by Kelly Pickerill
So Hannah and I were talking about short stories and how much we love them because of George Saunders’s new book and our First Editions Club pick, Tenth of December. I told her — because she’s new and may not have experienced this yet — that we as booksellers come across a lot of readers who don’t like short stories. After our event on Wednesday was so successful, Hannah was convinced otherwise.
Great turnout and enthusiasm aside, it is true that while George Saunders may be pardoned, the short story is still under scrutiny by the general reader. The day of our event at Lemuria, Adrian Chen at Gawker blogged that George Saunders “needs to write a goddamn novel already.” And he criticized lovers of the short story for being fetishists: “Short fiction is the Hard Stuff—pure uncut stories prized by real literature heads. Novelists are trotted out on talk shows and op-ed pages to give their thoughts on the issues of the day. Many are openly egomaniacal. But short story writers are noble craftsmen, painstakingly assembling flawless sentences into a delicate storytelling apparatus.”
Publishers can be biased, too; they know that a novel is often more marketable than a story collection. Being in the book business we know that many new writers are given a two book deal: the publisher will publish their stories as long they get a novel, too. But I often feel that for some writers, their stories are more focused. And of course that’s partly because a story is more focused than a novel. But there’s more to it than that. Hannah said it yesterday about Karen Russell. And the same is true of Kevin Wilson. His Family Fang was a great time, but in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth the quirkiness of his prose wasn’t as awkward; it confidently walked the tightrope between lighthearted and sober.
Some story collections to look forward to in 2013:
Lemuria loves Ron Rash, and we’re super stoked about the movie version of Serena that will be released this year, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. His novels are great, but his stories will leave you stunned. They paint a tragic but poignant portrait of Appalachia. His new collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay, comes out February 19th, and Ron will be at Lemuria for an event on March 22nd.
Before you start to think I hate those filthy novels, the last author I’ll tell you about is Jess Walter. His novel Beautiful Ruins was on several best of 2012 lists. I know many of you loved this one, and Jess has a new book of stories coming out this year, called We Live In Water. I got my hands on an advanced copy and so far it lives up to his standards — the stories are about broken people doing beautiful things.
Finally I’ll leave you with some George Saunders quotes from Wednesday night. I’m sorry if you missed the event; it was really the best way to start off 2013 at Lemuria.
George talks about writing only stories:
“Art is not all that generous of a thing, it doesn’t let you do what you want always. Like Flannery O’Connor said, ‘You can choose what you write but you can’t choose what you make live.’”
“If I have an eight page thing I kind of know what to do. I have strong opinions about it and I know how to compress it. If someone says take that eight pages and make it fifty, I don’t mind trying but I don’t have a strong sense of what to do. … So far anyway whenever I start to write something longer it will get to a certain point and the energy goes down and some little voice in my head will say just cut it, and compress it, and then it works out okay.”
George read the first part of the first story in Tenth of December, “Victory Lap.” Here’s what he had to say about his method of articulating the inner voice of a teenage girl:
“If you walk from here [Lemuria’s dotcom building] to that coffee shop across the way there [Broad Street] and it takes you forty seconds, there’s actual phenomenon occurring in your mind in those forty seconds. Can we articulate it? I don’t think so, but it’s a really fun thing to try. … It’s exciting to think about how you would come close to expressing actual mental phenomenon in prose. … So the first pass you do it for eighty pages and you go, ‘I’m a genius! Nothing happened — all he did was scratch his ass — but I got that down!’ And then you remember it’s a story, so you have to cross pollinate the mental phenomenon with some kind of physical action. That section I read was originally three times as long, but it was static. So on some fateful day you say, all right, I have to get this down to six pages, and at the end, something has to happen to escalate the action. So this guy shows up and then it goes from there.”
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