lauren, 15, was dipping into this classic for the first time.)

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver  (Kingsolver seems to be a popular choice this summer; I spotted multiple people reading this memoir of the author’s year-long experiment in eating locally, as well as her most well-know work, listed below.)

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, Vincent Bugliosi

The Winner Stands Alone: A Novel, Paul Coelho  (“Not as good as his other work,” according to reader Kat, 24.)

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, Christopher McDougall

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, Elizabeth Gilbert  (A movie based on this 2006 bestselling memoir will be released this summer.)

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro  (Also being made into a film, to be released in the fall.)

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Those clever people in Tin Houses.

According to GalleyCat, between August 1 and November 30, 2010, Tin House Books will accept unsolicited manuscripts if the submission includes a receipt that proves the author has purchased a book at a bookstore.

The same rule applies for unsolicited work submitted to its magazine between September 1 and December 30, 2010.

Remember: Tin House Books does not permit electronic submissions. Tin House magazine does. Read the rules.

A fun final note, as reported by GalleyCat: “Writers who cannot afford to buy a book or cannot get to an actual bookstore are encouraged to explain why in haiku or one sentence (100 words or fewer).”

Responses to this new submission policy here and here.

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.

The year is 2010. And The Guardian has recently reported that Stephenie Meyer has joined the ranks of authors whose books get the most requests to be banned from American libraries. The Twilight series debuts on the baddies books list at fifth, between To Kill a Mockingbird (fourth) and Catcher in the Rye (sixth).

The American Library Association (ALA) didn’t have too much to say on the importance of Twilight to the history of literature, but its rep Angela Maycock did note that Salinger’s iconic novel of teenage rebellion The Catcher in the Rye has been called “anti-white,” “obscene,” “centered around negative activity,” and “a filthy, filthy book”—ever since it was published more than 50 years ago.

Maycock’s final analysis: Noncomformity, even in 2010, is scary.

Barbara Jones, director of the ALA’s office for intellectual freedom adds the following: “[T]he ability to read, speak, think and express ourselves freely are core American values. . . Protecting one of our most fundamental rights—the freedom to read—means respecting each other’s differences and the right of all people to choose for themselves what they and their families read.”

Meanwhile, ASF wonders if the people who are cleansing their libraries and school of dirty and challenging literature have gotten the ink off their hands from their morning paper.

After the the jump, the ALA’s Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2009:

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Nearly 100 writers have been named by Dzanc Books’ as Best of the Web 2010.

ASF readers may recognized some of their favorite writers from our print and online pages:

* Chris Bachelder
* Kim Chinquee
* Michael Czyzniejewski
* Scott Garson
* Amelia Gray
* Ander Monson, and
* ASF editorial advisory board member Dan Chaon

According to Dzanc Books, publisher of BotW series, the 2010 print anthology, guest-edited by Kathy Fish, “compiles the best fiction, poetry, and non-fiction that online literary journals have to offer in an eclectic collection in the manner of other broad-ranging anthologies such as Pushcart, and Best American Non-Required Reading. This is the first substantial attempt at creating an annual print compilation of the best of material published online.”

Intrigued? Pre-order your copy for June delivery. Then, when it arrives, you can pat yourself on the back for your brilliant foresight.