Spiers’s Fav Book-length Fiction; My Fav Short Stories
Elizabeth Spiers recommends her ten favorite fiction books of the 00s, including J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help, and George Saunders’ Civilwarland in Bad Decline. Four of the ten are short story collections
which are hard to sell and tend to have less longevity than full-length novels, so I have a bit of bias in promoting them. And their lack of commercial appeal is a shame, because there are so many interesting short story writers out there, and you’d think that in the age of shrinking attention spans, short stories would be more popular.
Sales of short story collections are so poor that agents and editors rarely even look at them from new writers unless the writer has an O Henry Prize or New Yorker debut to her name. I wonder how much chicken-egg is going on here: I can think of literally dozens of recent NPR interviews with novelists on book tours. Short story writers? In recent years I remember hearing Alice Munro and George Saunders, but few others.
But story collections’ poor sales certainly aren’t solely the fault of poor publicity. Oddly, considering that the form began with Poe’s lurid tales, it has a surprisingly bad image these days as stuffy and dull. Last week, one of my students wrote that she’d liked this semester so better than the first-year English class in which she’d had to read “all those boring short stories.”
I hope that much of this kind of reaction is a matter of expectations, of what people are looking for when they read and how they think they “have to” or are “supposed to” read short stories. High school teaches us to study short stories—not to enjoy them. And a lot of the best stories are driven by ideas. They don’t give us time to inhabit characters as novels do, or reward what seems to interest book-clubs (I’d pay real money never to hear another comment to the extent of, “I just couldn’t connect with x character.”) In short stories, an article of clothing, a single action, a gesture establish character. Narrative momentum springs from an elusive blend of voice, character, events. Literal subject is often an elaborate shadow-dance for ideas or states of mind that by contemporary convention can’t be overtly mentioned.
Short stories are dense and moving and heart-stopping and perplexing. Here, in no particular order, and obviously excluding a lot of wonderful work, are some of my favorites from the 00s (some of which I’ve linked to before):
- Antonya Nelson, “Stitches” (also in the same collection: “One Dog Is People”. “Stitches” was originally published in The New Yorker in 1999, but in book form appeared in 2002’s Female Trouble)
- Alice Munro, “Post and Beam”
- Amy Hempel, “Beach House”
- Shelly Oria, “New York 1, Tel Aviv 0”
- Elizabeth Crane, “The Archetype’s Girlfriend”
- George Saunders, “Puppy”
- Nadine Gordimer, “Diamond Mine” (subscription required)
- Jim Shepard, “Courtesy For Beginners”
- Lucy Corin, “My Favorite Dentist”
- Amy Anderson, “Doors Closing”
