American Short Fiction blog

“The popular books Americans were reading in the early 1930s. . . look a lot like the mass market offerings of 2009.”

So says Maureen Corrigan in her June 15 report on NPR’s Fresh Air.

Chick lit, adventure tales, economic primers, even “a furry precursor to the vampire mania of today lurking in an April 1933 best-seller called The Werewolf of Paris.” They all make their appearance. And publishing industry trade magazine Publishers Weekly bears the record.

It apparently bears, also, according to Corrigan, a couple canine ancestors of Marley and Me:

The dog starring as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, Flush, in the 1930s Broadway play The Barretts of Wimpole Street is depicted in a September 2 photo spread putting his paw to a contract for a fictional memoir.

That same month, Virginia Woolf cashed in on the Flush craze by bringing out a biography of the pooch; the ad promised that the forthcoming shaggy dog story was “certain to be Mrs. Woolf’s most popular book.” Clearly, the copywriter was not a fan of Woolf’s experiments in literary modernism.

Read and hear the whole story. And check out the Guardian’s review of Woolf’s “canine classic” (which did become, within six months, her best-selling book to date).

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Tell ASF what you’re reading in the comments.

In early June, the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass discussed what book reviews will look like in 2010. More specifically, the blog reported on the topic as it was discussed by an expert panel during a packed session at Book Expo America. The title of the discussion: Book Reviews 2010: What Will They Look Like?

“Practitioners” who weighed in on the topic include Ben Greenman (New Yorker, writer/reviewer), Bethanne Patrick (PW blogger), David Nudo (PW and Shelfari, formerly of the New York Times), Otis Chandler (Goodreads CEO and founder), Peter Krause (the Tactic Company, formerly of Muze), and moderator John Reed, Books Editor of the Brooklyn Rail and NBCC board member.

The wide-ranging panel, which took on the unevenness of Web book reviews and the corruption of Amazon’s book recommendation system, did not reach consensus. However, former LA Times Book Review Editor Steve Wasserman weighed in with a positive evaluation. (A little backstory: two years ago, Wasserman wrote a widely circulated essay in Columbia Journalism Review that sounded the death knell of book reviewing in newspapers.) He commented that he was “heartened” that the newspaper review was not discussed–this very fact suggests that the conversation is moving forward, he said.

Read full comments at National Book Critics Circle blog.

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ASF invites readers to comment: Where do you go for your book reviews?

Josh Weil, whose story “The First Bad Thing” will appear in our Fall 2009 issue, is in the middle of a book tour for his trio of novellas, The New Valley. If you haven’t yet caught the tour or the collection that is winning raves, there’s still time.

Weil swings through Austin July 1 . . . Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, on July 28 . . . Baltimore on September 17.

For times and other info, check out BookPeople’s calendar of events.

Tonight ASF is hosting a free reading at Cafe Caffeine (909 W Mary) in Austin. We’re celebrating the release of our Summer issue . . . kicking things off at 7 pm. Come on down, have a beer, and catch some great poetry and fiction.

With poet Laurie Capps, actress Kelli Bland, and fiction writer Christie Hodgen. Refreshments provided by Live Oak Brewing Company.

Karen Gentry won our most recent short fiction contest with her story “The Mask of Destiny,”  a funny, knotty, closely observed story of a missing percolator at the UN. (Our Summer ’09 issue, in which this story appears, is sold out in our online store. You can pick up a copy at our reading tomorrow or from your local bookstore.) Gentry’s fiction has also appeared in the New Orleans Review, New Delta Review, NOÖ Journal, and the Southeast Review.

In this interview with ASF Editorial Assistant Sarah Wambold, Gentry discusses the genesis of the story, “Lutheran” percolators, and troublemaking voices.

ASF: You have an incredible grasp of language and, as evident in “The Mask of Destiny,” thorough knowledge of the fiction writing process. The ways in which the piece is self-aware, such as explaining each direction in the piece, seem to subvert editing decisions by working them into the narrative. Did workshops or classes inspire this piece?

KG: I wrote this in the midst of teaching my first introductory creative fiction writing course at Georgia State University. So the answer is yes; how storytelling works and how to articulate it was high on my mind. Also on my mind were the characters from a prior semester spent studying for a graduate fiction theory class— Aristotle, Chekhov, Gass, Gardner, James, Forster, Friedman, O’Connor, Prince, Woolf, and all the other royals of fiction theory. I had tried unsuccessfully to write a story around E. Herbert Norman for a good year, but this go-round these troublemaking, often conflicting, voices gave me a much-needed angle from which to tell the story.

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Stephanie Austin’s short “Jesus Cake Baby” is our featured web exclusive for June, part of our monthly fiction Pinup Series. Austin’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Pacific Review, Fiction, Kitchen Sink, and The Fiddlehead. She is in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

ASF intern Tricia Rosetty talked to Austin about her process, blogging, and cakes and the things you hide in them.

ASF intern: Where did the spark for this story come from?

Austin: Back in the glory days of the economy, I worked at an advertising agency. Our media girls used to get tons of freebies delivered by various media outlets courting them to buy ad space. One afternoon (I think it turned out to be Fat Tuesday), someone from one of the radio stations dropped off a king cake, which was vaguely stale but nonetheless put up for grabs in the kitchen. I had never heard of a king cake and as people were filling in and cutting up pieces for themselves, one of my coworkers asked if anyone had found the baby. Of course this led to an hour long off-work discussion about king cakes, traditions, and the things you hide in them. I had also recently read Rant by Chuck Palahniuk and part of the storyline involves the mother of Rant hiding tiny objects in food.

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Tania Hershman at The Short Review celebrates the short story collection. Recent highlights: new work outside the United States, including Deborah Kay Davies’s debut short story collection, Grace, Tamar, and Laszlo the Beautiful, which has won the 2009 Wales Book of the Year; Pasha Malla’s debut; and Canadian Trillium Book Award winner The Withdrawal Method.

Ms. Herman notes, too, some two dozen short story collection competitions, some of whose deadlines are approaching, including. . .

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize (June 30)

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize recognizes and supports writers of short fiction and makes their work available to readers around the world. The award is open to writers who have published a book-length collection of fiction or at least three short stories or novellas in commercial magazines or literary journals.

The Story Prize (July 15)

Eligibility for The Story Prize is restricted to collections of short fiction (at least two stories and/or novellas) by a living author, written in English. Eligible books must be first publication of the work in the United States during the calendar year, in either hardcover or paperback, and available for purchase by the general public. Collections must also include work previously unpublished in book form.

The Scotiabank Giller Prize (August 1)

The Scotiabank Giller Prize is worth $70,000 (Canadian) annually. A purse of $50,000 is awarded to the author of the best Canadian full-length novel or collection of short stories published in English. Each of the finalists will receive $5,000.

Fiction Collection Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Contest (November 1)

The Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Contest is open to any writer of English who is a citizen of the United States and who has not previously published with Fiction Collective Two. Submissions may include a collection of short stories, one or more novellas, or a novel of any length. There is no length requirement. Works that have previously appeared in magazines or in anthologies may be included. Translations and previously self-published collections are not eligible. To avoid conflict of interest, former or current students or close friends of the final judge for 2008, Michael Martone, are ineligible to win the contest. Employees and Board members of FC2 are not eligible to enter.

See the full Short Review list of contests and awards for short story collections here.

Where: Cafe Caffeine, 909 West Mary, Austin
When: 7 pm, Friday, June 26
Who: American Short Fiction
What: Celebrates its Summer 2009 issue with a reading

Come for an evening of music, fiction, and drinks! Christie Hodgen is flying in from Kansas City to read from her brilliant story featured in the current issue; actress Kelli Bland will be performing from Patrick Somerville’s “The Universe in Miniature in Miniature”; and poet Laurie Capps will also read. Emceed by ASF favorite Owen Egerton! Refreshments provided by Live Oak Brewing Company.

Christie Hodgen is the author of A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw: Stories (UMass, 2003) and the novel Hello, I Must Be Going (Norton, 2006). Her stories have appeared recently in Ploughshares and the Southern Review. She lives in Kansas City.

Laurie Capps is a poet and writer recently relocated to Austin. She earned an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, in North Carolina. She has worked on assembly lines, as a nanny, and as a business writer in New York City, and has lived in Boston, California, and upstate New York. Her work has previously appeared in Tar River Poetry, New South, and The Southeast Review, among other journals. Recently, she was a finalist for the 2009 Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize.

Kelli Bland earned her BA in Theater from Stephen F. Austin State University with an emphasis in directing. She studied physical theater at the Rose Bruford College in England and puppetry and actor movement at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona. After college, she moved to Austin where she has performed as an actress in film and in many plays, including The Red Balloon, A Thought in Three Parts, and A Genuine Plea to My Insides, her one-woman show which received a Best of Week nod at Fronterafest 2008. This year, Kelli directed the well-received plays The Bird and The Bee, as well as the original musical Faster Than the Speed of Light!

This past weekend Austin’s independent bookstore BookPeople hosted the “Delacorte Dames and Dude” in a panel discussion about the hows and whys of writing novels for teens. (Delacorte is Random House’s YA imprint.)

But moderator Sarah Bird (Do Evil Cheerfully, The Boyfriend School, How Perfect Is That, and many more) asked one particular question of the novelists that spoke to the writer in all of us:

“What advice would your published self give to your nonpublished self?”

The panelists responded without hesitation:

Shana Burg (A Thousand Never Evers): “Hang in there. Keep at it. People always say if what you’re doing’s worth it, it will get published eventually. You have to believe that. Have persistence.”

April Lurie (Dancing in the Streets of Brooklyn, The Latent Powers of Dylan Fontaine): “I was in a vacuum when I first started writing. I had four kids, I’d just had a baby. I wish I had made the time to get involved in a [writing] group. I would have made less mistakes.”

Varian Johnson (A Red Polka Dot in a World Full of Plaid, My Life as a Rhombus): “The key is, think of it as long-term. Think about what you’re trying to do. I would tell my unpublished self, ‘Have more patience. Don’t be so hard on yourself.’”

Jennifer Ziegler (Alpha Dog, How Not to Be Popular): “I would tell myself to chill out. You have to be disciplined. But you have to observe people, live life.”

Margo Rabb (Cures for Heartbreak): “If you want to publish, separate your business self. Have a constitution made of steel when it comes to rejection. When I started writing, I sent to three publishers at a time. When the rejections came in I’d send [more out]. When I was out of school and interning for Poets & Writers, I sent a piece to the Atlantic Monthly. They rejected it. I decided they hadn’t read closely enough. It got 25 other rejections. But when the Atlantic Monthly had a contest I submitted the same thing, without changes. It won. Send it to 50 places before you rewrite it. It’s the same with publishers. [pause] I believe it’s not called Random House for nothing.”

A few more YA market points to ponder, as told to us by Ms. Rabb:

Catcher in the Rye and To Kill A Mockingbird were the two books that publishers told me “without a doubt” would be published as YA today. With books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (published as adult) and The Book Thief (published as YA), both YA and adult publishers were in the auctions to buy the titles, and they were eventually published the way they were because of who won the auction. In the UK, they publish both YA and adult editions of crossover titles like Curious Incident, The Book Thief, Meg Rosoff’s books, and many others, but in America the market is dominated by Barnes & Noble, which will only shelve books in one place. So because of that, [U.S.] publishers won’t do dual editions.

Also according to Ms. Rabb, sales of Young Adult titles are up while books in other markets lag. One explanation: “The school and librarian market is not tied to the Barnes & Noble market as adult books are.” For further reading on this subject, she suggests Justine Larbelestier’s blog. Check out also Ms. Rabb’s last summer’s New York Times essay on the topic.

Writer’s Digest and WritersDigest.com are searching for a student blogger who will be in an MFA program during the 2009-2010 school year. The contest is called “MFA Confidential” and it’s free. Deadline is July 1, 2009; the winning blogger will be responsible for posting three times a week from September 2009 through May 2010 at WritersDigest.com.

Check out the guidelines and other details at http://www.writersdigest.com/mfacontest.