All of the proceeds from the sale of this collection, as well as Ford’s advance and those of the contributing authors, will go directly to 826michigan to support their writing and tutoring center.

As the title suggests, the stories here focus on the theme of work and our relationship to employment. Included are stories from such authors as Charles D’Ambrosio, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ann Beattie, Deborah Eisenberg, Nicholas Delbanco, Edward P. Jones, James Allen McPherson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jim Shepherd, Elizabeth Strout, Eudora Welty, and Tobias Wolff. When asked about the project in a recent FWR interview with contributing editor Travis Holland, Ford said this about the collection:

It’s important to me for several reasons, the chiefest of which is to be able to assist 826michigan in its noble mission to serve the youth of southeastern Michigan by teaching kids to write, giving them confidence to do better in school, helping them with their homework after school hours, and addressing many other really critical needs of kids trying to succeed in a demanding world. 826michigan performs these services free to the kids. So the proceeds of the sale of this anthology all go to that good end. Beyond that, editing an anthology gives me a chance to find a few new readers for my colleagues’ excellent work. And the premise of the book – stories about work – seemed apposite to all that Michigan means to your average American: a place where work matters. And, of course, doing the book allowed me to renew my long-standing affiliation with the state, which has meant so much to me in my life and given me so much.

Finally, how do you hope these stories might appeal to readers?

I don’t think the premise of the book overshadows the stories themselves. I’ve identified the stories as having to do with work, and insofar as the premise is a fair one – and I believe it is – the stories will turn the diamond of work this way and that and show work’s various facets to advantage: principally its consequence in peoples’ lives, its centrality as a legitimate subject of contemplation, its simple interest to us as a force in our lives. But in saying that, I’m just pointing out what excellent fiction routinely does to any subject it seizes: it shows us where importance lies when we might’ve thought we knew better; it elevates in importance a human concern or pursuit that might’ve been taken for granted; it pleases and informs us about subjects of genuine moral interest. To me, these are gifts of literature which have rather enduring appeal.

To read the rest of this interview, please click here.

Help support 826michigan and buy a copy here.

You can also win one of three signed copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers. If you’d like to be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

Each year, I choose the twenty stories to be included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Once I’ve gathered them in a manuscript without attribution of authorship or publication, I send the stories to the three jurors of the year. They in turn read them and, without consulting either me or each other, pick an individual favorite and write about it. The emphasis in this part of the book’s life is on individual choice, which mirrors the world of publishing from the most obscure stapled-together journal to a five-minute-old webzine to the most celebrated of book publishers: one person has to choose a piece of writing, believe in it, and carry it forward.

The question most often asked about my choice each year of the twenty prize-winning stories is what criteria I use and what I’m looking for in a short story. The question is so logical and straightforward that I hesitate to answer it, for it implies another me, one with defined standards and a firm idea of what exactly every story must be. That other person can measure a story against the standards and her definition of the short story, and she can be confident that if the story fits, all is well. Maybe in another world there is such a perfect way to choose what gets published and celebrated, but not in this one.

In fact, I have no set criteria nor do I look for something specific in the many short stories I read each year. The stories I admire aren’t required to have certain kinds of characters, settings, plots, nor must they be told using particular voices or styles.

As a reader I have more hopes than requirements. I hope to be moved, for if I feel nothing then what good is all the skill and technique in the world? A good story feels new and tells me something I didn’t know or makes me aware of something I knew but wouldn’t acknowledge. That’s the power a story can have over its reader.
Also, I hope that the stories in each PEN/O. Henry collection will last beyond our momentary political, social, or aesthetic concerns. Reading a collection of stories is one thing, and keeping that collection to read again and again is another, even better fate for twenty winning stories.

It’s my wish to remain an open reader, ready to be astonished and moved, and able to recognize art, which is more than skill and technique.

Laura Furman has been series editor of The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories since 2002. She is the winner of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for her fiction and is the author of seven books, including her recent story collection The Mother Who Stayed (Free Press).

Further reading:

• Check out the list of winners for The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011
• Learn more about PEN/O. Henry editor Laura Furman at her author website
• Find a copy of The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011—out this month—at an indie bookstore near you

In January 2011, Five Chapters will publish three short story collections by Five Chapters alums: Nobody Ever Gets Lost by Jess Row, Other People We Married by Emma Straub, and “an anthology of stories which have been published on FC over the last four years.”

Five Chapters founder David Daley shared the news with Mediabistro’s Morning Media Menu. Click here to listen to the interview with Daley, and in the meantime, for more on Five Chapters, see below.

Previously on FWR:

• Serial Fiction
• Why Slow Writing (and Slow Thinking) Can Be Good for You
• Aryn Kyle’s “Take Care” on Five Chapters
• Friend of FWR Preeta Samarasan’s short story “Sujata” on Five Chapters

Prague / photo credit: Pablo Sanchez

What is it about the European cultures, tucked like bats into their tiny cubbies, that seems so much more specific than our own? How do Belgium or Luxembourg achieve “culture” in little more space we might use to construct a Wal-Mart megastore? What is it about confinement that breeds a more tribal than national, identity? What are we doing when we sit down to read a collection of fiction culled from a continent? What to make of the contiguities of the stories, that seem at times to overlap the national boundaries so as to “say something about that place”? The very assemblage of stories is frustrating, and self-confounding. What you could comfortably say about “Europe” after a summer abroad and a few hostels in Prague sounds positively Mrs. Mortimer-ian after the reflexivity (On se voit) and pure strangeness of these narratives (?): even naming them calls for fresh punctuation and some superior method of notation, a more fertile subjunctive.

Olympic Rings in Berlin / photo credit: Will Palmer

How to avoid taking roll? Three collections of unrelated vignettes, present. Three stories tangent upon a famous person and his or her actions as reflected upon the world stage, present.

Zinedine Zidane, in a Camus-worthy cameo penned by Bruxellois Jean-Philippe Toussaint, is gripped by nausea as he feels his presence–in the existential sense–at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on July 9, 2006. Toussaint, a cinematographer as well as an author, cites Freud among his influences, but it is a stunt double of Camus’s “dark wind” that seems to draw Zidane from the future that has become the present, and to the absurd act that will become immortal: the headbutt to Marco Materazzi’s chest. Like Meursault, ennui and pure fatigue lead him to the “unscripted action,” the endpoint that his entire career has determined for him. Everyone and no one has seen the action: there is only the “Italian player” on the ground, and Zidane’s own head, forever covering half the distance to his opponent’s chest, without ever arriving. What better characterization of the action shots, the contortions of perpetrator and victim immortalized on Google? How much of what we claim to know is based on circumstantial evidence about what we’ve missed?

Suspended almost dead center of the volume, Giedra Radvilavičiūtė lays out a handful of answers in her five criteria for evaluating texts. In a collection like this, the gesture is reminiscent of a primary-school exercise book: tear out this ruler, and use it to solve the problems on the other pages. The tenets–in short, memorability, connection to lived experience, immersibility for the reader, revelation of the banal, and the impossibility of formulating any assertion without doubt–hover over the rest of the stories, inducing the reader to flip back, like a dutiful student to the endnotes, even after moving on to a new region. Connection to lived experience? Check. Revelation of the banal? Half a check. Immersibility? Perhaps not; here we are, flipping around, taking measure.

Back to the roll call for a moment. (What is about this collection that calls forth the spirit of the schoolroom? Do we, with an anthology, become students again? Do we read it because we assume it’s good for us, because there is some moral good in having read it, in the plus-que-parfait, like “the classics” our Brit-Lit teachers upheld?) A pair of stories about futuristic death-obsessed bureaucracies, present. Now this is the sort of gritty, dubbed stuff we expect to tune into when we delve into the European humanities scene. Flamand Peter Terrin tracks pro-/ant-agonist Ferdinand, noir-style, through his unauthorized murder of a loud and boorish neighbor. Haunted by some indistinct memories that he may have already drilled through more than his allotted share of murders (two per citizen, thanks), Ferdinand has some “Tell-Tale Heart”-ish moments as he attempts to sneak out of his victim’s house. His reasoning, though, about his neighbors, about others in general, is purely modern: “They’d rather see me dead than alive.” We all sort of feel this way about each other, in a way, which makes the two-murder ration seem at once gratuitous and not quite enough. If “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” then “le ciel, c’est la solitude.” It is in this solitary utopia that Ferdinand lurks farther and farther afield, into les quartiers difficiles, waiting for the sound of the punitive shot, knowing that the actual bullet to the brain will have preceded it. It’s a dim and sardonic story, one where you wonder more about what it’s like to off someone than get off with them, and where the two-murder-per-person method of population control is considered kinder than asking people to cut back on their childbearing.

Over in futuristic Bulgaria, Georgi Gospodinov reports on the anesthetic–literally, flowers no longer have scents and the sky gapes at the seams like an old baseball–conditions that follow our depredations upon genetics and the ozone layer. Castor P., an elderly astronomer who still remembers real bees and who, way back in 2011, discovered the universe’s smallest black hole, is about to sign over the last several decades of his allotted twelve and a half. He’s only waiting for the arrival of his son, on some other star; the silent recipient of his brief telegrams. As he waits, Castor arrives at the conclusion that loneliness has become the only organic substance, having escaped from its container like a gas and filling the vacuum where air used to be. His son never does arrive, and Castor is extinguished, mortal as his namesake. We’re left to wonder: who is his twin? Is the reader meant to be his double? There’s an Oedipal universality to this narrative: we can picture our old fathers, in their felt shirts, sending us voice mails and shakily lettered cards from our old ZIP codes. We only respond ceremonially, when we have to go back because they are sick, or dying or, finally, when we have to sort through their crumbled old papers and photographs of a world where they were at ease. He’s touching, this untwinned Geminorum, because he doesn’t want to make a fuss; he doesn’t tear up in front of the young woman clerking at the death office, still hoping his son will take a shining to her when he gets there.

Not everyone is so moving: in the other corners of Europe, a john runs off from a bust in a public pay toilet, leaving his homeless young servicer unpaid and beaten by cops; children kill a dolphin in a salt-water novelty tank during a dinner party, and the adults laugh it off; a girl rejects a boy during a secluded picnic and makes him drive her back to town; and a couple, lost on an idyllic bike ride, tie their dog to a tree and abandon it just before the husband proclaims his affair with his wife’s half-sister. But what’s the difference, anyway? In the first collection of vignettes, Austrian Antonio Fian’s narrator confesses to an eerily similar act with a friend of his wife’s sister who, surreally, turns out to be his wife–and every other woman in the world–after all. “So, all the women in the world know about us?” asks the adulterer, unsettled. They might as well–as in Gregory Corso’s poem, “Marriage,” we’re all alike–”All streaming into the same cozy hotels/All going to do the same thing tonight.” The only rebellion we might possibly enjoy is to remove ourselves from the honeymoon suite altogether: “Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!” Sexuality, so fascinating and individual to the self is, in reality, one of our most banal habits.

Another of humanity’s more banal projects, pop culture, finds an apt definition in Victor Pelevin’s description of “the merely comfortable selling the poor fantasies about the lives of the rich, the very rich, and the fabulously rich.” One immediately visualizes the same photos duplicated and recaptioned in the high-budget celebrity mags down to the press-release reprints in the low: if magazine layout was still analog, these images would be peeled bare by masking tape. From Professor Potashinsky, pioneering theorist of “Friedmann Space,” we learn that there is a whole field of quantum mechanics specific to wealth; apparently, the wealth-traveler, or “lucrenaut” (take that, Laika) ceases to perceive time and cannot recall any lucreventures if he or she is once again separated from the critical mass of wealth. Not for lack of trying, though–lucrenauts live it up, eating and drinking and–here is Pelevin’s most brilliant line, at least in translation–”transferring their genetic material to gentle creatures who sold themselves so expensively that the transactions already resembled love.” At the end of the experiment, the brain images of the lucrenauts’ perceptions during these brave ventures are uniform: a green corridor. The proletariat struggle, the rise and fall of communism, the corruption and trafficking, and drug-cartel stabbings for wealth, and what does it feel like? A waiting room in a third-rate clinic.

It would be a Short-Story-210, too-clever-by-half reader who would state that the motifs of overmanaged, generic nation-states and transactional, interchangeable relationships–and the substitution of celebrity gossip for village tongue-wagging–directly correspond to anxieties about the European Union and any amalgamating tendencies it might have on the cultures within its borders. Without putting words in anyone’s mouth, it’s fair to assume that no one wants the mother country to turn into the Epcot version of itself: a souvenir stand with a few snack specialties–extra points for chocolate, fried stuff in cones, and sausage. It’s limiting, though, not to mention a little boring, to read literature symptomatically, and we’re often so immersed in our era that we tend to overdesignate themes as specific to our own time. Reading with an inflection is one thing; “getting the news through poems,” or short stories, for that matter, is another.

Europe isn’t the only continent where people are overwhelmed by market psychology and looking around at each other to define themselves. The laments that nothing is genuine anymore, that style is winning over substance, that there’s nothing original left to do or say, are almost as old as recorded history–or, cynics might say, as old people themselves. Somehow, there have been new utterances and new pastimes and, much as the new is always indebted to its antecedents, the breath hasn’t been entirely snatched from us yet. In fact, if anything, there’s a little too much breath–together with text and bandwith and airtime and any of the other major transmitters. Of course, surplus doesn’t equal substance, and language doesn’t equal an utterance. We’re watching the same shows, in different languages: celebrities are whittling their faces and bodies down to the same androgyn; music is so produced it’s hard to name the instrument; and food–at least the affordable, available stuff–is so processed you can’t name the food animal or the preservative. The vacuum-inflating loneliness and ersatz bees may not be far behind.

Further Reading and Links

Aleksandar Hemon

- In this interview, World Books talks to series editor Aleksandar Hemon about the challenges of promoting first-rate European fiction to American readers.

- Here on Fiction Writers Review, read a review of Hemon’s most recent story collection, Love and Obstacles.

- Read interviews with some of the anthology’s contributors: The Quarterly Conversation talks to Jean-Philippe Toussaint; Dalkey Archive Press talks to Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria), to Antonio Fian (Austria), to Peter Stamm (Switzerland), to Naja Marie Aidt (Denmark), and to many others.

- Via BookBrowse, read an excerpt from Best European Fiction’s preface (by Zadie Smith).

- If you’re shopping for a copy of this book, support indie bookstores by ordering it from Powell’s.

Christine’s essay is a lyrical meditation on video games, the development of character, how we make meaning, and, of course, monsters. Drawing from her own experience playing RPGs like Shadow of the Colossus, she asks us to consider how the best games in this genre–like the best literature–not only challenge us to confront ourselves, but can also give us a glimpse of enlightenment. Along the way she touches on the poetics of C.D. Wright, the duty of heroes from Beowulf to the Bhagavad Gita, and theories of self-cultivation. But what truly stands out about Christine’s work is her attention to language and her deep probing of what it means to be human.

It was for all these reasons that we were honored to publish this essay last year, and why we’re so thrilled her writing has received this wonderful recognition. If you missed “Games are Not About Monsters” last spring, you can read the essay in its entirety here.

To purchase the 2008 or 2009 editions of Best of the Web, visit the Dzanc website.

Below is an excerpt from the opening of Christine’s essay. Congratulations, again!

In a role-play game, or RPG, gameplay consists largely of traveling and fighting battles. Traveling, like the “free and easy wandering” of the Chang tzu, isn’t as easy as one might think—surviving monster attacks is usually the order of the day. Even so, traveling is one of my favorite things about RPGs because an RPG is a lengthy journey in a (hopefully) immersive world. My favorite game, Shadow of the Colossus, is difficult to place in a single game genre, but it’s more RPG than anything else. You wander an expansive landscape, soaking up the aesthetic splendor, gathering information, and eventually, finding and fighting colossal monsters. Monster-killing is central to the game, and yet this game is no more about monster-killing than gardening is about slaughtering aphids or Ender’s Game is about killing Buggers.

To continue reading, click here.

Tao Lin’s two-and-a-half page (the type is small) “The Vegan Muffin” gets inside the mind of a hyper-aware baked good. The story opens with:

The muffin worked at NASA. Her ingredients included spelt, agave syrup, and vanilla. She was a vegan technically because she never ate.

The Vegan Muffin, by Nous Vous

These three sentences illustrate one of the pleasures of an anthology of short fiction. If they were the opening of a 300-page novel, this reader may, may, have thought, “Hmmm, this is not the book for me.” But the small investment of time required to read a piece of short fiction means one easily overcomes the natural prejudices of taste or mood. Tao Lin’s story rewards the reader with a fable of modern connection and disconnection. Paired with the story is the work that inspired it, an illustration by Nous Vous (itself a collection of four artists) portraying what loosely resemble thumbprint portraits of NASA employees staring into a white void at the center of the page. Food for thought indeed.

Free Donuts, by Pietari Posti

Keeping with the baked-goods theme, Ryan Boudinot’s “Free Donuts” arrives like the love child of George Saunders and John Cassavetes. This time around, an illustration by Pietari Posti served as inspiration. In peach, sea foam green and fuchsia, a giant worm and bird appear Godzilla-sized atop a donut shop and restaurant, respectively. Within Boudinot’s story, the Helmers family is pinned like butterfly specimens in a cinéma vérité vision of the suburban strip-mall where they wait in line for hours for free donuts and giveaways like donut man bobbleheads. The story captures the absurdist mood of the drawing in the family’s outsized emotional reactions to the most trivial of slights, winding up in a complete meltdown.

Since the Layoffs, I

Then there is Dan Kennedy’s brilliant diatribe of a man who has been laid off from his job, with the informative title “Since the Layoffs I’ve Started Drinking and Jogging.” Frank Chimero’s illustration sets the scene for personal implosion. Kennedy builds tension with a master touch: as the protagonist jogs while dissecting his unraveling life, he glares at some women crossing the Stewart’s Food Emporium parking lot and thinks “What are you dirty bats going to do?” I actually laughed aloud at the line. It’s been a while since a book – let alone three-page story – has so completely charmed me.

Thaw, by Lizzy Stewart

Lizzy Stewart illustrates the story “Thaw” by Sean Michaels. Stewart’s meticulous pen-and-ink drawing, with a cool hint of red, captures the two main characters atop the head of the wolf they keep seeing as they run, seemingly without purpose or end, through the tundra. She gets at not only the essence, but also the mood, the temperature of the story:

They ran as fast as they could over the ice. Even when the sun was low in the sky and they were in their fur boots, panting, feet landing on the spines of ravines or in the slick bellies of what had once been pools.

My Violetation, by Verity Keniger

In Caren Beilin’s piece, “My Violetation,” she riffs on the mythological and psychological pull of violet, tracing the color as it finds mention in the texts of the Liang Dynasty, the poetry of T. S. Eliot, the compositions of Richard Wagner, and, of course, Edgar Allan Poe’s spine-tingling “The Masque of the Red Death.” The idea of inspiration from another artist’s work clearly helped generate this compendium of a hue. Verity Keniger’s violet-feathered bell provides an appropriately eerie counterpoint.

The collection’s numerous jumping off points reminded me of the Creative Commons ethos, or collaborative innovators like Jonathan Lethem and his Promiscuous Materials project. We Are the Friction invites a third collaborator into the mix: the reader. The stories and illustrations provide a beautifully executed sketch of an idea, a mood, a relationship that leaves the reader imagining the periphery of the story, what comes before, what after. Some work better than others, but that, I suspect, is a function of individual taste and would be entirely different for another set of eyes.

Together, the twelve pairs of authors and illustrators pay homage to inspiration, and celebrate the collaborative nature of art. Readers have always been mindful of influence, the Biblical diction of Faulkner, or the Homeric echoes in Joyce, but rarely is the inspiration laid bare so clearly on the page. It creates an entirely new pleasure to study the illustrations firsthand and consider the visual sensibility informing the literary, and vice versa. Some pairings harness this symbiosis – Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake, for example, or the 1930 Rockwell Kent-illustrated Moby Dick – but few works show such a range of interpretation. And the vastly different styles are arranged in ways that invite further speculation, rather than shutting off the valve of imagination. We Are the Friction has a limited press run of 1,000, so get yours while you can. If they sell out, perhaps Sing Statistics will set forth to create a third volume of provocative pairings…

Further Resources

-Find the full list of contributors to this project at the Sing Statistics website.

- Read Jonathan Lethem’s piece on influence and creative collaboration for Harper’s: “The Ecstasy of Influence.”

- Peruse, with the chance to purchase, limited edition prints of the illustrations in We Are the Friction.

- View the Flickr set of the We Are the Friction exhibition in Edinburgh.

The Millions pointed us to this interesting analysis of the Best American Short Stories series from the blog Years of BASS. Jake, the brain behind Years of BASS, has read all of the collections since the 1978 edition and compiled some statistics. C. Max Magee (of The Millions) reports:

Interestingly, Alice Munro, though Canadian, has made the most BASS appearances over the last 30 years by a wide margin with 18 appearances. After her come some more of the leading lights of short fiction: Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike with nine stories each; Mavis Gallant (another Canadian) with eight; Joy Williams and Tobias Wolff with seven stories a piece; Lorrie Moore and Rick Bass with six stories each; and Charles Baxter, Raymond Carver, and Tim Gautreaux with five stories each.

All told, these writers have accounted for about 13%. Writers with four or more stories have accounted for 21% of all the stories in the series; writers with three or more, 31% of the stories; and writers with two or more, for 52% of the series. This means that writers who had only one BASS story during the 30-year span accounted for about 48% of the stories in the series during that time.

I suppose you can draw a couple of very different conclusions from this. Since 52% of the stories over the past 30 years are by repeat writers, you could conclude that once you’ve gotten a story in, your chances of having another selected are somewhat better. But since 48% of BASS stories are one-offs, you could also conclude that–shockingly!–BASS inclusion is by no means a free pass to the in club.

[Incidentally, earlier this year, The Millions did both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the New Yorker. A couple years back, a Princeton undergrad did the same. The results are roughly comparable to the BASS analysis: some writers appear over and over (we're looking at you, Alice Munro); a large number appear just once.]

Here’s my suggestion for the next number-crunching project: how many BASS authors go on to publish one or more books? It would be interesting to see whether there’s any correlation between BASS inclusion and later writing success. Any volunteers?