This week’s feature is Kevin Moffett’s new story collection, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (Harper Perennial). He is also the author of Permanent Visitors, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, judged by George Saunders, and was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Believer Book Award. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in such places as Tin House, the Harvard Review, American Short Fiction, the Chicago Tribune, the Believer, A Public Space, and in three editions of The Best American Short Stories. The title story for this new collection won the National Magazine Award in 2010.

In his recent review of this collection, Shawn Andrew Mitchell writes:

There are plenty of writers who attempt to work in George Saunders’s style, one of absurdity and satire and capital letters, but what they often miss is the morality and heart at its core. Moffett misses nothing. He follows his own advice and listens closely, to the detail, to the mystery, and to his characters’ plights.

We’re giving away a copy of Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events next week to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

Further Reading

• Read the rest of Mitchell’s review.
• Read an interview with Kevin Moffatt conducted by the University of Pittsburgh.

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Last week we featured Lucia Perillo’s collection Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain, and we’re pleased to announce the winners:

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!

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Queenie As Portrayed in A&P, by Sarah Van Arsdale

It just kept nosing its way into my own novel—“A&P” by John Updike. I’d first read it when teaching lit classes years before, and now, as I finished my third novel, my characters kept making references to it: a girl’s mind “just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar” or the way the boy at the register sees the girls’ bathing suits. Knowing it’s best to let the subconscious have its way while writing fiction, I let the story in, even as I wondered what it was doing there. My novel, Grand Isle, was in print a good two months before I realized—with a whoop of surprise and delight—why the story felt so present in the novel: the Updike story is really about class, about town and gown, and about a young person developing moral mettle. Um, just like my novel.

Updike does the thing I so envy about a brilliant short-story writer: he brings his precisely-focused eye to the singular moment in which the fate of the world turns. It’s like seeing a prism catch the light and fracture it into a full spectrum of colors. The story takes place over the course of about ten minutes, and yet it has stayed with me now for nearly twenty years—and stayed with me so deeply that there it was, having its way with my own novel.

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We were delighted to learn that FWR contributor extraordinaire Daniel Wallace made an appearance on Prairie Schooner’s podcast, Air Schooner, this past week. Along with travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Daniel reads from his work on his traveling to Syria and living in the Old Quarter of Damascus under the Assad regime.

You can listen to Air Schooner #9 on the Prairie Schooner website. Congratulations, Daniel!

• Like what you heard?  Read more of Daniel Wallace’s work on FWR, and visit Daniel’s blog to learn more about him.

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“[T]he value of a short story is the same as the value of all literature—that it allows a person to confront the world in a new way, that at its best it has the power to act as a transformative experience, and to leave the reader changed—smarter and more empathetic. I think there’s something especially lovely about being able to have a complete, meaningful emotional experience in the time it takes to read ten to twenty pages.”

~ Danielle Evans

• Read more about Danielle Evans on Fiction Writers Review
• Looking for something to read? Check out the Stories We Love
• Need inspiration? Try our Get Writing exercises

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I’ll be totally honest: I really did not expect to like Frankie Thomas’s “The Showrunner” at all. It starts off at a casting session for a fictional Disney-esque tween series, and not only am I biased against stories that saturate themselves in current pop culture—I tend to like a little patina on my cultural references—I expected the story to be as flimsy as the TV show at its center.

I was completely wrong. Within half a page, I was unable to put the piece down. (No joke: I was late to pick up my son from daycare, I was that immersed.)

Roger, the showrunner of the title, takes Peter Lane—the adolescent, adorably innocent, unabashedly gay kid he casts—under his wing, promising himself to protect Peter from everything bad that he himself has experienced in show business:

Roger looks over at Peter, who’s sitting there strapped into the passenger seat at groping distance from Roger, humming along, his eyes closed and his legs apart. It’s strange to think that Peter is the same age that Roger was when he ran away from San Antonio, and that Roger is now older than the guys who fucked him back then. Peter would never expect to be fucked the way Roger was—no, Peter expects to be loved, and why shouldn’t he? Peter was born to be loved.

How easy it would be for Roger to drive home instead, talk Peter into coming inside, pour the kid a drink and sweet-talk him and undress him and then pound him into the mattress so hard he’ll never smile that trusting smile again for the rest of his life. It scares the shit out of Roger, how easy it would be and how much he must not let it happen, never, not to Peter Lane.

In fact, the story has only one thing in common with tween sitcoms: you can see where it’s going almost from the first scene. And yet, unlike with those sitcoms, you won’t be able to look away. You have to keep reading, keep watching, even as the story hurtles to its shattering conclusion, even as it breaks your heart.

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When I was in high school, I took a playwriting class, and we’d sit there–all of us sixteen, seventeen, eighteen–reading our work aloud around the table. Our teacher, who was about thirty, would give us pointers: that speech is clunky; this character hasn’t said anything for ten minutes. But sometimes he wouldn’t say a word: he would look at us, hold his palm in front of his face for a moment, then let it drop to the table, as if he were offering us an invisible treat.

We didn’t really understand this Zen gesture at the time, but I can translate it now: it meant we were too close to the subject we were writing about. When something is right in front of your face—be it your palm or how your boyfriend broke up with you last week—it’s too close to really see. It’s nothing but a shadowy blur. Only when there’s some distance between you and it can you see it in a useful way.

The same is true in stories. Sometimes, in the quest for immediacy, we put our characters too close to the events they’re experiencing. And their lack of perspective can make the reader lose perspective as well.

So here’s the exercise: Write in the voice of your character 30 years later, describing the events of the story that is being told in the present. How does the character feel about these events now? How important was this day in the context of his/her life?

What you come up with may end up as the seed for your story to grow in a new point of view, as a moment of flash-forward for your character, or an Alice Munro-eque ending that leaps decades to join the character well in the future. But even if what you write never makes it into the story at all, looking back at the story—through the wrong end of the telescope, as it were—will offer you insight into the character and new perspective on the events you’re trying to tell.

• Missed some of our Get Writing exercises? Check out the whole set in our archives.

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This week’s feature is Lucia Perillo’s debut story collection, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain (W.W. Norton). She is also the author of six books of poetry, most recently On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), and a collection of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing (Trinity University Press, 2007). Her fifth book of poems, Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

In her recent reviewlet of this collection, Alison Espach writes:

Perhaps the collection is best described in my favorite story, “Doctor Vick’s,” when Perillo writes, “You know the only true world is the one you carry inside you.” These stories are compelling journeys because they are so true.

We’re giving away a copy of Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain next week to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

Further Reading

• Read the rest of Espach’s review.
• Read Lucia Perillo’s poem “This Red T-Shirt” – published in The New Yorker, May 10, 2010

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Last week we featured Johanna Skibsrud’s collection This Will be Difficult to Explain, and we’re pleased to announce the winners:

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!

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Fresh from a relationship with a feminist scholar, I was on guard against Shann Ray’s American Masculine before I even cracked its spine. With a title like that, I thought, you’d better have a gay man in Chelsea, a drag queen in Flint, a straight man watching a hired man wash his yacht, a man living out of the back of a Volvo in a Wal-Mart parking lot, a Hispanic man washing dishes, a Hispanic man climbing the corporate ladder; you’d better provide one heckova Whitmanian catalog of Masculinity in the U.S. of A. My suspicions only deepened as I read the first few stories. In them men were rough, troubled, distant, and heteronormative. Women were the epitome of light, everything good that men reached toward.

But then a curious thing happened: the beating heart of these stories won. I took a breath and relaxed into Ray’s paternal, semi-omniscient arms.

Because it’s not fair to judge a collection by its title. Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior didn’t start out so winkingly alliterative and evaluative. Her publisher suggested that name.

And it’s not fair to judge a collection based on what the author didn’t intend. (See John Updike’s 6 Rules for Reviewing, dear curmudgeon.)

What Ray appears to want to do—and what Ray does—is give us wise, caring, broadly-scoped stories that roam time as freely as they range across the Western landscape in which they’re set, deeply spiritual stories with room for grand characterization—“the malice inside him like the outline of an animal in the dark,” sweeping views—“everything but the land was solitary and small under a wide, wide sky,” and muscular descriptions—“down to the tracks, the wheels, the black pump of the smoking engine, the yell of the machine.” Ray drives into rough terrain with honesty, and delivers intense portraits of what it means to try to be a man in the country, the city, an insurance office, a rodeo.

I love these stories more each time I read them.

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