• Valerie Suydam (@valeriesuydam)
• Chanel Dubofsky (@chaneldubofsky)
• Sara Habein (@sshabein)

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• For whom do workshops work?
• Where do workshops work?
• When do workshops work?
• How do workshops work?

You’ll likely find yourself in territory similar to fiction writing: ambiguities, contradictions, and more questions than answers. As fiction writers, we don’t pose yes or no questions, so it makes sense that an investigation into our primary pedagogy wouldn’t either.

If you’ve followed scholarship debating creative writing—its position in the academy, ontology, professionalization, and pedagogy (to name a few issues)—you know that writers who perpetuate the traditional workshop have come under fire for not considering alternatives or for not reflecting on their pedagogies at all. If you haven’t kept up with the discourse, Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? (Multilingual Matters, 2010), edited by Dianne Donnelly, provides a foundation into creative writing studies in addition to new conceptions of what the workshop is and what it could be with revisions.

While the authors acknowledge the importance of new media, propose modified models of graduate training, and name specific practices—such as Leslie Kreiner Wilson’s “[a]nonymous floating workshop”—the collection is a theoretical and pedagogical study. We’re far beyond swapping unquestioned lore. Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? is by and large a scholarly inquiry into the workshop’s epistemology, elasticity, and value. These are complex issues and difficult questions; in this discussion rests the fate of creative writing in the academy, but there may be even more at stake than that.

Image Credit: Flickr

Here is an abridged history of the past twenty years of creative writing studies. Scholars of composition, critical theory, and creative writing have debated: can it be taught?; should it be taught?; who has the authority to teach it?; what are we teaching?; and can it serve a diverse body of ever-changing students? (to name a few).

Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? offers an important and timely contribution to the discipline because—in addition to reiterating the censure of instructors who do not turn a critical eye onto their pedagogies, professionalization, and workshop methodologies—the collection complicates issues by asking readers to consider the workshop as an event, an artistic act, and a human activity. Despite all their relevant criticisms, these authors assert that the workshop doesn’t need to be dismantled, but conceptualized in completely new ways. Graeme Harper prefaces the collection by asking readers to see the workshop as “an exchange of human experiences” and creative writing as a thing “we do” rather than an object “we make.”

Harper, a seasoned contributor to the discipline, joins veterans Stephanie Vanderslice, Patrick Bizzaro, Anna Leahy, Tim Mayers, Brent Royster, David Starkey, Katharine Haake, Mary Ann Cain, and Joseph Moxley—all of whom have been publishing (in addition to their creative work) articles, full-length texts, or editing collections on pedagogy and disciplinarity for a number a years. Donnelly also includes newer voices in a collection that itself functions much like an effective workshop of passionate writers/teachers discussing the larger issues of craft and instruction relevant to the discipline.

Notably, Does the Writing Workshop Still Work?—and specifically Bizzaro’s chapter: “Workshop: an Ontological Study”—does an excellent job of showing creative writing as its own discipline with problems different from those of composition and literary studies, even if it has been influenced by these strands of English studies. This distinction is important because, rather than a subfield of composition, creative writing is its own strand. And perhaps, as Tim Mayers stated in his 2009 article “One Simple Word” in College English, creative writing studies “may harbor the roots of an institutional compromise in which the union between composition and literature does not involve one side winning and the other side losing, but rather both enterprises being transformed [by creative writing studies] so that they can meet on heretofore unimagined ground.” Any member of the academy knows how ugly these battles can get. English departments have imploded over less, but if creative writing might bridge this divide, it may one day even contribute to the survival of English studies in general. So, the work done in Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? may be important not only to our strand of English studies, but to all of English studies.

Donnelly organizes the book into four sections: “Inside the Workshop Model,” “Engaging the Conflicts,” “The Non-Normative Workshop” and “New Models for Relocating the Workshop.” Beginning the first section, Vanderslice, in “Once More to the Workshop: A Myth Caught in Time,” advocates exercise-based, in-class writing, so students can see how a piece of writing comes together rather than as something finished and workshop-ready. Vanderslice points out that beginning writers need “content that enhances skill building and craft” so that they can understand the multiple ways of being a writer, reflecting, and producing work. In addition to his important ontological study, Bizzarro advocates that instructors “show students how to do the work of the workshop—to interpret and evaluate,” which are more examples of skill building students need prior to engaging in the workshop.

In the second section of the book, Royster considers the social dimensions of creative writing, a relatively new topic of inquiry in creative writing scholarship, but one that will be crucial to the discipline. He discusses the subjectivity of the author and argues that “[c]reative writing, in short, is both social and individual, and both identities are held within the self. As an alternative to the romantic ideal of the independent genius, the writer composes in response to specific environments and ideologies.” Royster advocates for instructors to help students locate themselves in a larger socio-cultural enterprise. Also in this section, Gaylene Perry looks at the vulnerable, but crucial, situation of “[carrying] out the practice of the art form” in hands-on writing workshops, which is also similar to Vanderslice’s emphasis on exercised-based, in-class writing.

Although rhetorical awareness has traditionally been the concern of compositionists, Mayers engages the question of audience in creative writing. He proposes the workshop as a site for exploring the issue because it “provides apprentice writers with a responsive audience” and “[highlights] the variable and complicated ways in which writers think (or do not think) about the readers they one day hope to reach.” Composition theory is more prominent in chapter nine, “‘Its fine, I gess’: Problems with the Workshop Model in College Composition Classes.” Colin Irvine writes of the difficulties students have workshopping and discussing global writing issues (such as structure, context, and problematic patterns) in peers’ works in-progress. His contribution is significant because traditionally (in composition scholarship) instructors have been faulted; Irvine proposes that the problems are much more complex and have little to do with teachers. Although Irvine’s argument focuses on the composition classroom (but is rightfully included in the collection because it is about the workshop), it may indicate imminent reprieve for creative writing instructors, who have been accused of anti-intellectualism and even laziness in previous scholarship.

In the final section of the collection, “New Models for Relocating the Workshop,” Sue Roe proposes master classes that focus on practical technical skills as well as a real world understanding of the publishing industry. Similarly Haake, who has previously argued that curriculum should include professional institutional concerns, adds that students in workshops should be “encouraged to define for themselves precisely what might count as writerly, for whom and in what contexts” so that they might sustain their writing with inquiries that go beyond the classroom. These inquires are crucial because “exposing them to the hardest most complex writing problems of our age is the single surest way [ . . . ] for them to experience the primacy and imperative of writing, as writers do.” Finally, Cain complicates the question of the title. She proposes that it’s not about asking students if writing works or doesn’t but teaching them to look at how it works. Cain challenges the assumption that “the binaries that inform the question of ‘what works’” are fixed. “[T]he work of the workshop is, instead to ‘disorder,’ ‘deconstruct, and ‘tentatively reconstitute’ these totalizing assumptions.” Like Haake has done throughout her career, Cain is thinking bigger by engaging critical theory, and this foundational work will be as important to creative writing studies as the theorizing of composition studies was to grounding that discipline decades ago.

Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? concludes with Moxley’s commentary on the state of creative writing studies. Moxley—the editor of the earliest inquiry into theory and pedagogy, Creative Writing in America—reiterates his call for collaboration between all strands of English studies but states that questions and issues raised twenty years prior (regarding instructor’s anti-professionalism, and anti-intellectual attitudes) persist. He points to “the constraining force of the existing faculty reward system” that grants tenure to poets for their poetry and to fiction writers who publish fiction. Research and scholarship (and book reviews?) that are vital to the survival of our discipline don’t merit much; whereas, these are the critical components to the advancement of literature and composition studies. This is particularly chilling to someone who wants to write and teach in the academy—someone who understands the simultaneous impulse to write with academic ethos and connect to others (not just academics) through language.

Nonetheless, I’m hopeful that discussions begun in Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? will spark further discourse among all threads of English studies, mark the beginning of similar projects to consider what Donnelly calls our “patchwork of practices,” and put workshop practitioners into conversation. Creative writing studies is, or can be, as Katharine Haake stated in What Our Speech Disrupts, a conversation with many voices and ideas rather than a revolution. Haake writes, “I am not convinced transformation is in order anymore, since it presumes consensus and, as in many things, our diversities continue to be among our greatest strengths.” Creative writing studies is very much like the workshop itself: multi-vocal, uncertain, and significant. The contributors of Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? assure us that there’s no need to dismantle the workshop, but reconsideration, further analysis, and more inquires—like the one they model in this collection—are in order.

Further Links and Resources

- This Table of Contents from Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? includes a full list of the book’s selections. You can preview or purchase the book at Book Depository or through Amazon.

- In case you missed Lee’s blog post about this last week, The Faster Times recently published a wonderful piece in which Deb Olin Unferth and George Saunders engage in a rational, practical, and, in the end, laudatory discussion of writing programs – a counterpoint to the voices raised against the model.

- Previously on FWR: Read Mary Stewart Atwell’s interview with Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. (And we just can’t stop linking to Louis Menand’s essayistic review of said book.)

Each week we’ll give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. All you have to do to be eligible for our weekly drawing is to be a fan of our Facebook page. No catch, no gimmicks. And once you’re a fan, you’ll be automatically entered in each subsequent drawing.

Last week we featured The Wilding, by Benjamin Percy, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Dan Albergotti, Jim Carmin, and Jon Tribble. Congratulations! Each will receive a signed, first-edition of Ben’s book.

This week we’re featuring Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2010, edited by Kathy Fish and Matt Bell. In his recent review of the collection for FWR, Michael Rudin writes, “The stories are smart, but they’re also just so damn cool—collected works less concerned about molds and reputations than expanding our understanding of what literature—online or otherwise—can achieve.” Read the full review, with infographics, here.

If you’d like to be eligible for this week’s drawing (and all future ones), please visit our Facebook Page and “like” us. As we did last week, we’ll be giving away three, signed copies of this title. To everyone who’s already a fan, thanks for supporting this project. What we want to do is not only find ways to expand our readership, but also to put books we love in the hands of readers.

So please help us spread the word!

But the zettabyte is a form of measurement. Equal to one billion terabytes, it will soon represent humanity’s total digital output when videos and social networking sites push us past the milestone later this year. It’s a gaudy number that looks more like binary code than anything quantifiable: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

That we’re talking in zettabytes at all is a testament to the Internet’s prodigious growth. With Internet traffic doubling every two years, the zettabyte will eventually become an annual rite of traffic rather than an aggregate. After all, between 2008 and 2009 alone, IP traffic in North America grew 47.9%.

During this time, Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2010 grew a nearly equivalent 50.8%. Not bad for an anthology that’s only in its third year of existence.

I don’t know what a zettabyte of literature might look like, but I applaud Kathy Fish and Matt Bell, the anthology’s Guest Editor and Series Editor, respectively, for trying to keep pace with the all-mighty Web. It can’t be easy to track—let alone read—let alone rank—all the new online journals and literary portals filling America’s zettabyte destiny, but Fish and Bell epitomize what they anthologize. Best of the Web 2010 does what you’d expect an anthology of Web-based writing to do, in that it embraces the best of the Web, the whole Web: not just short stories, but flash, flash prose, experiments in structure and surrealism—and not just fiction, but the Web’s best poems and essays, and, yes, even a book review.

Every year, I enjoy my annual installment of The Best American Short Stories for anthologizing what I expect: familiar fiction from familiar publications from familiar names. And although some of these familiar names have begun to extend into the online space, trusting their work to new digital editors and readers, I enjoy installments of Best of the Web for anthologizing the unexpected, the new: everything else, from everywhere else, from everyone else.

Best of the Web 2010 contains ninety-five works—not quite a zettabyte, but perhaps my original vision of the zettabyte: ninety-five nano-sized pieces that drilled down through my skull to feed on the fatty brain beneath, reorienting my understanding of online literature, depolarizing the way my writer mind perceives pace and structure, perspective and linearity.

Best of the Web 2010. No little bugger, but still downright dangerous.

* * *

What’s New, Isn’t

Please don’t think I’m so smart as to use Cara Barer’s incredible book art for anything but pie-chart imagery. This is no infographic statement on print versus digital; I simply thought it would look cool.

I think that’s what I like best about Best of the Web 2010: the stories are smart, but they’re also just so damn cool—collected works less concerned about molds and reputations than expanding our understanding of what literature—online or otherwise—can achieve. These stories are experimental. They’re emotional. They don’t limit themselves to a few paragraphs to be edgy or modern; don’t flirt with headers and structure to cater to the computer monitor; don’t flip points of view or reference pop culture to be ironic. They—like their poetic and essayistic counterparts—don’t cater to the Web because they operate on it. They are simply stories, unique forms of art. Narratives the only way they can be told. Fish probably said it best when she described her decision-making process in the book’s introduction: “Did this writing open my eyes? Will I remember it months from now? Was it beautiful or strange or completely fresh and new? Did this writing unravel me?”

As a fan of last year’s anthology, I have to admit I opened the 2010 edition looking for publications and writers I recognized from the year prior. I loved Michael Czyniejewski’s “On the Other Hand” in 2009 (how can one not love a story where two characters’ hands get swapped in a surgery-room mix up?) and fully expected the author’s “beautiful” and “strange” and “completely fresh and new” storytelling to satisfy Fish’s criteria here in 2010. And then there he was, in this year’s edition for “Pregnant with Peanut Butter,” in spite of the fact that his 2008 publisher, Waccamaw, who published two stories in last year’s edition, was not, along with 95% of Czyniejewski’s fellow contributors. Only five returned for the 2010 edition.

This development puzzled me. With my favorite authors and publications from the year prior—Todd Hasak-Lowy who wrote about the sadness of being a Detroit Lions fan (you’ve got nothing on my Cubs), Matt Getty’s surreal take on “fasting girls”— nowhere to be seen, I grew increasingly fascinated with the differences between the two anthologies. Not just the shift in storytelling forms, but the shift in author and publication mix. As a business school graduate without an MFA, I suppose this is how my mind works, how it conceptualizes things. Here I am, using numbers to define art. Being stupid. Shallow. But at the same time, there are trends here, as there are in nearly everything. Perhaps if I dug in analytically, I might gain an insight in how the online space was maturing and shifting.

The most surprising development was this review’s first insight, viewable in the pie charts at the top of this section. While the twin pies above suggest the storytelling mix has remained constant year over year on a proportional basis, fiction composing 68% of the last two editions, this thinking doesn’t factor in scale. In reality, the 2010 anthology contains twenty-two more stories than its predecessor. While there is one less essay (and trust me, the lines are so incredibly blurry on some of these works that I wish I could have called a few authors to ask for confirmation that their prose wasn’t a prose poem, or that this thing I’m reading, dripping in authenticity, was indeed fiction and not a personal memoir) in this year’s collection, poetry saw a considerable 8% boost. 2010 is 2009 on speed—much of the same content but more of it, a DSL’d anthology versus modem’d.

The macro trend here suggests a possible migration of literary talent from print to digital. It suggests a push from sturdy stories to unraveling ones. It suggests literary magazines have established themselves online in more significant ways. It suggests authors no longer give a hoot about the stigma of online versus print. It suggests Dzanc got a good deal on paper. Or it suggests that the Web is simply growing, naturally, and for literary sites feeding the growth, there is enough readership to go around. But all these theories fail to recognize what Bell and Fish have: that a burgeoning Internet doesn’t require a burgeoning Best of the Web; rather, the burgeoning quality of these new works’ range and breadth and honesty is what demanded placement in the anthology.

Given this, and our impending zettabyte, Dzanc better send a Christmas card to the paper people after all. Things have only begun to unravel.

* * *

Who’s New, Is

Our history with print’s first-rate publications can be a comforting force, a grid of familiar local streets against the sand-swept dunes of online. With print, we know the lay of the land. Whereas, the digital landscape is ever shifting—the uninitiated could spend forty years wandering it for the Promised Land. And it’s this lack of familiarity with digital’s landscape that makes Dzanc’s anthology so incredibly necessary: for new and old writers alike, it’s a guidebook as much as it is a book-book.

And yes, the need for a guidebook is very real. As you can see above, less than a third of the publications that contributed to the 2009 anthology provided content for this year’s. The sand hasn’t rested long enough to crown these repeat-publishers online’s main “boulevards,” but publications like Brevity, failbetter, FRiGG, Guernica, Memorious, storyGLOSSIA, and Wigleaf have all done their part to solidify the online space with their consistency. Maybe placement on library shelves is impossible, but why not in a librarian’s bookmarks? As Bell wrote in his introduction, “There is room—and perhaps even a need—for our literary community to have both print and online incarnations, and for both to thrive. We’re lucky to have as many options as we do, arguably more than any generation of readers and writers has ever had.”

Maybe most importantly, the 66.3% spike in new contributors is significant in that it gives hope to writers and editors that works are being judged on the merit of their storytelling. It’s also a percentage I like to think of as the unraveling factor. With only 5% of Best of the Web 2010 composed of returning authors, online’s wild growth and steady transformation makes it the overgrown forest to print’s manicured fairway—alive and teeming with life, a different kind of game altogether.

* * *

What Actually Matters

But for all the analytical mumbo-jumbo, one cannot forget that beyond the bylines and table of contents, here lies more than 400 pages that will punch you raw. In a story entitled “Touching the Spine,” by Charles Lennox, one brother pummels another. Again and again, he punches his brother. “I punch him four times and hear the foundation of the world crack open. I punch him forty-two times and my left hand breaks.” The beating continues until the punching brother thinks he can feel his brother’s spine. “I am the shovel and he is the dirt,” he says, and this entire story—only the eighth piece in the anthology—becomes a perfect pacesetter for how one will be affected by all the works that follow.

In fact, writing about it now, I see how the anthology progresses naturally, constructed in ways that seem more intentional than when I was first reading. The story immediately preceding Lennox’s focuses on brilliant minds incapable of simple human emotions—a group of geniuses, alone, trapped by their intellect, begin to realize the concept of love only after one amongst the clan goes against the grain to pursue it. In “The Genius Meetings,” Elizabeth Crane writes: “We secretly imagine our lives with one perfect woman who will take us away from ourselves, spirit us away on clouds and whales and the shoulders of giants, who will show us things we have never seen, and who we will stay with forever.” It’s a fitting note and touching sentiment, as the anthology itself is preparing to push off shore to show us things we ourselves have never seen.

The first of these lies directly on the other side of Lennox. Dan Chaon’s essay, “What Happened to Sheila,” is worth the purchase price of the anthology alone. Originally published in The Rumpus, it illustrates how Chaon’s wife, Sheila Schwartz, poured herself into work as cancer returned to her a final time. We voyage back to observe Dan and Sheila’s unconventional courtship and then see how their illogical, age-gapped union—though, really, what love is logical?—led, in part, to how they treated the hard truth of Sheila’s fate just as illogically. To be perfectly honest, I’m at a loss for how to properly describe the piece. There’s so much. And how can I when “loss,” the word itself, is so earnestly explored in the essay’s conclusion?

“Loss” is a good word, I think, because you spend so much time thinking that you can find them somewhere. The fact they are gone—vanished—is the most unreal thing you can imagine, and so part of you keeps searching. But there are gaps in the world, now. Places that she occupied that are just blank spots.

In the end, it is a passage like this—a hard and brutal purge—that shows how Sheila, a slightly older teacher, might have educated her husband, the younger student. The advice she gave all her students—to take their work seriously because “this is the piece of you that will last, this is you, so you’ve got to do it right”—could not ring more true than in the digital monument her husband erected to their relationship on The Rumpus, gathered here as one of the year’s Best.

This depth of searching, of meditation, found in Chaon’s essay is not what some readers expect to find online. The Internet is a place of scrolling and skimming, after all. And like Chaon, Terese Svoboda provides the anthology with yet another story that breaks this mold with a level of sophistication that no doubt required readers who first found it online to print it out, pen in hand. At least to me, “Swanbit” meant nothing until I read it a third time, unraveling and unraveling and unraveling until, finally, the last line of the story unraveled me. “The swan circles, some say, a certain spot.” I won’t ruin it for you because it’s a line I want you to not ruin for somebody else.

There are other lines I can’t forget, such as the discordance of story and structure created through the title of Emily Bromfield’s “One Way To Cook An Eel.” The title and each subsequent header give the story an eerie sense of doom. As the narrative revolves around the loneliness of a divorced, lottery-playing fishmonger, readers find themselves pinned under an ever-expanding sense of anxiety as they wonder what will happen to the eel this man adopted, the eel he loves and takes care of even as subject headers—“Step 4: Butter a saucepan, season with nutmeg, salt and pepper, and cover with lemon and onions”—describe steps on how to prepare it. How can the title of the story be reconciled against the delicate balance of their lonely lives together?

In the end, no story demanded more reconciliation than Steven J. McDermott’s “When a Furnace Is All That Remains.” After reading Best of the Web front to back, I found myself returning to this single story over and again, unsure why it was my favorite but confident the Web itself could help me unearth the answer.

McDermott’s story is published online and therefore copy-pastable. Since the story was available digitally, I could have done just about anything: translated it into another language, posted it to a forum, plugged it into an application that would read it to me in a wise, British man’s voice. I chose to utilize the word cloud generator Tagxedo to graphically represent the story’s most commonly printed words. The resulting word cloud suggested McDermott’s story was about a regulator, furnace, matches, light, or “whump,” a sound effect. These were the words that Tagxedo claimed dominated the story about a young man trying to light a golf course’s furnace.

Using Tagxedo’s software, I customized the word cloud into four prison bars, a bit of symbolism since McDermott’s protagonist will have violated his probation if he loses his job. In going back into the story for this icon and meaning, I went beyond “word frequency” to think more deeply about the story beneath—I began interacting with it, customizing it in ways I’ve never done before. I was making it my own.

Whereas the narrative’s alternation between six segments in time and five “signs of trouble” slowly revealed why any man would care so much about lighting a furnace, the story’s gritty details gave the struggle real weight and a terrifying momentum. And as components in a word cloud, these words—“match,” “regulator,” “light”—galvanize our own feelings of guilt for the character’s luck with the furnace. As readers, we wonder if pitying his situation transfers into pitying him for the bad decision that got him here, a pharmacy robbery. Yes, we know he’s a fuck-up because he keeps fucking everything up, but something about his perseverance with the furnace endears us to him. He pisses on it. Knowing there is a risk of explosion, he lights a fire under the tank hoping to thaw its freeze. Is this desperation? Or commitment to a new life? We end up worrying whether or not he’s going to blow himself up; if his boss will arrive at the clubhouse to find the charred remains of a juvie hugging the pieces of a furnace.

All this…in three-and-a-half pages. It’s fitting that we don’t learn until the fourth section that keeping this job—contingent on keeping the furnace lit—is the one way McDermott’s protagonist gets to stay on probation. The young man never says it, but the intensity of his commitment suggests reigniting a golf club’s pilot light is the most important task of his young life. It keeps the light lit on his own freedom, a word that one won’t find in my word cloud but maybe in the white space between its bars.

* * *

Binding online stories into print provides them with access to a world they might have otherwise never known; beyond putting digital literature into brick-and-mortar bookstores, inclusion is a recognition and declaration of quality (despite understanding that any selection process is subject to aesthetics and taste). It places authors and publications onto the map by putting them into the “guidebook” as any other “best of” anthology does.

But perhaps the mission can still be embraced more fully. The addition of an actual Web element could do more than simply support the channel that produced these stories, but service it. This could be as easy a dedicated URL where readers can discuss stories and post thoughts or perceptions. Or maybe an extended version of the anthology, available online and on e-readers, can make “Notable” stories that could not be published accessible digitally.

Sure, such moves would add bits of data to our upcoming global zettabyte milestone. Word clouds, pie charts, and online reviews like this one only add as well. But when so much of the Web’s best can be anthologized in collections like Best of the Web, it seems responsible to reciprocate, to feed the Web with as much literary content as it desires. After all, if the Internet plans on doubling in traffic every other year, maybe we should start preparing for a Best of the Web that publishes bi-annually; or, more fittingly, does so digitally, installing itself beside its stories to live online in perpetuity.

Further Links and Resources:

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.

What we received often transcended mere lists; writers shared why these certain books affected them, woke them up, even made them jealous. So in addition to the “favorites” that received the most votes, we’ve also included some of these endorsements and mini-reviews. Most selections are arranged by genre (Novel, Story Collection, etc.), and then there are less conventional categories–like Book You Loved But Would Be Embarrassed to Be Caught Reading.

Which books did you fall in love with last year? Which were delicious flings and which, life-long companions? Comment and let us know!

Novels We Loved

Sag Harbor was one of our contributors’ favorite novels. In her FWR review, Natalie Bakopoulos writes:

Sag Harbor is driven not by plot but by time, by the fleetingness of summer and its constant reminder of that fleetingness. The beginning is slow, with the sense of months ahead, time to digress and ponder and imagine and internalize, with the thickest, most dense prose socked in the middle of July, the more desperate, urgent bursts as we careen toward Labor Day. The writing is wonderfully languorous throughout, like summer itself, and a perfect match for adolescence: unrestrained and indulgent but wonderfully self-conscious as well.

When Jeremiah Chamberlin talked with Colson Whitehead at the Ann Arbor Book Festival, he asked how the process of writing this more autobiographical book compared to that of his previous novels. Whitehead responded:

When the writing slowed down it was because I was trying to figure out what I remembered from being a teenager, or what I had discovered about the time period and the community that would work in the story. In previous books I had a lot more free reign to invent stuff. Some of them take place in very fantastic stages or there’s a kind of heightened reality. So I had to figure out how to play it straight and stick to the facts and make the facts useful in the story.

Another novel at the top of our lists was Nami Mun’s debut, Miles From Nowhere, which was short listed for the Orange Prize for New Writers. Her novel-in-stories follows Joon, a runaway teen living on the streets of the Bronx in the 1980s. Mun captures both the vulnerability and the toughness of this character–to say nothing of her ingenuity–with remarkable grace and compassion. When Greg Schutz interviewed the author, she discussed the relationship between Joon’s life and her own:

Considering that I also left home for good at an early age, and that I’ve held some of the jobs Joon does in the book, I think it’s very fair for readers to wonder if the book is autobiographical. Emotionally speaking, the book definitely expresses some of the feelings I have felt in my life, but the actual scenes, dialogue, events, etc. portrayed in the book are very much fiction. To put it in numbers, 99% of Miles from Nowhere is pure fabrication. The remaining one percent represents what I think of as kernels of real life that provided the spark for that 99%.

Elizabeth Ames Staudt’s passionate recommendation of Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr. (Viking) makes me want to pick up a copy:

Not since Season One of The Wire has anything fictional caused me to weep so desperately. This novel takes some risks structurally, and it kept going places that, in the hands of a lesser writer, could have been danger zones. But Ron Currie Jr. breaks the readers’ hearts in the best way a book can–by making us want to suck the marrow (and blood and muscle and vaporous stuff that must be soul) out of every last minute we have during our too-short time on earth.

Why did our contributors rave about Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood? Can you really write a successful novel composed entirely of questions? Isn’t that a gimmick?

Valerie Laken, author of Dream House, says that in this case, it works. If you’d like to hear an excerpt, here’s a YouTube video of Powell reading from the book; to learn more about it, readthis “Briefly Noted” review from The New Yorker.

Laken’s own book was a standout this year, and a top pick of our Contributors. Though already an acclaimed writer of short fiction, Dream House is her first novel. She spoke with FWR’s Peggy Adler last spring about the process of moving from the short form to that of the novel, saying:

I agree with your comment that writing a good short story requires a very exacting degree of skill, whereas novels can have a few flaws and still be widely loved. I don’t think people expect perfection from a novel as they do from a short story. I can wince and squirm over a single line when I read a story, but in a novel, when I encounter a bum line, even a bum paragraph or chapter, I often just shrug and keep reading onward.

On the other hand, writing a novel requires so much more stamina and faith than a story. It’s a little like those people who get in their sailboats and sail to a far-off island, just for the adventure of it. I always think they’re insane, because the idea terrifies me: what if you get lost out there all on your own, and no one knows how to find you? Most of writing a novel feels like that kind of middle-of-nowhere, you’re-on-your-own sort of journey. And there are so many days when you wake up in the middle of the ocean with no wind in sight and think, “Why the hell did I sign on for this”

Few books were more eagerly anticipated this year than Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs . And the wait was worth it for many Moore fans, myself among them. I love Lorrie Moore unconditionally, like a dumbstruck teen, and A Gate at the Stairs (her most novel-ish novel yet) reaffirms and renews that love. In this coming of age story, college student Tassie takes a part-time nanny job for a white couple on the cusp of adopting a mixed-race baby. Rather quickly, Tassie learns about the world beyond the small farm where she grew up. As she forms a loving attachment to her little charge, she’s also faced with an onslaught of big issues — from racism and terrorism to the darker sides of marriage, family, sex, loyalty–as well as life’s smaller mysteries: she uses her roommate’s dildo to stir her chocolate milk. Here is some of the finest yet of Moore’s brutal, gorgeous, pun-soaked prose that creates tension between witty satire and real human connection. This novel is not tidy or well-structured, and there is one subplot that, were I lucky enough to be her editor, I’d have urged her to abandon…but the story at this book’s center is amazing, as are its main character and voice–so the book as a whole is no less than amazing, too.

A debut novel worth proclaiming our love to is Sima’s Undergarments for Women, by Ilana Stanger-Ross (Overlook). Several FWR contributors (myself among them) enjoyed discussing this book last year, off-site–and here’s an excerpt from Lee Thomas’s forthcoming review:

Many reviewers of this debut novel by Ilana Stanger-Ross note the sensitivity and care she uses to describe Sima Goldner’s small basement lingerie shop: the neighborhood gossip, the constant trips up and down a stepladder, the dressing room sessions that are equal parts therapy and the quest for the perfect fit. Stanger-Ross definitely has an eye for detail, and an ear for humor in conversation. Sima and her husband Lev, both in shuffling middle age, have long since grown used to the disappointment of not being able to have children. In the Jewish neighborhood of Boro Park in Brooklyn, being childless has cast a shroud of tragedy upon them. Sima withdraws into the world of her shop. These details provide the backdrop, the story begins when a vivacious young Israeli woman, Timna, enters Sima’s shop one August day and changes everything. The book begins with the magic of Sima falling in love. Stanger-Ross conceives her lonely seamstress masterfully and completely, down to the embarrassment Sima feels when caught staring at Timna’s perfect breasts. As Sima’s obsession with Timna’s lively presence in her life grows, so does the pathos of her longing. A rekindled yearning for motherhood carries Sima through emotions akin to romantic love: fascination, passion, jealousy and revelation.

After the literary and cinematic success of What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller had big shoes to fill: her own. And our contributors say she’s done so with aplomb. Concluding her June review of The Believers , Lee Thomas writes:

Among many things, The Believers is a meditation on a marriage facing the fact of mortality and the legacy of a larger-than-life man. In a book full of conflicted personalities, Audrey epitomizes a woman of such force that other characters continually underestimate her. They miscalculate her selfishness and cunning, certainly, but also her capacity to change and surprise. For Zoë Heller there are no simple villains: no one in The Believers could be mistaken for a hero, but her characters prove incredibly seductive. Along the way one becomes mesmerized by the story, enthralled by the Litvinoffs as much as these family members are with themselves.

We’d also like to give a nod to the terrific debut novel Everything Asian by Sung Woo. In his introduction to an interview with the author, Jeremiah Chamberlin writes:

Though modeled in part on the author’s own life, Everything Asian is more than just a coming-of-age tale or an immigrant narrative. It is also the portrait of a particular community and the odd intersections that take place between people who work in close proximity to one another but don’t always know each other very well. Captured with humor and generosity, the book chronicles one year in the lives of the Kim family as they adjust to a new life in the United States and interact with fellow shopkeepers at Peddlers Town.

You can read the entire interview with Sung here.

Novel We Loved (Again!) When It Came Out in Paperback

Originally published in the fall of 2008, Hannah Tinti’s The Good Thief’s paperback edition continues to enthrall our contributors. Charlotte Boulay reviewed the book in 2008; here’s an excerpt:

Even as Tinti’s details and characters make the novel completely her own, the author also retells a classic story, that of the resourceful orphan boy; I marvel at how effortlessly, even in that somewhat glutted field, she carries it off. Reviews have compared Tinti to J.K. Rowling, and perhaps in terms of sales this is a good thing for any author, but this is not Rowling (who I also love)—Tinti’s writing is both more emotionally complex and scarier. Unlike the characters in Harry Potter books, the friends and possible authority figures who surround Ren are deeply troubled, unreliable, and needy. They are, in other words, real people. And although saints can raise boys from the dead, Ren always has the stump of his hand to remind him that violence is present.

Fans of The Good Thief, give your Valentine a great last-minute gift: a subscription to One Story, the acclaimed non-profit lit mag that Tinti co-founded and continues to edit. (For yourself, order a copy of issue #86: Celeste Ng’s wonderful story “What Passes Over.”)

Story Collections We Loved

Speaking of short stories…this collection seemed to be on everyone’s list: no book received more votes–regardless of category–than Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. In the opening line of his review of this collection, Brian Short writes, “The first things you feel are joy and awe.” And though that opinion darkens slightly for our reviewer by book’s end, “powerful” seems an unequivocal adjective to describe this voice and these stories.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is currently a finalist for the 2010 Story Prize. The other contenders for this prestigious honor were also written by debut authors: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Daniyal Mueenuddin, Norton) and Drift (Victoria Patterson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). The winner will be announced on March 3.

Another all-around favorite from last year was Allison Amend’s stunning collection Things That Pass for Love. Whether mentioned in blog posts (I’m still kvelling after seeing her read last January) or cited by other authors in their interviews, this book was clearly a house favorite. When Celeste Ng spoke with the author in October, Amend described her story-writing process:

I’m almost never sure where the story is headed, and it’s not until I write the last sentence that I realize it’s the last. I would worry that if I knew where the story was going, the prose would be too serving of that purpose. I do, however, sometimes know what plot points I want to happen, or what themes I want to explore, but I never know the ending of a story.

Stories for me are born from an amalgamation of snippets of observations that finally come together in a way that’s meaningful for all of them (or not—I have a folder of stories that… frankly… suck). One story in the collection came from my application of tingly chapstick, and wondering: if I kissed someone, would they feel the tingly-ness? The scene eventually got cut from the story, but it was a point of entry. Other times I start with a sketched plot: what would happen if someone’s dog fell in love with a different owner? Who would the original owner be, and what would that mean for him/her?

Elizabeth Ames Staudt highly recommends Girl Trouble , by Holly Goddard Jones:

I’ve been anxious for more from Holly Goddard Jones’ since reading her marvelous short story “Life Expectancy” in The Kenyon Review two years ago. Girl Trouble was every bit as wonderful as I’d hoped it would be–so good, in fact, that I still haven’t read one of the stories. Sounds weird, I know, but I was one of those kids that made my Halloween candy last until Easter. Come out with another book, Ms. Goddard Jones!

Maile Meloy’s newest book of stories, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want it, was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s Top Ten Books of 2009. It was a favorite of ours, too. In the closing of her December review of this collection, Celeste Ng writes the following:

Amy Hempel once described a story as “when two equally appealing forces, or characters, or ideas try to occupy the same place at the same time, and they’re both right.” That definition applies perfectly to Both Ways. There are no clear lines here, no obvious right answers. Meloy’s characters are caught between two choices that are both right—or both wrong—and that’s what makes their decisions so difficult, and makes these stories so compelling. In reading them, you feel, as Meloy puts it, “both the threat of disorder and the steady, thrumming promise of having everything [you] wanted, all at once.”

For more on Maile Meloy’s work, read Joshua Bodwell’s December interview with the author.

One of my personal favorites of 2009, Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff, was also a popular pick among our writers.Each of these stories condenses the depth and scope of an epic novel into fifty or fewer pages. Groff’s characters are vivid and sympathetic, her stories romantic, her plots gripping. Delicate’s most powerful tale, “L. DeBard and Aliette,” chronicles a passionate love affair between a retired professional swimmer-turned-poet and the young, wealthy teenager with polio whose father hires him to give her swimming lessons. Spanning decades, their story is both buoyed by hope and tugged down by despair; its ending feels as unexpected as it is inevitable. Another story, “Blythe,” follows the complicated friendship between two women who meet in a poetry night class. Groff captures astutely the fluctuations of that particular dynamic of fierce, feral love shared between female friends when one is a luminous (if also dangerous and severely depressed) star and the other adopts the reluctant–even resentful–role of yes-woman/caretaker. Throughout, the prose is rich but always precise. Groff never inundates readers with too many images or adds one for the sake of mere atmosphere. The tension between her characters’ sly sense of humor and the dark situations they must navigate makes them truly flesh-and-blood, able – as people must – to find joy or at least irony in seemingly joyless scenarios. And this makes their destinies matter all the more to us.

Joshua Bodwell recommends 2009’s Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award winner, Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy:

Stumbling upon this collection and writer was, hands down, my “big discovery” of the year. I completely lucked into hearing Simon read in New Hampshire back in late June. His work knocked me out of my chair. He was also just a completely charming guy. I bought and devoured this collection…then I re-read it to savor the lyrical prose. By October, I’d arranged to host Simon for his first trip to and reading in Maine.

Several contributors recommended Alice Munro’s newest collection, Too Much Happiness. Contributor Mary Westbrook writes:

I just finished Too Much Happiness. Maybe not her “best” work, but I do like how weird Munro has gotten. That’s not a very “literary” way to describe her work, but that’s how I feel. Her stories are  wild. Though I had read several of the stories in the collection before its publication (in the New Yorker and Best Of series), I was compelled and surprised by the randomness — or seeming randomness — of violence in the collection, particularly in its first half. The gloves come off right away, so to speak. I think this collection taps into some collective anxiety lurking in the air, without sacrificing storytelling.

Even before Tunneling to the Center of the Earth hit the shelves and was an Andrew’s Book Club pick, many FWR contributors were excited to read it. The stories in this collection have appeared previously in such places as The Cincinnati Review, One Story, Ploughshares, The Greensboro Review, and Meridian. The title story and “The Choir Director Affair” were also anthologized in the 2006 and 2005 editions of New Stories of the South, respectively. And the collection did not disappoint.

Here is a preview from Brian Short’s forthcoming review, which will be published by FWR later this month:

Kevin Wilson, who also helps to run the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, has put together a strong and surprising collection of deceptively odd stories. We encounter an old woman who works as a substitute grandmother for children whose real grandmothers have died, or gone senile, or have had a falling out with the real parents. We follow a young man who, in addition to working in a Scrabble factory—trolling all day through hills of letters to find those he has been assigned—also might have a genetic predisposition to spontaneous human combustion. There is a second-person story, and another in the form a handbook or lexicon. Clearly, Wilson is interested in the formal possibilities of the short story. But unlike many authors with similar interests, Wilson never abandons the very human and often shockingly tender hearts of his stories or their characters.

Another debut collection (and Andrew’s Book Club selection) we couldn’t wait to read was What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us. We’ve read Laura Van Den Berg’s stories in One Story, American Short Fiction, and the Baltimore Review, and her work has been anthologized in Best American Non-Required Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Puschcart Prize XXXIIV. Here’s an excerpt from Liana Imam’s forthcoming review of this collection:

Two books in 2009 made me cry: Lorrie Moore’s new novel and this collection. The stories here–about women who are lonely and, at times, want to be lonely, and who don’t want to live a life of drinks and goings out with people–are chasing the tails of the same legends as their characters: Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and contentment. And these stories were saddest because these characters always almost had what they wanted; they just wouldn’t reach all the way for it.

Anthologies We Loved

Each year, a bookshelf’s worth of “Best of” anthologies are published, but one of our favorites is Dzanc’s Best of the Web series. We were fans long before Christine Hartzler’s essay “Games Are Not About Monsters” was selected for inclusion in next year’s collection. Honest. Here’s what Jeremiah Chamberlin had to say about Best of the Web 2009 last August:

Each summer Dzanc Books releases The Best of the Web, an annual anthology of the year’s best poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that was published online. Of all the “Best of” collections that come out each year, this anthology, with its multi-genre interests, probably has the most in common with The Best American Non-Required Reading series. And like that anthology, this one also shares an interest in work that is driven by voice, that isn’t afraid to test the limits of its form.

Another collection that impressed our contributors was Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Tin House, 2009), edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker. T.M. De Vos reviewed the book for FWR:

Life in Russia, said author Aleksander Snegirev at Housing Works’ September 21 Rasskazy event, is uncomfortable, but always interesting.

So, too, are the stories in this plump new anthology: Arkady Babchenko’s beleaguered soldier returns to Chechnya a page away from German Sadulaev’s lyrical descriptions of Chechnya’s devastated countryside. The binding is a veritable trench, across which both narrators peek at each other warily.

One of the most innovative anthologies last year was We Are the Friction: Illustration vs. Short Fiction, edited by Jez Burrows and Lizzy Stewart, who together form Sing Statistics. This project paired twelve illustrators with twelve short fiction writers from around the globe: each artist created a piece of work inspired by an author’s story, while each author penned fiction based on an artist’s illustration. In her review of the collection, Lee Thomas wrote:

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.

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction , edited by Tara L. Masih, is a collection of 25 brief essays on the form, written by such authors as Robert Olen Butler, Ron Carlson, Stuart Dybek, Pamela Painter, and Jayne Anne Philips. In her FWR review, Sophie Powell writes:

As a creative writing professor at Boston College, I frequently use collections of flash fiction, stories which usually run 1,000 words or less. Given time limitations and the varying writing experience of my students, these versatile, word-limited pieces are a very approachable and satisfying form to work within. However, I always find myself floundering about when I try to explain and define this genre for the first time. As Pamelyn Casto, one of the thought-provoking, inspiring contributors, puts it: “Flash fiction is difficult if not impossible to define – and should be allowed to remain so – because this type of writing is protean… it takes on various shapes and uses different strategies to achieve its goals.” This is why this collection is so successful, and so essential, to anyone in the field of short fiction who teaches, writes, and is interested in its history and practice. These essays are probing and explorative rather than reductive and constrictive. A true ‘field guide’ in spirit, I came away thoroughly more equipped to teach and write short fiction in a richer, more illuminating way.

Mysteries We Loved

In 2009, many writers enjoyed The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson, the second book in the author’s Millennium triology. The third installment, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, has just been released. Charlotte warns that “anyone who underestimates this mystery/thriller series does a disservice to themselves.” (Read Lee Goldberg’s review of the first book in the series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)

Young Adult Novels We Loved

The contributors who recommend The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner urge readers to start from the beginning of this series with The Thief. Here’s an excerpt from Charlotte Boulay’s upcoming review of this YA novel:

…of all the books I’ve read in recent memory, not many compare to this series, which is serial narrative of the best kind—the kind that gets richer and more complex as it develops. There are three novels presently published: The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia. A fourth, A Conspiracy of Kings, comes out in late March. I can’t wait. [...] [A]mong YA fantasy novels, The Thief is exceptional because it’s a story about adults. These are not the sudden inheritors of magical powers, but people who have carried the weight of responsibility for their entire lives. Although I love the tradition in YA novels of getting rid of the parents early on so the young protagonists can transgress and transform, it’s also refreshing to break that mold.

- In The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, what was once North America is now Panem, a dystopic society where twelve impoverished districts are forced to pay their dues to the rich capitol that quashed their rebellion, and the price is awful: every year, each district must send one girl and one boy to compete in the culmination of reality television’s horrors, the Hunger Games, where children must fight to the death until only one remains. Collins delivers an inventive, suspenseful story that raises important questions about timeless and timely issues. And I was thrilled to find that the novel’s central character, 16-year-old Katniss, is brave, strong, and clever: finally, a girl that readers of both genders will be able to identify with and admire! This book is the first in a trilogy; the second book published a few months ago, and the third is due to publish later this year.

A Memoir We Loved

Helen W. Mallon recommends The Locust and the Bird by Hanan al-Shaykh:

I love the voice al Shaykh creates–though this is a first person memoir, it’s in her mother’s voice and not her own. Yet the warmth, passion, and power she evokes is intimate, like the lingering perfume of a friend who’s just left after sharing tea for the afternoon. In the prologue, Lebanese-born novelist and journalist al-Shaykh writes that her mother, Kamila, respected Hanan’s career while openly scorning its limitations. On a balcony during one of al-Shaykh’s visits home, Kamila declared: “(The politically active women you write about) were privileged. Maybe nobody encouraged them, but at least they weren’t oppressed. But what about the women who are treated as less than human because they are female?…Perhaps you are not curious to know about my childhood, and why I left you?” What daughter could tolerate hearing such a story? What daughter could resist? Al-Shaykh gave Kamila a first-person voice in The Locust and the Bird, stepping aside so that her mother, unable to read or write, “wrote this book,” revealing how she “transformed her lies into a lifetime of naked honesty.”

Poetry Collections We Loved

All-American Poem by Matthew Dickman

End of the West by Michael Dickman

The Dickman twins were 2009’s Poet Celebrities…and while the media lusted after their family resemblance, we at FWR loved how mindblowingly grand and unique (from the other) each poet’s work was. Reading the books together is an experiment we recommend. Also? It’s kickass that we even HAVE poet celebrities in 21st century.

It may be from 2008, but several contributors insisted that we recommend Corinna A’Maying the Apocalypse by Darcie Dennigan.

Book You Loved But Would be Embarrassed to be Caught Reading

Paperback copies of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, flew off the shelves in 2009. Even writers, we snobbish creatures who blush to be reading what everyone else is, are buying — and loving — this bestselling novel, nominated by several writers for this category. One anonymous contributor writes:

It’s just so, so popular. Every bookclubber has read, discussed, and gifted it at this point. But with good reason. Masses, you have good taste!”

Best Book with The Worst Cover (Don’t Judge it)

Hand of Isis by Jo Graham

Most Satisfying Book for Your Inner Nerd

How I Become A Famous Novelist by Steve Hely. Read Richard Parks’s review.

Most Satisfying Book for Your Outer Nerd

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms by Ethan Gilsdorf. You can read Sophie Powell’s review of the book here.

What You Plan to Give Your Spouse So You Can Read It

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, by Reif Larsen. This inventive, beautifully illustrated novel about cartography is a Staff’s Pick at Powells.com; read why.

Book You Haven’t Read Yet But Are Dying To

Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith. Elizabeth explains why:

In “Read Better,” her 2007 essay in the Guardian, Zadie Smith writes, “I have said that when I open a book I feel the shape of another human being’s brain.” The shape of Zadie Smith’s own brain feels marvelous, as lovely and winding as the cover of her new collection, Changing My Mind, which I cannot wait to get my hands on.

More Books We’d Send Roses and Chocolates To

- The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

- Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

- The Spare Room by Helen Garner

- The Program Era by Mark McGurl (Read Mary Stewart Atwell’s interview with the author here.)

- Lowboy by John Wray

- How to Leave Hialeah by Jennine Capó Crucet

- Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

- Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

- Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles by Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés

- Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

- The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

- The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Many thanks to Associate Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin for helping both to compile results and to create this feature.

And for a list of categories so awesome it needed a post of its own, check out Brian Bartels’s own Valentine to 2009’s books on the FWR blog.

NYC-based writers, head to Brooklyn’s newest bookstore, Fort Greene’s Greenlight Books (686 Fulton St., at S. Portland), tonight (Monday, November 23) at 7:30 PM for a special event featuring local authors and the editor of Mentors, Muses, and Monsters, a book that we at FWR are excited to read.

This is also the bookstore’s first installment of what promises to be an exciting series of events featuring both authors and lit bloggers.

On a personal note, I’m thrilled at Greenlight’s birth, if a bit heartsick that I had to leave Fort Greene about a month before it opened; when I head back to the east coast for the holidays, I will make a pilgrimage.

But for those of you lucky enough to live a short train ride or jaunt away, here’s the skinny (via Greenlight’s newsletter):

Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives (The Free Press)
Featuring editor Elizabeth Benedict
With contributors Alexander Chee, Mary Gordon, Martha Southgate, and Lily Tuck
Hosted by Beatrice.com’s Ron Hogan

A cavalcade of local authors kicks off our new series of Blogger/Author Pairings, in which a literary blogger hosts a real-world reading.

Pioneering blogger Ron Hogan, creator of Beatrice and book industry journalist for GalleyCat, hosts this event for a new anthology exploring the varied relationships of writers with those who have influenced them, for better or worse.

The book’s editor Elizabeth Benedict (author of The Practice of Deceit and others) will discuss the project of Mentors, Muses & Monsters, and her own relationship with Elizabeth Hardwick.

Alexander Chee (author of Edinburgh) will read from his essay on taking a class with Annie Dillard.

Mary Gordon (author most recently of Reading Jesus) will talk about her two Barnard mentors, Elizabeth Hardwick and Janice Thaddeus.

Martha Southgate (author of Third Girl from the Left) reads from her piece on an influential book, Harriet the Spy.

And Lily Tuck (National Book Award winning author of The News from Paraguay) talks about the influence of Gordon Lish on her own work.

Join us for a lively conversation about influence, identity, and the writing life.

You can RSVP on Facebook for this event; RSVPs are appreciated (to help us get an idea of attendance), but NOT required, and seating is first come, first served.

And if you can’t make the event but still want a signed copy…

We want to make sure every reader has a chance to enter the fascinating and ongoing conversation between generations of writers by reading the fabulous essays in Mentors, Muses & Monsters, whether or not they attend Monday’s event. If you can’t make it and you’d like a signed copy of the anthology (or any of the other titles by these authors), just send an email to info@greenlightbookstore.com indicating the books you’d like, any particular inscription, and the best way to reach you. We’ll have the books signed and hold or ship them to you as you prefer.

Perhaps this accounts for another similarity between the anthologies: a decision not to identify the selections by genre. That is to say, there is no indication in either the Table of Contents or prefacing the pieces themselves to categorize the work as either “fiction” or “nonfiction” or “poetry.” Yes, in most cases this distinction becomes fairly obvious. Especially with the poetry. Yet even here, because of an editorial appreciation for flash fiction, particularly short-shorts with a keen attention to the “mouth-feel” of language, the borders of what we might define as poetry or prose are put into question as well.

One such writer, Blake Butler, who has several pieces featured in this year’s collection, says the following about his work in a brief interview included in the anthology:

Most often, as a reader, the text I feel most moved by is that which inflicts my brain or body as if physically manipulating me through the paper. Condoning physical responses via the simulative act of language is, for me, in the same mind of the way the body is altered via states entered in sleeping…

Similarly, the nonfiction selections press the boundaries of their form. With a few exceptions, the essays are lyrical in structure, propelled forward by image and sound as much as narrative or analytical development.

I like this. And I think I also like the formatting decision not to include genre markers, if for no other reason than it once again asks us to think about “intention” in writing. And, just as importantly, what we hope to encounter on the page when we enter into the intimate relationship that exists between reader and writer. As a traditionalist, I’ll admit that it does make a difference to me knowing whether writing is fiction or not. Scott Russell Sanders describes the importance of this distinction in his essay “The Singular First Person” by trying to explain why it was problematic for him to have one of his essays mistakenly identified as fiction in a scholarly article. He writes:

The essay is distinguished from the short story, not by the presence or absence of literary devices, not by tone or theme or subject, but by the writer’s stance toward the material. In composing an essay about what it was like to grow up on that military base, I meant something quite different from what I mean when concocting a story. I meant to preserve and record and help give voice to a reality that existed independently of me. I meant to pay my respects to a minor passage of history in an out-of-the-way place. I felt responsible to the truth as known by other people. I wanted to speak directly out of my own life into the lives of others.

That said, I enjoyed the process of encountering each piece of writing “blind,” so to speak, unattached to preconceived notions of form and removed from the surroundings of their original publications. Meeting the work in such an unencumbered fashion was not only a change from how I often sit down with a text, but also asked me to think about what defines good writing.

Perhaps all good anthologies prompt this question—what’s included has been judged and selected, after all. But in addition to the work itself, the open structure of this collection also encourages an interesting conversation about style and aesthetics. Between these covers poetry bumps up against fiction; longer work is juxtaposed to shorter; traditional narrative meets the absurd; and canonical authors like Stephen Dixon share equal page space with writers who’d probably never identify themselves by that title.

Yet what pleases me most, perhaps, is the conversation that this anthology is not provoking: one that feels the need to justify its existence. With this second anthology a precedent has now been firmly established, one that recognizes, as this year’s editor, Lee K. Abbott, does in the introduction: “It ain’t where; it’s what.”

There is good work here. Perhaps that’s all that needs to be said.

To purchase a copy of The Best of the Web 2009 and to support this project, please visit DZANC books.

Further Resources

- DZANC books is a non-profit founded in 2006 by Steve Gillis and Dan Wickett to “advance great writing and champion those writers who don’t fit neatly into the marketing niches of for-profit presses.”

- Dan Wickett is also the founder of the Emerging Writers Network. The EWN blog was recognized as one of the ten best lit blogs in the country last year.

- For links to Best of the Web 2009 authors guest blogging about the release of the anthology, please visit this EWN blog post.

- Blake Butler edits the internet lit magazine blog HTML Giant:

- Here is an interview with Scott Russell Sanders in Fourth Genre, where his essay “The Singular First Person” was first published.

Despite these problems, Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Best Sex Writing series has become a yearly fixture at my house. With her personal take on the best of sex journalism from 2009 (or, rather, 2008; the title is a bit of a misnomer), Kramer Bussel notes that “You don’t have to look far to find sex, but you do have to get a bit bolder when looking for writing and thinking about sex that doesn’t play to the lowest common denominator.” I would absolutely agree with this statement, even though I always find myself wondering why she hasn’t yet published anything from my own sex news and views website.

Best Sex Writing editor Rachel Kramer Bussel / photo from East Bay Literary Examiner

The collection’s first offering, “One Rape, Please (to Go)” by Tracie Egan, is a make-or-break piece, setting an odd tone for the rest of the anthology. The title alone may get readers’ hackles up, and Egan’s cavalier attitude about her self-described “rape fantasy” is certainly off-putting. Her refusal to analyze this troubling terminology (i.e. how can it really be “rape” if it’s something you want to happen?) doesn’t help matters, though ultimately the piece is an interesting exploration of one woman’s attempt to satisfy a controversial fantasy. It’s definitely more fluffy than I would have expected for a “best of” anthology, but certainly grabs the reader’s attention right from the start.

The best article in the collection is without a doubt Mary Roach’s “The Immaculate Orgasm: Who Needs Genitals?” Roach, the author of Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, is great at bringing scientific exploration on sexual subjects to the public in a thorough yet light-hearted manner. This particular piece focuses on the science behind orgasm, which isn’t quite as straightforward as one might imagine. Indeed, the piece explains how people who have experienced spinal cord injuries can still achieve orgasm—which, in turn, allows scientists to develop a clearer definition of orgasms more generally. Roach interviews and shadows professor Marcalee Sipski, who presents the concept of “nongenital orgasms,” which can occur in before epileptic seizures, in dreams, or even as “thought orgasms.” The piece is in-depth, wide-ranging, entertaining and educational, and absolutely meets my own criteria for the best in sexual reporting.

Honorable mentions include “Sex Offenders!!” by Kelly Davis, “Is Cybersex Cheating?” by Violet Blue, and the short but sweet “Silver-Balling” by Stacey D’Erasmo, where even the most profligate lovers are confounded by the name of an unfamiliar sexual act.

EDIT 5-5-09: This review has now also been published in Black Heart Magazine .

Further Resources

- For the Huffington Post, Rachel Kramer Bussel writes about “The Media’s Sexual Irresponsibility” and talks to writer Susannah Breslin about Eliot Spitzer and prostitution.

- The East Bay Literary Examiner offers a recent interview with Kramer Bussel.

- For more reviews of erotica and other features from and about “the dirtiest minds in literature,” check out Laura Roberts’ Black Heart Magazine.

- Here’s a book preview of Mary Roach’s Bonk: