Hyphen Magazine and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop have named Sunil Yapa as the winner of their 2010 short story contest. From the announcement:

Hyphen and The Asian American Writers’ Workshop have selected the 2010 Asian American Short Story Contest winner, Sunil Yapa, who penned “Pilgrims (What is Lost and You Cannot Regain)”, a poignant story of anguish and reconciliation.

Yapa is a recent graduate from the MFA program at Hunter College in New York City. His work has appeared in Pindeldyboz: Stories that Defy Classification and The Multicultural Review, and he has received scholarships to the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and The Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, MA. The son of a Sri Lankan father and a mother from Montana, Yapa grew up in central Pennsylvania and has since traveled and lived in 48 states and 35 countries.

Contest finalists included Viet Dinh for “Lucky Dragon,” Soma Mei Sheng Frazier for “Antique,” Marjan Kamali for “Tehran Party,” Stellar Kim for “Dissolution,” Tsering Lama for “The Greatest Tibetan Ever Born,” Jenie Pak for “Something Out There,” JK Shushtari for “The Sweet Dry Fruit of the Lotus Tree,” Shilpi Suneja for “The Simpleton,” and Shruti Swamy for “Blindness.” Alexander Chee, Whiting Award–winning author of Edinburgh, and Jaed Coffin, author of the memoir A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants, served as judges, and Fiction Writers Review was proud to serve as a media partner for the contest.

Yapa’s winning story will be published in the fall issue of Hyphen, on newstands in September. Until then, you can whet your appetite by reading the 2008 winning story, “Playing the Sheik,” by Shivani Manghnani, and the 2007 winning story, “Our House Stands in a City of Flowers,” by FWR contributor Preeta Samarasan.

Finally, you can read more about the contest and results on the AAWW website and the Hyphen website.

Katherine Anne Porter (Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, U of Maryland Libraries Special Collections)

Each week, The nonprofit Library of America offers a free short story, readable online in PDF form. The current “Story of the Week” is “The Charmed Life”< by Katherine Anne Porter. Other recent features include “Charles” by Shirley Jackson (who—yes!—wrote more than just “The Lottery”), the early story “The Cut-Glass Bowl” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Wives of the Dead” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Each story is also accompanied by some commentary that helps set the story in context. This seems like a great—and free—way to discover some lesser-known pieces by well-known American writers. See the current story and all archived pieces on the LOA website, sign up to have the stories sent to you, or follow The Library of America on Facebook to get updated when a new story is posted.

Many thanks to FWR contributor Erika Dreifus of Practing Writing for pointing us to this great resource.

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.

After reviewing The Good Thief for FWR, I continued to think about it a lot. In fact, I decided to teach it in one of my classes at the University of Michigan this winter, partly so I could think about it further. So when Hannah Tinti visited campus this spring, on the tail end of what sounded like a mammoth trip through Europe and back, I jumped at the chance to sit down with her to talk.

From the author’s website: Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. Her first novel, The Good Thief, is published by The Dial Press and Headline. The Good Thief is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award and winner of the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Hannah also recently won the 2009 PEN/Nora Magid award for her editorial work at One Story.

Interview:

Charlotte Boulay: I’m so happy to meet you because I love The Good Thief so much and I just taught it in a class on writing about visual art.

Hannah Tinti: I have photos of visual art I’m going to use in my talk later.

Oh, great! Well, in this class we talked a lot about all the great descriptions in the book, and how you represent things visually. Were you inspired by visual art?

Work by Lee Bontecou: Image from the artist's Facebook page

When I’m working on something like this—something that has a certain time or place or mood—I have a bulletin board over my desk, and as I come across things that are in that vein, I start tacking them up. I had a couple of photos from The Gangs of New York that I had up for visuals on describing some of the places the characters went; I had photos by Edward Curtis, a photographer who took pictures of native Americans in the 1800s; I had stuff by Lee Bontecou. I love her work.

Oh, I don’t think I know her.

Her stuff is sort of steampunky. She builds out from the canvases and there are these giant weird holes.

Were you thinking of the mousetrap factory?

Work by Lee Bontecou: Image from the artist's Facebook page

For the mousetrap factory I actually had an image from a children’s book. Bontecou does giant mobiles and these kinds of canvases that are almost mechanical looking. She also makes weird giant crazy fish out of plastic. She’s a pioneering female abstract artist. And she’s still alive. I had gone to an exhibit of hers, and then I just became a little obsessed with her dark vision, and her interesting take on something that’s abstract but makes you feel a lot of emotion, particularly when you stand in front of it and it comes out at you. It almost envelops and sucks you in. It’s really cool. So I used photographs of her work, and also Edward Gorey. Then, when I was writing about the dentist, I had this photograph of someone selling teeth on the street—I think in India—and also images of early dentures. I had photographs of early mousetrap patents, and all sorts of weird images to help create that dark, slightly scientific mood.

So even if the particular reference didn’t make it into the novel they all contributed to the ethos?

Yeah, it’s generating a feeling; when you look at them, you think. That’s the kind of feeling I’m trying to capture. I have no idea how to articulate it that well, but something about those images was doing it for me.

Well, perhaps this darkness is connected to my next question. I found most of the characters in the book to be extremely sympathetic—the main characters, that is, not the hat boys. How do you make yourself inflict violence on characters that you care so much about?

I knew from the start that I wanted to have a happy or a somewhat happy ending for Ren. I wanted to end in a positive place, because it was the only way I could drive myself to put him through all of that. I am drawn to that sort of darkness, I think, from growing up in Salem, Massachusetts, and being around that Halloween stuff all the time. That Gothic world is very normal and natural to me. I’ll show some pictures in my talk tonight of graveyards, which were my playground.

Was there a point in your evolution as a writer when you realized that what was natural to you was actually really interesting material for readers?

I think I realized that I always tended a little toward the dark in things. That’s where I started to really find my voice as a writer, and I started to figure that out in grad school at NYU. I took a class with A. M. Homes, and she’s very dark. She made us do a lot of writing exercises, which had never really worked for me. But she pushed us in a lot of different directions and she challenged us to try new things. One exercise I’ll never forget was this time she gave out photographs and asked us to write something from an unusual point of view. For me it was this photograph of a kid holding a giant rabbit. He was in a sort of British, shared backyard with all this laundry, and he had a towel tied around his neck. So I had this idea that I was going to write from the mother’s point of view, and that the kid had been taken away from her by child services, so she was having to defend herself as an abusive mom by telling her side of the story. But she’s telling it without realizing what she’s revealing to this social worker. And I remember when I turned in the story, A. M. Homes wrote, “Oh, my God, this is disgusting,” and I was proud because I had grossed out A. M. Homes.

I also think it was the first time I had captured something. I think for every writer there’s one story where you make a breakthrough, where you move from the mediocre—not quite clicking into place, not knowing what’s pushing a story—into telling something that’s really exciting, or something that people are really going to want to read. That was the first time I’d ever touched that, and for me it was by going to this dark place, and then investigating it, and realizing, Why is this working for me? and Why is this working well for the readers?

And it was the first time in a workshop that people were really excited about what I had read. Every time before that was really dull and terrible. This was the first time people thought, “This is kind of cool.” And so I thought, They are reacting to something; what is it? And I think that’s partly how you find your subject. Then you just keep trying to hit it from different places, and to understand it, because often it has something to do with you inside, and you’re trying to get at that something.

It’s fascinating that you remember the photograph of the boy and the rabbit in such vivid detail.

Oh, yeah, for me it was really a changing moment in writing.

Did you pick the photograph, or did Homes give it to you?

No, she gave it to me.

So that’s a good teacher, too, to pick out something that would maybe resonate with you.

She’s a good teacher. She’s a tough teacher. She was the kind of teacher who didn’t coddle her students, and I got her at just the right time—when I was really ready for someone who wouldn’t let me get away with anything. By contrast, a lot of teachers only talk about the good stuff, or are only encouraging. But she would just say, “You did not do this. This is terrible. You are not accomplishing this POV. You are not accomplishing these characters.”

Do you feel like all writers should be able to, or develop the capacity to, take that kind of criticism?

I think that the ability to take criticism and thoughtfully implement it in your work is key to building your skills as a writer. I see this a lot from the editorial side of One Story. There are certain writers I work with who I try to show how something is not quite tracking or not quite coming across. Then I’ll give examples of how I think they can fix it, and discuss challenges and ways they can work it through. When you’re working as an editor, your relationship with a writer is a companionship, working side by side, versus the teacher telling the student, “Go this way” or “Go that way.” So, I think that there are some writers who are able to take the criticism I give them and make it their own and really turn a story toward a wonderful new direction, and there are some who I really have to handhold and lead every step of the way because they’ll do a rewrite and start taking steps backward instead of moving forward, which is a terrible thing to see as an editor. When I get a new draft of a story and I realize that they’ve just taken two steps back instead of moving the story in the direction it needs to go, then I’m just like, “Oh, God, now we’ve got to start all over again.”

Wow, that’s an enormous amount of work.

It is an enormous amount of work. The writers I see who are light on their feet and able to incorporate changes and really make them their own in this way—it’s magical when that comes together. There’s a story that I worked on with Rob McCarthy called “Stag” that we published about a year ago. Something about the ending was not quite coming together, and we kept talking about it and trying to get at what was going on in this last scene with the father and daughter. And I’ll never forget—when he finally sent me this revision, all he had added were about two sentences. Yet it suddenly made the whole story make sense. That was so exciting for me. We just talked about it; I didn’t tell him what to write. I just said, “There’s something here that’s not quite working. I don’t fully get what you’re trying to say.” And he just isolated it and it was magnificent.

So that makes it worth it.

Oh, yeah.

I get One Story on my Kindle.

Oh, cool.

How did you work out that deal with them, because I don’t know of many other literary journals that you can even get on the Kindle?

Maribeth Batcha, my business partner, pushed that; I didn’t have that much to do with it. Now the next thing is getting on the other platforms like the iPad, which all have their own delivery systems. I know we had to jump through a lot of hoops to get on the Kindle because I don’t think they saw the market for One Story, or the way it would work. But we had a contact somewhere on the high end who helped us actually get our phone calls returned, and we hooked it up. We’ve gotten a lot of new subscribers from Kindle.

It’s interesting to me because it seems in some ways that the One Story format fits the Kindle so well—I don’t know if you see One Story’s format as a response or a pushback to the amount of information we have in our lives otherwise. It’s very nice to sit there and just focus on this one thing, instead of a thousand things at once, but then I’m getting it digitally, which is traditionally a realm of over-information, so there’s a little paradox there…

I don’t read it digitally, but Maribeth does. I think that’s definitely something we were thinking about with One Story, but mainly we were just looking at the mistakes that all these other literary magazines were making, and thinking about how we could come up with a business plan for a magazine that would succeed in these places where they were failing. This is the way literature is going: you have to be leaner, meaner, and smarter. And the small presses, large presses, and literary magazines that are doing this are really finding audiences, whereas the ones that are doing things the old way are losing audiences.

So the organizations that succeed are the ones that aren’t trying to do too much?

Yes. Our thing was that the biggest problem with literary magazines is that they don’t come out frequently, so you forget that you even subscribe to them. I mean, the Kenyon Review is a great magazine, but when I get it, I’ve always forgotten that I actually subscribe to it. Whereas, when you miss a New Yorker, you’re like, “Where’s my New Yorker?” So we went to every three weeks. Originally we wanted to do every two weeks, but it was too much work. Still, when people miss an issue of One Story, they call or email us. Publishing so frequently develops a relationship with your subscribers. Our subscribers are very loyal because they’re constantly getting the magazine and feeling like they’re getting in touch with us, that they have a stake in the magazine. Also, these large journals–which are basically like publishing a book–are very expensive to print and mail and get carried in bookstores. We do subscription only. We only print as many as we’ve sold. We do print on demand.

Another aspect of our model is that we made a rule never to publish an author more than once. So, 135 issues so far and135 different writers. There’s always going to be a fresh voice, and that’s something we’re giving to the subscribers as well. Publishing One Story as we do allows the writer to take the spotlight in a way that they do not in an anthology, which normally someone would buy, flip through, read the writers they know, and skip the ones they don’t. So even though the magazine might have 5,000 subscribers, only 500 of them are actually reading your story. Everybody reads the whole issue of One Story.

The other thing is that the format is light, easy, unintimidating. The envelope is like a little gift in the mail, at a time when most people’s mailboxes are full of bills, not real letters anymore.

To change tack, my students wanted to ask you some questions. We talked a lot about how certain images and symbols in The Good Thief keep circling back; just when you’d forgotten about the wishing stone, for example, it appears again. Caitlin wanted to know at what point during the writing process you thought about which objects would have repeating roles. Did you have that plan before you started, or did that evolve?

I don’t plan or plot; I just sort of go and see what happens. It’s like using a divining rod—I try to find the scene and write it, and whatever I spit out I try to make sense of later. I think the most important thing to do is to trust your subconscious, that it is actually tying things together even though you don’t think it is. For example, the scene where Ren is in the kitchen and the dwarf comes down the chimney—I had no idea what was going on. I just had him filling his hot water bottle, and then I was bored, so I thought, What’s something that could happen right now? What if somebody comes down the chimney? Originally I thought it would be an animal, because I grew up in an old house and that used to happen all the time to us. But I figured a man, perhaps coming to rob them, would be more interesting. Then I thought, A man wouldn’t fit. It would either have to be a child or a dwarf, and I already had a kid in the book, so I made it a dwarf.

So he crawled out, and then what was he going to do? Well, I had him take a bath. I had him eat food. Then I made him go back up the chimney. I didn’t know who he was or why he was there. It took me many, many drafts until I figured out that he was Mrs. Sands’ brother, and that this was paralleling the relationship between McGinty and Margaret—brothers and sisters—and the theme of caring for each other this way.

He was also an example for Ren of a different way to lead your life. Do you withdraw from society the way the dwarf does? Do you cut off your emotions the way Dolly does, and just murder everybody and not care and not connect to people? Do you become an alcoholic like Tom? Do you lie your way through life like Benjamin?  How do you deal with not quite fitting in and not quite being who people think you should be? I didn’t know why he was there, but I knew he was important, and I just trusted that I would figure it out.

The wishing stones came in later because I originally wrote the middle of the book in the first draft, and then I wrote the beginning and the end.  So the very first scene I wrote was when they dig up the bodies and Dolly comes back to life. Right after that, I wrote the scene where Dolly and Ren become friends. Then I thought, Who is this kid, and how did he get here? Next, I wrote the chapter where Benjamin comes to pick Ren up from the school, and the chapter where he meets Tom.

When I showed it to my editor, she said I had to write more about the school and more about the lives of these kids before Benjamin arrives, to get to know the character before taking Ren on this adventure. So I went back in a fleshed out that world. That’s when the wishing stones came in, and they started coming back in different ways. Same thing with the river and the hand. Now I give one wishing stone away at every reading!

Jessica described the book as being almost cinematic. We’ve talked about the images, but she wondered whether you were inspired by any films?

Jean Simmons (young Estella) with Martita Hunt (Miss Havisham) in David Lean's 1946 film adaptation of Great Expectations

I do love movies, and I watch them a lot, but I don’t know if there was any one movie I was thinking of. I definitely visualized the book; I did see things in my head, particularly in the first chapter I wrote. I had a vision of a graveyard scene, and it was almost like a camera shot: a boy holding the reins of a horse, night, big iron fence, grave robbers, what’s the situation? So in terms of movies, I probably drew from the original Great Expectations with Alex Guinness. It’s beautifully done in black and white, and Jean Simmons plays Estella. She was probably only twelve or thirteen, and she was perfect. Another movie I thought about a lot, because it works, is Pirates of the Caribbean. I know that sounds crazy, but I think the reason that movie works so well—the first one, the other ones weren’t so good—is that it is extremely clear what each character wants. Johnny Depp wanted his boat back. Geoffrey Rush wanted to be alive again. Orlando Bloom wanted the girl. The girl wanted adventure. It was so clear. So how did the desires of each of those characters intertwine? I thought that if I could do the same thing, I could really track my characters through the book.

And the last question from my students is: Why are there so few named strong female characters in the book, the exception possibly being Mrs. Sands?

That’s one thing people ask a lot: Why is this a boy’s book? It started that way because of the circumstances. I had this scene in the graveyard, and it made sense to me that the lookout would be a boy in that situation, not a girl. A girl raises so many sexual issues and a lot of other things that I really didn’t want to deal with. I really wanted the book to be an homage to the classic boy’s adventure tales that I read when I was growing up: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist—the young boy falling in with dangerous characters, having adventures, finding his way in the end. The female characters actually make everything happen in the book. Mrs. Sands provides Ren with what he’s always wanted, which is a home and someone to love him; Sister Agnes provides Ren with what he was missing, which is what happened to him and his origins; and Jenny, the Harelip girl who only gets a name at the very end of the book, kills the bad guy and saves Ren and Benjamin. So even though their roles are smaller, they are actually making everything happen. They are powerful but minimized, and my plan for the next book is to write more of a girl’s book with more female characters, so we’ll see what happens.

Well, I don’t think of it as a boy’s book at all…and not that the larger number of male characters is a fault. I read all those classic novels as a kid and never thought about them being boy’s books.

Neither did I. I think people ask me because I’m female. If I was a male writer, I wouldn’t get asked that question as much. The same thing is true of questions about violence in the book—I think if I was a man people wouldn’t ask about that either

I read a lot of different genres, as many people do, and I read a fair amount of “YA” literature, which I think is a kind of useless category because it encompasses so much stuff, but this novel seems to be solidly placed in the literary fiction genre because it successfully combines aspects of horror, mystery, and adventure. I worry sometimes that fabulous books are getting stuck in genre cracks. Do you think about that at all? Or that sometimes because of a marketing decision by a publisher something gets categorized as “YA” when it very well could be literary fiction if some other publisher had picked it up.

Well, we did wonder whether this book was going to cross over to YA. There was never really a question that it should be published as YA, although my editor brought the galleys down to Random House’s YA area, and she made schools aware of the book. My editor’s feeling was that it would be easier for it to cross from adult to YA than from YA to adult. And it naturally found its way into YA because it won an Alex Award, which is given by the American Library Association for books that are written for adults but can be recommended to younger readers twelve and up. So as soon as that happened, which was right before the paperback came out, it started getting pushed in that direction and I started doing events at many more schools, particularly junior high and high schools. That’s been fun. I knew it would work for that market because I had been doing a lot of book clubs and I did one that was a club of mothers and sons. It was a group of friends who all have sons around the same age, and they’ve been meeting for five or six years. They all read the same book, and then they get together and cook a themed dinner with food from the book. So they got in touch with me.

What was the dinner for The Good Thief?

Oh, it was hilarious. They made the Mother Jones Elixir for Misbehaving Children. It was actually root beer or something. And they had a hilarious graveyard cake with R.I.P. written in icing and stones made of Nilla wafers. It was so much fun, and I called in and they sent me pictures, and the book really did appeal to both the mothers and the sons, and they could talk about it. When I was writing, I was not thinking about the audience. I was just trying to write the book. I knew the kind of book I wanted to write, and that I wanted to do classic, old-fashioned storytelling. I think that’s the best thing you can do. If I’m going to work on something for six years, which is how long it took me to write The Good Thief, I want to write a book that I want to read. And I wanted to read the kind of book that made me fall in love with reading, that made me really excited to read books, that made me want to stay up late at night and not put the book down, and at the same time explore issues that I’m interested in. I did try to give each story an arc that would keep the reader reading.

The book is dedicated to your sisters, and you thank your mother in the acknowledgements. We’re in an age of memoir that bashes family, or maybe I’ve just read several of those kinds of books lately. Did you have a lot of family support while writing this book? Is family support different for fiction writers than for essayists?

I think it depends on the writer. I was lucky that my family valued books. My mother was a librarian at Brookline Public Library in Massachusetts in the 60s. And my mother and father are first generation Americans—their families were immigrants, and they were each the first to go to college in their families, and it mattered a great deal to them that we love books in the same way they did. I don’t think my extended family has read my work; this is not their world. For me, growing up in that kind of environment was invaluable. I was reading above my level at a very young age because there was so much reading in the house. A special night was when we got to bring our books to the table. Instead of some families who watch TV while eating dinner as a special treat, our treat was that we got to read while we ate. That made a difference. My family has been supportive of me, although there were many times when I got the talk: what are you doing with your life? You’re wasting your time. Because it takes so long to make any money from your writing and so many people never do, really. So they definitely sat me down with concern a few times.

What are you reading lately?

I just read Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin. It was really good, particularly the first story, which kind of blew my mind.

Is he someone you knew before? That collection has been getting a lot of attention recently.

Well, it just won the Story Prize, so I was there that night and heard him interviewed. The book had been on my radar, but I hadn’t picked it up. His interview with Larry Dark that night was really interesting. I think the Story Prize is definitely helping to raise the profile of story collections, which is great. I also read a lot of books that haven’t come out yet, for blurbs and things. There’s a great book coming out called The Wake of Forgiveness that’s going to be out this fall from Bruce Machart, who we published in One Story the first or second year we started. He’s been working on this novel for a long time, and it’s a sort of epic: a sons and fathers in 1890s Texas story about horse wrangling. It’s awesome. I read so much for One Story—we have a great story coming out by a guy named Cheston Knapp. Is the first story he’s ever published, and it’s called “A Minor Momentousness in the History of Love.” It’s about an actual tennis match from Wimbeldon in 2001 between Sampras and Federer, but the story is really about the ball boys and girls and the weird love triangle going on during that very famous match. We’re really excited for that to come out in our next issue.

My last question is about the end of The Good Thief. And maybe I won’t spoil the ending for people by quoting the final line in the interview—

I always read the end of books before I read the beginnings, so I don’t care.

I think it’s just one of the most beautiful last paragraphs. I’ve thought a lot about the ending, and especially the last sentence. Teaching it was a bit hard; I’m a poet and I teach a lot of poetry in this class about visual art, and you can only go so far in explaining what something means before you ruin it. But my question is: how did you know that the final word needed to be repeated four times, not two or three or five?

I think this again goes back to writing with intuition and gut versus the technical place, which you hopefully go to later when you’re editing. Writing that last chapter I tried to go to that intuitive place. Figuring out how to end the book was hard. Originally I ended on the image of the Harelip’s shawl draped over the grave, and the idea of the grave and the person who was dead and forgotten, with the shawl giving it some connection to life again. There was the idea that this grave was chosen. I was trying to get at something there yet I wasn’t, and I realized it was because the moment was too far away from Ren. I had to go to where he was. Ren had been through these events and had these physical and emotional missing parts of himself. And even though he had found the physical part and had, in many ways, closed the emotional gap by finding a person who loved him, he was never going to be 100%. There was always going to be a part of him that was missing, and missing Benjamin, because Benjamin might reappear, but he might not. There’s no 100% happy ending. Ending in that emotional place felt right when I read it. Repeating the last word four times is better than three times because it just feels right. Normally I have a rule of threes. I give this structure lecture about the magic number three—this is the trinity: a priest, a rabbi, and a minister. When you have something happen, the first time is setting it up, the second time repeats it exactly the same way to create a pattern, and the third time something different happens and you break the pattern. That’s the classic form of writing a short story.  But there are a few stories that use four. “Reunion,” by Cheever, is a very simple one page story where he makes something happen four times and it’s amazing the fourth time it happens. It’s a great teaching story because it’s so short you can read it in class in five minutes and then you can break it apart and teach it. Doing something four times slams it home. You’re taking a risk, but for me it felt right at the end of this book.

Further Links and Reading:

Congratulations to this year’s winners of The Collection Giveaway Project! Earlier today we held four separate drawings to determine the recipients of our free story collections, and here are the results:

1. Shannon for Laura van den Berg’s collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
2. Pete for Joshua Furst’s collection Short People
3. Barrett Shipp for Skip Horack’s collection The Southern Cross
4. Melanie Yarbrough for Robin Black’s collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

Thanks also to Erika Dreifus of The Practicing Writer (who first suggested the giveaway), the editors of The Replacement Blog, and Lucy Blue at Before There Were Children for joining this project. You can find the winners of their contests on their sites.

Most of all, thanks to everyone who participated in our May is Short Story Month celebration. We received more than fifty wonderful recommendations from our readers for favorite collections or collections they’re looking forward to reading, and the selections ranged from classic must-reads to debut fiction. Here they are, in no particular order, just in case you’re short on a list of good books to read…I mean, it is the start of summer.

1. The World is the Home of Love and Death, by Harold Brodkey
2. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, by Ernest Hemingway
3. The Age of Grief, by Jane Smiley
4. Separate Kingdoms, by Valerie Laken
5. Airships, by Barry Hannah
6. Finding a Girl in America, by Andre Dubus
7. Jenny and the Jaws of Life, by Jincy Willett
8. Girl with the Flammable Skirt, by Aimee Bender
9. The Point, by Charles D’Ambrosio
10. Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
11. If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home, by John Jodzio
12. A Few Short Notes On Tropical Butterflies, by John Murray
13. Do the Windows Open? by Julie Hecht
14. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver
15. Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
16. Girl Goddess #9, by Francesca Lia Block
17. Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout
18. The Holiday Season, by Michael Knight
19. The Palace Thief, by Ethan Canin
20. Girl Trouble, by Holly Goddard Jones
21. Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, by Lydia Peelle
22. The Secret Goldfish, by David Means
23. Where the Dog Star Never Glows, by Tara L. Masih
24. Boys and Girls Like You and Me, by Aryn Kyle
25. Call It What You Want, by Keith Lee Morris
26. Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories, by Shirley Hazzard
27. Between the Assassinations, by Aravind Adiga
28. Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri
29. The Boat, by Nam Le
30. Where the Money Went, by Kevin Canty
31. The Red Convertible, by Louise Erdrich
32. The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
33. Something Is Out There, by Richard Bausch
34. At the Jim Bridger, by Ron Carlson
35. The Pacific and Other Stories, by Mark Helprin
36. The Tiger in the Grass, by Harriet Doerr
37. Out of the Woods, by Chris Offutt
38. Legend of a Suicide, by David Vann
39. The Murphy Stories, by Mark Costello
40. The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, by Philip K. Dick
41. Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, by Justin Taylor
42. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, by ZZ Packer
43. How to Breathe Underwater, by Julie Orringer
44. Through the Safety Net, by Charles Baxter
45. Drown, by Junot Diaz
46. The Dead Fish Museum, by Charles D’Ambrosio
47. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
48. The Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley
49. The Secret Lives of People in Love, by Simon Van Booy
50. How to Escape a Leper Colony, by Tiphanie Yanique
51. Do Not Deny Me, by Jean Thompson

As the month winds to a close over Memorial Day weekend and summer officially begins, we’ll also be wrapping up our celebration of May as Short Story Month. Inspired by The Emerging Writers Network and their unparalleled coverage off all things story-related each May, as well as The Poetry Book Giveaway For National Poetry Month, we decided to launch The Collection Giveaway Project (warm thanks to Erika Dreifus of The Practicing Writer for suggesting our site as a home for this promotion).

The goal is a simple one: to get readers talking about their favorite stories and story collections. So all month we’ve been publishing interviews and reviews and essays with a special eye toward the art of the short form. We’ve also been publishing blog posts about several story collections that we’re going to give away free to readers on Monday, May 31. And we’re happy to report that The Practicing Writer and The Replacement Blog have joined us in offering free collections to their readers, as well.

To be eligible for any of these free books, all you have to do is click on that book’s title link (below) and leave a note in the comment field of the original post about one of your favorite story collections.

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, by Laura van den Berg. Jeremiah Chamberlin writes: “The stories in this collection feel ‘of a family,’ for lack of a better phrase. Not because most involve elusive creatures and foreign locales, or because exploring and discovery are central themes in all, but because collectively the stories seem to be working toward answering the same question: How can things disappear from our lives so quickly? Whether a husband, a father, one’s health, or happiness, the world these characters inhabit has the potential to change in an instant. And there is little left to do other than sort through, sort out, and move on.”

Short People, by Joshua Furst. Lee Thomas writes: “We all had one. It’s one of those universals of human experience, more constant than love or rage or betrayal or grace. I’m talking about a childhood. Still, it’s impressively difficult to capture on the page, pitch the right tone, allow the perfect amount of insight and innocence, or describe the overblown drama of what it feels like to be a kid. From the opening story of his collection, Short People, Joshua Furst nails it. That first story, ‘The Age of Exploration,’ follows the ramblings of Jason and Billy, best friends, both age six. Most of us can remember things that happened when we were six. But Furst reminds you what it’s like to be six – what it feels like to discover the world.”

The Southern Cross, by Skip Horack. Celeste Ng writes: “I am often skeptical of reviews by people who know the author: sometimes they’re a bit too chummy, like Sarah Palin praising Glenn Beck. (Ew. Just—ew.) So let me start off by saying that I do know Skip Horack, but only slightly. We met at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in 2009…I hadn’t read any of Skip’s work before the conference, but I made a note to myself to pick up his collection, The Southern Cross, as soon as I got home. Set in the Gulf Coast in 2005—the year of Hurricane Katrina—the collection is timely and relevant in the way the very best fiction is.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, by Robin Black. Anne Stameshkin writes: “Before I recommend or send any book to one of FWR’s reviewers, I always read a sample story or two, a chapter, or maybe the first fifteen pages. If I fall in love, I order a copy of the book for myself. But sometimes there’s a novel or collection that demands to be read immediately. If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This made me forget I had a job, a website, friends, a boyfriend waiting for me to pick him up, dinner burning on the stove. And even after finishing this book (and sending it off to the reviewer), I couldn’t resist buying two more copies–one to keep and one to share as part of Short Story Month 2010: The Giveaway Project.”

Who I Was Supposed to Be, by Susan Perabo. Erika Dreifus (of The Practicing Writer) writes: “One of the bright lights that sustained me through my MFA program was my friendship with Susan Perabo, a gifted teacher (her ‘large group’ workshops and craft seminars were among my very favorites) and equally gifted writer. I read Susan’s debut collection, Who I Was Supposed to Be, very soon after meeting the author at my first residency in May 2001. And then I reread it, bought it for friends’ birthdays, etc. I even mentioned it right here on the blog three years ago. And now I’ll buy a copy for one of you.”

The Pale of Settlement, by Margot Singer. Erika Dreifus (of The Practicing Writer) writes: “This is another book I have mentioned here before. (I’ve also written about it for Kenyon Review Online.) Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, and the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, The Pale of Settlement is also another book that I’ve been unable to stop recommending to others.”

If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home, by John Jodzio. The Editor of The Replacement Blog writes: “What better way to celebrate short stories than by giving away a free, signed copy of John Jodzio’s If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home? Metro Magazine recently put it at #1 on their May survival kit, calling it ‘a sad, weird, masterfully drawn short story collection.’”

And finally, Lucy Blue at Before There Were Children, is giving away a copy of Going Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle. In her self-described “rave” of this collection, Blue writes: “I couldn’t put it down. [...] I would think about the stories and the characters long after the story was over. I couldn’t wait to crack it open and read the next one to see where it would take me [...] and even kept the book past its due date at the library to have the boyfriend read it as well.”

The Collection Giveaway Project contest ends at 12:01am on May 31.

Winners will be contacted by Fiction Writers Review, The Practicing Writer, The Replacement Blog, and Lucy Blue. Results of the drawings will be posted shortly thereafter.

For any other bloggers, authors, or publishers who would like to join in on the fun, here are directions to participate. Feel free to leave a comment below that directs readers to your site.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s story “The Inventor, 1972” begins here, with a sentence that ushers us into a world both familiar and strange. Some of the details feel worn. They are the near-clichés of the rural short story: the rusted old car, the fog rising off the fields, the swift and unforeseen violence. But their deployment is fresh, the voice distinct. There is the dreamy suspension of the present tense, the elided conjunction between clauses; there are the knowing inflections of an omniscient narrator and, significantly, that surprising article: not “a thirteen-year-old girl,” but “the thirteen-year-old girl.”

The main characters in the story—point-of-view passes back and forth between the injured girl and the driver of the El Camino—are at once anonymous and exposed. The reader knows them only as “the girl” and “the hunter,” yet the detached omniscient voice occasionally cracks into the higher register of free-indirect narration (“Footsteps like heartbeats! Someone is coming through the fog!”) as the story wanders further and further from the present moment—the girl on the side of the road, the hunter searching for help—burying itself in the characters’ heads and in their pasts, teasing out surprising connections between their lives. By the story’s close, the inciting event seems less an accident than an act of fate.

Of course, neither the girl nor the hunter is aware of the connections between them; their perspectives are necessarily limited, incomplete, in a way that the reader’s is not. The story is held together as much by its white space as by its text: its emotional freight is conveyed through dramatic irony, a product of reading between the lines.

That “The Inventor, 1972” closes on an upsurge of loneliness—the hunter, taken into custody by authorities, recalls a moment of intense physical connection from his childhood—is only fitting: dramatic irony is a lonely concept, dividing reader from character with a gulf of knowledge. Thus, the story isolates reader and characters alike in analogous fashions. This is a subtle accomplishment, a case in which formal innovation does not distract from a story’s emotional center but instead augments it—is, in fact, inseparable from it.

“The Inventor, 1972,” like so many of the fourteen stories in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage (Wayne State UP, 2009), evokes the ache at the center of the rural experience with startling clarity and force. The stories in American Salvage know what it means to occupy landscapes in which humans are outnumbered by animals and in which nature, beautiful and indifferent, rushes in to fill the physical and emotional distances between individuals. Set in a natural world that is (as Richard Ford described it in “Great Falls,” a story that is itself deeply eloquent on the subject of this rural ache) “without patience or desire,” Campbell’s stories explore what is uniquely human: the grinding exercise of patience, the headlong pursuit of desire.

Subtly daring and meticulously observed (a girl standing in an autumn field “kicks out rabbit holes in the yellow grass to keep warm”; the mysterious appearance of thousands of dead honeybees in the basin of a kitchen sink fills a house with a smell both salty and sweet), American Salvage captures its subject so convincingly, and from such surprising angles, that even a reader comfortable with the trappings of contemporary rural fiction may feel Campbell’s rural ache as if for the first time.

Trappings: in this context, the word isn’t accidental. Campbell’s stories are fresh entries into a subgenre—the rural short story—whose approach to its subject has too often, lately, whiffed of staleness. Readers may be familiar with rural short fiction in its too-predictable form already—stories that capture the grotesqueries, poverty, violence, and addiction at the margins of rural life in pungent detail, but with clockwork regularity.

This is not entirely a criticism. Such stories share an eye for the suffering of what Frank O’Connor called “submerged population groups” or “the Little Man,” those for whom “familiar society is the exception rather than the rule”—surely a fair description of those living within the rural experience described above. These stories belong to a tradition traceable back through Flannery O’Connor, John Steinbeck, James Agee, and William Faulkner to the peasants of Chekhov and Turgenev, and perhaps even further still, to fairy tales (Jack was just a poor farmer before he climbed that beanstalk) and minstrelsy. Like their forebears, the very best contemporary stories in this vein—consider Benjamin Percy’s “Refresh, Refresh,” Donald Ray Pollock’s “Real Life,” or Annie Proulx’s “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?”—are charged with the stark empathy of a Walker Evans photograph.

At the same time, however, even these very fine stories represent a solidifying sense of how the rural experience should be dealt with in fiction. They share a tough-minded worldview and a microscopic eye for grit that is beginning to feel increasingly familiar.

It’s true, of course, that the life of the Little Man and Woman in the rural world (and in Proulx’s Wyoming stories, to be fair, every individual, rich or poor, is equally “Little” when set against that vast, implacable landscape) is going to involve hardship and grit, and that in writing these lives, tough-mindedness and understatement are preferable to melodrama and sentimentality. But the problem here is not tough-mindedness and an eye for grit as such—though it’s also true that too many rural stories render up their visceral details with the relish of fetishists, an almost cultic veneration of dirt, grime, and pain; rather, the problem is the growing ubiquity and, as a result, the predictability of this treatment.

Spotting a familiar face in a fresh context—with a new haircut, for example, or sporting a black eye, or in a strange city far from home—can be a strangely thrilling experience. Her features seem strange; we are shocked into studying her in sharp detail. Our friend has been defamiliarized. We thought we knew what she looked like already, but now we are truly seeing her, as if for the first time.

In other words, the question of whether a gritty rural story is “accurate” or “true-to-life” or even “truly felt” is immaterial. The short-story author must be more than a good describer: she must be a good artist. If she wants her reader to truly see the rural world, and to be thrilled by it, she must—without sacrificing verisimilitude—find ways of defamiliarizing the rural experience. We will come no closer to understanding the world these stories depict unless we are made to see it once again as if for the first time. And yet in many contemporary rural stories, there’s just too much that feels familiar, like the features of a face we know too well to study.

Throughout its fourteen stories, American Salvage nimbly balances these competing demands—for authenticity on one hand, for originality on the other. True, the reader will encounter familiar rural tropes: methamphetamine addiction, roadhouse bars full of factory workers, incest, old men drinking beer and jawing on the tailgates of pickup trucks. But in these deft stories, even old saws feel sharp.

This is sometimes—as with “The Inventor, 1972,” constructed as an engine for dramatic irony—the result of Campbell’s formal daring. Several stories in the collection bracket their narratives with multiple points of view; another, “The Solutions to Ben’s Problem,” is presented as a list of possible actions its titular character could take. Stories range from four to nearly thirty pages long, and not one of them ends quite where the reader expects. And at every turn, Campbell’s skill with language (her poetry collection, Love Letters from Sons of Bitches, recently received the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Award) provides her fictional world with the thickness and heft of reality. She is a gifted noticer of the telling detail: in “Boar Taint,” the men in a ramshackle farmhouse sit around a kitchen table with “a forward curve to their shoulders, with their forearms resting on the table as though they were defending bowls of food, only there were no bowls.”

But even more so than through their form and language, these stories unsettle the reader by baring their brimming hearts. If it is commonplace in the rural short story to vividly depict ways in which characters are broken, then what is decidedly uncommon is Campbell’s attention to the ways in which damaged and broken lives may, as per the collection’s title, be salvaged. Without offering bromides or easy solutions, each story is inflected by an abiding respect for even the most damaged (and damaging) characters. They are like the catalytic converters torn from junked cars in the title story: “mostly they were dirty and rusted from the slush and mud and road salt, but each of their bodies contained a core of platinum.”

Here, triangulated between the grit and hardship of necessity, the loneliness of nature and a reverence for it, and the migrations of good and decent hearts—or, at least, hearts that strive in clumsy, sometimes self-defeating ways to be so—through a world that feels cold or, worse, actively hostile to their concerns, Bonnie Jo Campbell has located and renewed the rural ache.

Sharp, strange, and surprising as it is, American Salvage places Campbell among such authors as Barry Hannah, Ron Hansen, Alice Munro, Carolyn Chute, Dan Chaon, and Tony Earley as one of the most distinctive—and therefore necessary—practitioners of the contemporary rural short story.

It’s impossible, of course, to take stories as varied—and as wonderfully odd—as “The Inventor, 1972,” Hannah’s “Water Liars,” Hansen’s “Wickedness,” Munro’s “Carried Away,” Chute’s “Lizzie, Annie, and Rosie’s Rescue of Me with Blue Cake,” Chaon’s “Fitting Ends,” and Earley’s “Prophet from Jupiter” and lump them under a single heading. But it is exactly this—their singularity—that charges them with defamiliarity. Their idiosyncrasy is their artistry; their strangeness is why we should care.

Further Links and Resources:

I frequently happen upon Selected Shorts on NPR midway through a story and go through a predictable course of thinking: I’ve missed the first part of the story. I should just download the podcast and hear it from the top. Wow, that sentence was brilliant. What the heck is going on here? And then I end up listening to the conclusion of the story and enjoying it immensely.

Now that I’m in New York, I hope to make it to one of the live stage performances of Selected Shorts. If you’re lucky enough to already have a ticket, on May 26th Selected Shorts will celebrate the stories of This American Life with an evening featuring Ira Glass, Mike Birbiglia and Elna Baker. Just in time for Short Story Month, this evening is also a part of New York Book Week. I’m excited for the Audience Favorites performance on June 9, when three stories nominated and chosen by listeners over the past season will be read onstage.

But no matter where you are, a short story read aloud is a very fine thing, so check out your local library or bookstore to see if any authors are visiting or giving readings. I’ve also been thinking a short story supper club might be the busy friends’ solution to the book group. Each week or month, one person could read a favorite short story after dinner or over a cup of coffee, discussion to follow. Pre-reading not a requirement.

What are some of your ideas about how to celebrate the read-out-loud story?

Jeremiah Chamberlin

Marissa Perry

It’s especially appropriate to highlight Glimmer Train this month—Short Story Month—as it’s one of just a handful of journals that publish only short fiction. Moreover, Glimmer Train provides great support to its writers, offering payment (which many journals aren’t able to) and searching out first-time authors. And that attention to quality pays off. The editors report:

In a recent edition of Best American Short Stories, of the top “100 distinguished short stories,” ten appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, more than any other publication in the country, including the New Yorker.. We are pleased to say that, of those ten, three were those authors’ first stories accepted for publication.

Order Glimmer Train Issue 75 for $12, or—even better—subscribe for a year (four issues) for just $36. For submission guidelines and a monthly breakdown of GT’s contests, click here.

Do you want to read the book yet?
Because I’m trying to make you want to read it.

Kevin Wilson, who also helps run the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, has put together a strong and surprising collection of wonderfully 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 of 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 tender hearts of his stories or their characters.

For example, in “The Choir Director Affair (The Baby’s Teeth),” [also anthologized in New Stories from the South 2005] we don’t just hear about the baby with the shockingly large and well-formed teeth; Wilson goes to great lengths to show us the baby’s mannerisms, the general and specific gestures that make it impossible for those who encounter it (including us) not to love it, at least a little bit. We feel the heft of the baby’s small but solid form, the competing clean and sour smells of its body. This is not just a metaphor, Wilson insists, and his intelligence and voice go a long way to making us agree.

Kevin Wilson

In addition to startling story concepts and pleasurably alarming imagery, Wilson also makes the collection work as a whole. Two-thirds of the way into the book, we arrive at perhaps Wilson’s best story. By this time, readers might think we have the author’s number—a little bit of Saunders, with some Bender/Millhauserian weirdness thrown in. Then Wilson hits us with “Go, Fight, Win,” something more in line with Flannery O’Connor and Allan Gurganus. There is always a danger when writing weird, ambitious, surreal-ish short stories in getting stuck in that rut where everything has to be audacious or silly, conceptually. One can imagine another, less full Wilson collection that never would have left this land of Barthelmeian wonder and humor. And that might have been great, too.

But what strikes me as a writer after reading all those more conceptual pieces is how fully realized the domestic “Go, Fight, Win” is. It’s a coming-of-age story about an adolescent girl interacting with her younger neighbor, a boy with some hard to define mental or emotional problems. There are grace notes throughout—pitch-perfect scenes regarding first kisses, investigating the dubious authority that teenagers exert over one another, documenting moments of honest obsession and unexpected kindness.

After “Go, Fight, Win,” Wilson gives us “The Museum of Whatnot,” which encapsulates, in its imagery and concept, the argument for this author’s modes of perception and narrative, like Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be a Writer” from Self-Help or Etgar Keret’s “A Thought in the Shape of a Story” from The Nimrod Flipout. In Wilson’s story, the main character is left to tend a seemingly random collection of bric-a-bracs, to guide visitors through a collection she does not quite understand, that has accumulated randomly and without specific purpose. And in this place, people move, think, feel. They search for meaning, for love. Their lives matter to them, and they matter to us, despite the strange surroundings and odd ornamentation. It is a beautiful story, quiet and subtle and lovely, and it is also a smart story in a really, really smart collection.

So are you going to read this book or what?

Extras: For Further Reading

- Read some of Wilson’s stories online:

• “The Museum of Whatnot” in Fifty-Two Stories (also appears in Tunneling…)
• “The Dead Sister Handbook: “A Guide for Sensitive Boys” in DIAGRAM
• “Hammer” in Waccamaw
• “My Hand, Dead Tissue Severed at the Wrist” in Hobart
• “The Neck’s What Keeps Heart and Head Together” in Blackbird

(For more stories and a full list of print publications, see this page on the author’s website.)

- Wilson’s collection was recently nominated for a 2010 Shirley Jackson Award. Other nominees in the single-author story collection category are: Everland and Other Stories (Paul Witcover), Fugue State (Brian Evenson), Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical (Robert Shearman), There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya), and Zoo (Otsuichi). A review of Petrushevskaya’s collected stories (translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers) is forthcoming this summer on FWR.

- Here are two great interviews with Wilson: In Redivider (by James Scott); and in The Collagist (by Matt Bell). While you’re reading The Collagist, check out Wilson’s story “Excerpt from the Big Book of Forgotten Lunatics,” which appeared in the journal’s first issue.

- It’s Short Story Month! Support short stories—and independent bookstores by ordering a copy of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth from Powell’s.

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