Congratulations, Regi!

Regi Claire, whose short story collection, Fighting It, we just reviewed in The Short Review and who is published by Two Ravens Press, is shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award, Scotland's major literary awards, alongside AL Kennedy, whose short story collection What Becomes is on my review pile,  and Janice Galloway, whose Collected Stories is also waiting for me. Congratulations, Regi, and Two Ravens Press, and more power to the short story!

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Short Lit Bits November

Electric Literature will begin a new venture in microserialization by tweeting Rick Moody's new story, Some Contemporary Characters, from Monday, November 30th to Wednesday, December 2nd. Follow at @ElectricLit.

Ray Bradbury has signed on with White Oak Films with the idea of creating a miniseries of six 1-hour episodes, all based on different short stories of Bradbury’s, says Screenrant.

Bonnie Jo Campbell was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction for her short story collection, American Salvage but sadly didn't win. More on MLive.com

The Wall Street Journal tells us that brevity can be a virtue: " From Alice Munro to Lydia Davis, short-story writers get fresh attention". Read more.

Simon Van Booy's short story collection Love Begins in Winter, winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, has been shortlisted for the 17th Bad Sex award, says the Guardian.

Los Angeles-based Wordtheatre, which lines up actors to read short stories, "a pairing that shows both in a flattering light," is opening in London, according to the LA Times Jacket Copy blog.

Granta Books has acquired UK & Commonwealth rights to a new novel and collection of short stories by Chris Adrian, author of Gob's Grief and The Children's Hospital, says Booktrade.info

John Grisham releases his first short story collection, Ford County. Read more in the Madison County Journal.

The Creative Writing Corner blog talks about short stories vs novels: ""I'm more likely to read a short story from end-to-end rather than a trashy novel precisely because it's a significant waste of time, whereas the short fiction is a minor waste of time.""...

Read or listen to an interview with a master of short stories, William Trevor, on BBC Radio 3: "I really am a short story writer who also writes the occasional novel, not the other way round."

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Guest post: Rose Metal Press interviews itself on short short stories and hand-stitched chapbooks

We are delighted to have the wonderful Rose Metal Press, independent publishers of "hybrid genres specializing in the publication of short shorts, flash and microfiction; prose poetry; novels-in-verse or book-length narrative poems and other literary works that move beyond the traditional genres of poetry, fiction and essay to find new forms of expression".

They have just opened their Fourth Annual Short Short Chapbook contest to submissions, deadline Dec 1st: "25-40 pages of short short stories under 1000 words", and if you want a reason to submit - or to make sure you buy the winner - we have reviewed the winners of the first three contests: Claudia Smith's The Sky is a Well, Geoffrey Forsyth's In the Land of the Free, and, most recently, Sean Lovelace's How Some People Like Their Eggs.

Rose Metal Press is a wonderful example of two people publishing the writing they love, not for any financial gain, but just because it should be a beautiful book. They have even published The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, if you need some pointers.

Here, RMP co-founders Kathleen Rooney and Abby Beckel interview each other about what they do.

Kathleen Rooney: Hey, Abby Beckel, co-founder of Rose Metal Press, did you know that E. M. Forster says that “The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists?” Does Rose Metal Press assume the existence of such a spectator? If so how?

Abby Beckel: Well, Kathleen Rooney, co-founder of Rose Metal Press, I don’t know about the perfect spectator, but we do assume the existence of the perfect reader. More accurately, we publish our books with a sense of hopefulness about the existence of the kind of reader who likes to be challenged and take chances and have their ideas about genre stretched in unexpected ways. The good news is that it’s not just an assumption and a hope—those readers do exist! We get so much great feedback from readers and reviewers, letting us know that they are happy that Rose Metal provides an outlet for innovative hybrid genre writing.

Abby Beckel: Since you referred to what we do as creating works of art, can you elaborate on the ways Rose Metal Press views books themselves as art forms, literature as art, and what’s possible as far as combining books and literature with other arts?

Kathleen Rooney: Sure. We publish all kinds of books—novels-in-verse, anthologies, prose poetry collections, and chapbooks of short shorts—but the thing they all have in common besides being in hybrid genres is that they are all subject to the utmost in rigorous quality control. And by that, we mean not just that the contents of the books are well edited and proofread, but that the books themselves are held to exacting standards as objects. Back when we started out in 2006, you and I decided that even though we suspected we’d want to publish many more, we would limit ourselves to publishing just three books a year. Partly we stick to that limit to allow the press to stay in the black, and partly we stick to it to preserve our ability to focus on both the press and our day jobs, but we also chose that limit because we estimated that that was the amount of time we’d need—at least four solid months per book, and usually more—to not merely edit the writing and plan the promotion, but also to put together each book as an art object, kinda. And in retrospect, this limit has helped us to make our design, layout, paper, and cover art the best they can be. Way to go, past selves.

Kathleen Rooney: Speaking of books as beautiful delivery devices for literature, why does Rose Metal Press love short shorts, and why run a limited edition chapbook contest just for them each year?

Abby Beckel: When you and I were starting the press and trying to decide how best to manifest our idea to publish and promote innovative writing in the form of hybrid genres, short shorts jumped out at us as a genre ripe with potential as something of a flagship genre for us: they were and are increasing popular both for readers and writers; they appeal to audiences beyond the literary community; they provide lots of options for interesting design choices; and most importantly, despite all those things, they have very few publishing homes. Rose Metal’s first book was an anthology of short shorts by Emerson College alums titled Brevity & Echo that was the brainstorm of fiction writer and Rose Metal Press board member Pamela Painter. (Emerson College was one of the first writing programs to offer dedicated courses on writing short shorts.) That book continues to be a crowd pleaser and has been used in classes at a number of colleges and universities.

That was the beginning of our tango with flash fiction. It’s been a committed relationship ever since. By starting an annual chapbook contest for short shorts, we saw an opportunity to stretch the boundaries of not only genres, but publication form. Chapbooks have traditionally been the realm of poetry, but the brevity of short shorts makes a manuscript of them work well as a chapbook. We get lots of amazing and inventive and affecting collections each time we do the contest. The short short is growing and changing and every year we see innovations in the forms and styles and subjects that flash writers tackle.

The chapbook form also allows us to really focus on creating a literary object of beauty. Each year we letterpress the chapbook covers by hand at the Museum of Printing [link: http://www.museumofprinting.org] in North Andover, Mass., on an old Vandercook press. We choose specialty endpapers and have the book hand-bound, sometimes hand-sewn. Two of our chapbooks have won spots in the New England Book Show for design. It’s really gratifying work creating a chapbook package that projects the heart and talent of winning authors’ stories.

Abby Beckel: The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction represents Rose Metal’s first foray into books about a genre rather than original work in hybrid genres. How do the Field Guides fit with the vision of the press and are there more plans for academic exploration of genres in the future of the press?

Kathleen Rooney: As you know because you were there, we didn’t set out to necessarily publish work for academic use, but we were open to that as a possibility, as long as the academic explorations were themselves in some way hybrid. As you also know, the Field Guides weren’t our idea, and they weren’t even ideas hatched by the same set of people. But when Tara L. Masih approached us about the flash fiction guide, and then shortly thereafter, F. Daniel Rzicznek and Gary McDowell pitched us the prose poetry one, we were impressed on both fronts by how these editors were interested in making texts that would be suitable for classroom use, but that would not have to be used in a classroom—they’re books that don’t try to define or pin down the respective genres, but just to examine and illustrate and discuss them in a creative, personal, and wide-ranging style.

To answer the second part of the question, it’s hard to say how precisely they’ll fit with what the press publishes in the future—we may publish additional academically inclined books if the right ones come our way, but then again we might not. The next couple of books we put out, including the fantastic and weird Color Plates by Adam Golaski, are going to be single-author projects, but if somebody approaches us with another anthology idea we can’t refuse, we won’t refuse it. That’s one of the many kickass things about running a very small press: nobody gets to tell us what we can or can’t do. And I can’t wait to see what else we publish next.



Neither can we! Thank you Kathleen and Abby. Find out more about Rose Metal Press and the Fourth Annual Short Short Chapbook contest and you could be clutching a beautiful, hand-bound book of your own.

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An Elegy For Easterly the only short story collection shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award

Huge congratulations to Petina Gappah, whose short story collection, An Elegy for Easterly, is shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award - the only story collection on the list. Find out what all the fuss is about - our review is here and an interview with Petina is here. Good luck!

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A week of short story collection events in the UK

What a wonderful week for short story events, featuring authors whose collections we have reviewed or are about to. If you are in the UK, what riches there are!

Oct 21st

Alison MacLeod (15 Modern Tales of Attraction) and Panos Karnezis (Little Infamies) chat about short stories at the Lancaster Lit Fest, chaired by Carys Davies (Some New Ambush)








Also: the launch of Matter Magazine Issue 9 in Sheffield, also featuring Alison MacLeod (15 Modern Tales of Attraction) and Adam Marek (Instruction Manual for Swallowing)

 Oct 23rd

The launch of Hassan Blasim's collection, The Madman of Freedom Square (our review coming soon), at the Calder Bookshop, 51 The Cut, London. More about this on the Comma Press website.

Oct 24th - a whole day celebrating short stories as part of the The Short Weekend at the Manchester Lit Fest:

The Launch of When It Changed - Science Into Fiction anthology
Geoff Ryman, Patricia Dunker, Liz Williams, Dr Tim O'Brien; Prof Steve Furber and Adam Marek (Instruction Manual for Swallowing)
Friends Meeting House, Manchester.

Bernard MacLaverty & Atef Abu Saif

Hassan Blasim (The Madman of Freedom Square) & David Constantine (The Sheiling (our review coming soon))

Chris Beckett (The Turing Test) ; James Lasdun (winner of the First National Short Story Award)

Paint a Vulgar Picture event






Find out more about The Short Weekend at the Manchester Lit Fest. I'm sure there's more going on that I missed, do let us know. Have a great week!

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Guest post: Chris Fowler, author of 11 Short Story Collections, Talks Stories

The Short Review is delighted to welcome Christopher Fowler - whose tenth short story collection, Old Devil Moon, won the Edge Hill 2nd Prize 2008 and had seven other nominations, and his eleventh, The Horrors, features 14 new stories and is scheduled for summer 2010. Christopher talks about what a great short story is for him :
 
"Feelings, as Antonia Byatt recently noted, are ruining short stories. Detailed descriptions of emotional states don’t take the place of a good story well told.
 I don’t believe everyone can write – it’s not something you simply become passable at producing, like watercolours. A short story needs to surprise and entertain, but also needs an element that rings true; recognisable humanity. The opening of John Collier’s The Devil George And Rosie starts ‘There was a young man who was invariably spurned by the girls, not because he smelt at all bad but because he happened to be as ugly as a monkey.’ You want to read on.

My favourite short story volume is the anthology Black Water, edited by Alberto Manguel, a veritable encyclopedia of great tales. The book contains a famous story; David Garnett’s’ Lady Into Fox’, where the plot is actually embedded in the title.
 Tennessee Williams said ‘I don’t want realism. I want magic…I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth.’ I think tiny moments of magic can reveal great truths.

Short stories should be pleasurable to read. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp, a sailor buys a genii and has to sell him for less than he paid – which proves impossible. Stories are much more enjoyable when the main character is having a terrible time. Panic breeds action, and action adds pace – when I read tales in which a lonely woman stares out of a window at the rain, my heart sinks, because I know we are off to a slow start. It’s often the case that the reader is way ahead of the writer.

John Sladek wrote a story called Anxietal Register B which consists of a form to be filled in by the reader. Good ideas satisfy immensely. For this reason, I’m sure, Roald Dahl is often cited as the perfect short story writer, but in truth he’s part of a long historical line, from Poe to Saki, from E F Benson to Somerset Maughan. Dahl is easy to read; no crime, this – for some reason, certain writers go out of their way to be unreadable in short form. I’ve been guilty myself, once writing a story in futuristic phonetic teen slang.

A short story doesn’t need the kind of structure one would expect in a novel. It may even end before the main event. In J G Ballard’s The Watchtowers, ominous towers guard a frightened populace, and only begin to open and reveal their purpose in the last line of the story. The point of the plot is to highlight the effect that a police state has on ordinary people. In Shirley Jackson’s celebrated The Lottery, villagers stone a character to death, but there is no explanation provided that will allow us to comprehend their cruelty. The point of the story is that real cruelty is inexplicable. So the plot does not directly provide the reader with satisfaction. Rather, it is the author’s delivery method for the idea. In Daphne Du Murier’s The Birds, no explanation for the avian behaviour is given, and therein lies its power.

Of course, a plot is a skeleton; it is hidden under the skin. It needs characters and scenario to function. The perfect plot is one which emerges from the other two factors. "Don’t look now," says John to his wife, "but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotise me." John and Laura have lost a child, and are in Venice. John has a secret ability he has failed to recognize. The two old girls will ignite a terrible tragedy. Daphne Du Murier’s brilliant short story Don’t Look Now’ combines the three elements to perfection because they rely on each other. If the couple had not gone to Venice, if John had not been so blind, everything would have been different – but how often in life do we ask ourselves what would have happened if we’d only behaved differently?

A plot can’t simply be imposed on its characters, because free will must be exercised – but of course people are willfully blind, or too optimistic, or cruel, and this affects outcome. Kenneth Tynan once said that you don’t need to know why two people fall in love, you just need to know that they do.

The unexpected is important. It’s the element in any story that makes you want to describe it to others. ‘You’ll never guess what happened today’ is a phrase which begs the other person to undermine any surprise. I’m not a fan of trick endings unless they come naturally – we never see the best ones coming. In Don’t Look Now, the elements of the ending are put in place early on, and still we fail to spot the climactic tragedy. Mystery writing, in particular, is about the fair withholding of information. I stress ‘fair’ because it would be a cheat to reveal at the end that the protagonist is a dog, unless you can read the story a second time and see that it’s obvious. Hiding is not the same as withholding.

In Du Murier’s Adieu Sagesse. This plot concerns a dull 60 year-old banker with three daughters and a wife obsessed with appearance and status. He owns an old boat that has never been sailed, and lovingly tends it. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that he’ll soon give his family the finger before taking off for the open sea. After all, the title can be translated as Goodbye Common Sense. But instead of a closing scene in which the old man sails into a calm and glorious sunset, Du Murier makes him sail off into stormy grey seas. The suggestion is that it won’t be plain sailing, but at least he’s got away. It’s more realistic.


In my last collection I wrote a story called Cupped Hands after reading a newspaper report about African towns with no natural water supply. How do they survive? They have the water delivered in tankers. What if someone stole the truck? Why would they do that? Well, suppose they needed to leave town fast and there was no other vehicle? Suddenly I knew the story was there, because a moral problem had been created. The guy can save himself by stealing the truck, but will doom the stricken town.

So far I’ve had over 150 short stories published in ten collections. I’ve yet to write the perfect short story."

There are some who would beg to disagree, Chris! Read our review of Old Devil Moon and check out Christopher's website for more about his writing.

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Simon Van Booy Wins 2009 Frank O'Connor award and Chris Beckett gets a two-novel deal

Congratulations to Simon Van Booy who is this year's winner of the 35,000 Euro Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for his collection, Love Begins in Winter! We will be reviewing the collection in the October issue, so hold your horses... In the meantime, for more about the winner read this article in today's Irish Examiner.

"I was very nervous coming to Cork for the Frank O’Connor Festival," said [Simon]. "But I stopped being nervous when I read the other short-listed books. I was shocked by the quality of the work, and I knew I had no hope of winning."

Also: congratulations to Chris Beckett, who won this year's Edge Hill Short Story Prize for his collection, The Turing Test. He has just signed a two-novel deal with the Corvus imprint of Grove Atlantic, and the first book will be The Holy Machine, published in the US by Prime. This is excellent news - even though the deal is for two novels, we hope Chris will carry on writing short stories!

Read our interview with Chris about the award and about his 20-year relationship with Interzone magazine.

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