The Sept issue is here

This month's Short Review is up. What's in it, you ask??

We bring you false relations, damaged goods, repetition patterns, quick repair, stories like donut holes, stories named for rivers, things that are cold to the touch, people who always want something, the collected stories of the Armitage family, and our first review of an ebook which leaves the reader, Radiohead-style, to decide what they'd like to pay. And, as ever, author interviews with almost everyone we review.

Controversially, perhaps, we've added the Literary Fiction category to the Find Something to Read By Category page. Difficult one, this. Might cause trouble. Who is to say what is Lit Fic and what isn't? Hmm. What do you think?? Leave a comment.

Also: Surprise yourself! Check out our non-complete list of short story collections published in 2008 and so far this year (almost). More than you thought, eh?

Pop in and have a read.

"Most Imaginative" Sci Fi Author Wins the Edge Hill Prize!

Shocker in the short story world - Chris Beckett, author of the Turing Test, published by Elastic Press, has beaten heavyweight writers of "literary fiction" Anne Enright, Ali Smith, Gerard Donovan and Shena Mackay to run off with the Edge Hill Prize for the short story!

"I suspect Chris Beckett winning the Edge Hill Prize will be seen as a surprise in the world of books,"

said James Walton, one of the judges.

"In fact, though, it was also a bit of surprise to the judges, none of whom knew they were science fiction fans beforehand. Yet, once the judging process started, it soon became clear that The Turing Test was the book that we'd all been impressed by, and enjoyed, the most — and one by one we admitted it."

Wonderful that finally "genre" transcends its boundaries to claim the prize. Says Walton:

"It was Beckett who seemed to us to have written the most imaginative and endlessly inventive stories, fizzing with ideas and complete with strong characters and big contemporary themes. We also appreciated the sheer zest of his story-telling and the obvious pleasure he had taken in creating his fiction."

Congratulations to Chris! Read Prize organiser Ailsa Cox's sneak peak behind the scenes before the winner was announced.

AND: I've just been informed that World Fantasy Award winner Graham Joyce just won the O Henry award, the US' most prestigious award for a single short story, judged this year by AS Byatt and Tim O'Brien. Genre triumphs again!

The story An Ordinary Soldier Of The Queen, describes the hallucinatory experiences of a British Soldier in the first Gulf conflict. Byatt says she was haunted by the rhythms of the story and the seamless mixing of genres in combining the daily and the strange. O’Brien, celebrated for his own war writing, calls An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen a “superb ghost story, a wonderful story about war”. O’Brien suggests that many war stories merge with the world of magic and ghosts, for the systematic butchery of war does not always feel “real” and that sometimes a realistic story can seem to demean the essential unrealistic reality of war.

Graham Joyce, a previous winner of the World Fantasy award, is known for his blending of realism and the hallucinatory. He is the author of a dozen novels and several short stories and says he wrote the story after seeing a statistic suggesting that three-quarters of homeless people on the streets of the UK are ex-service personnel.

If this inspires in you the immediate urge to read science fiction and fantasy, click on those links to see what we've reviewed that falls under those headings (I hate the "g" word.)

Guest post: Polly Frost's Confessions of a Genre Slut

One of the many things I admire about The Short Review is the way in which it celebrates all kinds of short fiction. Recently Tania Hershman wrote about the topic of literary short fiction vs. genre short fiction. I was really fascinated by her posting, which made me think about my own attitudes and experiences.

Attitude #1: I love both writing and reading short fiction.

Attitude #2: I’ve always been puzzled by the divide between the “literary” and “genre” worlds.

And let me say first that I admire anyone who persists writing stories. And I’m grateful to readers who -- despite far too much mainstream media neglect -- continue reading short fiction.

Let’s face it: It’s hard to make money writing short fiction. It has to be one of the least practical forms of writing. Not only have commercial outlets disappeared. Agents and book publishers often discourage you from writing short fiction.

They do this despite the fact that everyone knows our schedules are choppy and our reading time is growing too scarce. It should be a great time for short fiction. Instead, too many mainstream-publishing figures put pressure on writers to“grow up” and turn out novels. Grow up, indeed. Tell it that to Chekhov! And too many readers think they aren’t doing any real reading unless they’re in the midst of something 400 pages long.

All due respect to novel-writers and novel-readers, but when a lot of the novels today feel like they should have been short stories. Good ones, often! But they feel padded-out, like the writer had been ordered by an agent or publisher to turn a good story-idea into something full-length.

The fact is, short stories don’t just offer a concise reading experience. They often have a special kind of power over readers. My mother, for example, was still affected by having read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” several decades after first reading it. In my own experience as a writer: People have written me about a one of my pieces of short fiction years after it was printed. Somehow it had stuck in their minds.

How great is this?!

Still, short fiction is something that takes commitment and love to write and publish. And it takes savvy and persistence on the part of readers to find and enjoy. I’m on the side of anyone who roots for them.

Which brings me to the topic of the war that goes on between the literary and the genre worlds. You’d think that anyone who writes or read it would be cheering for everyone else. Instead, some highbrow literary people sneer at genre stories. Meanwhile, there are genre people who are belligerent and defensive.

Zooming in, you discover other divides too. There are the genre-within-genre wars like the one that The Short Review posted about: The mundane sci fi fiction camp versus the fantastic sci fi fiction camp.

Now, in many ways I love these tiffs. What we’re seeing is writers who are passionate about what they do sounding off their art. And that’s vital for good health as well as fun to observe. Their manifestos are provocative, and they make me think about what the writers conveying in their fiction. As a writer myself, I grope my way towards my fiction. But I understand that some writers motivate themselves by writing manifestoes.
Still: How seriously to take these dust-ups?

As a Californian who grew up on loving both Roger Corman exploitation movies and Glenn Gould Bach recordings, I guess I’m a bit of a natural-born post-modernist. And as a consequence, I’ve published short fiction in a variety of genres. I’ve been published as a humor writer (two of my New Yorker pieces will be included in their upcoming “best of” anthology), and I’ve been published as a horror, sci fi and erotica writer (my collection, “Deep Inside” was put out last year by Tor).

The one thing I’ve been a total flopperoo at has been writing “literary” short stories. As a writer I got started by taking a workshop in Venice, California, from Michael Silverblatt, who’s now well-known as the radio interviewer The Bookworm. I churned out straight-faced story after straight-faced story. Then, after several weeks of this, Michael took me aside and informed me that I had no talent for writing literary stories. He softened the blow by telling me that I was very funny, and that I might want to think about writing humor. Maybe I should think more about emulating James Thurber than Italo Calvino.

Damn! But after 15 seconds of feeling wounded I started to see his point. I knew that I wasn’t a lofty marble bust. I’m a mischievous bomb-thrower -- basically a satirist and a humor writer. (In fact, Michael and I wound up co-writing several humor pieces, one of which was published in The Atlantic.)

These days I write in a variety of genres and often refer to myself as a “genre slut”: sci fi, erotica, noir, suspense, horror, and my longterm love humor. Tip to those setting out: Satire and parody are great ways to explore many different ways of creating fiction!
Despite how zigzaggy my creativity is, the one thing I always come back to is writing short. I’m working on a full-length thriller right now and my husband and I just finished co-writing, recording and directing a 14-hour radio play and 32 NYC actors. Great experiences all. Yet it’s always a rush to come back to writing short.

I suspect that many writers feel this way. Besides the fact that they’re brilliant and beautiful writers, I love the fact that Amy Hempel and Alice Munro are so devoted to short fiction. Erotica writers like Alison Tyler and Rachel Kramer Bussel continue to supply heat and shivers in compact packages. I’ve been as affected by the short tales of Philip K. Dick, Stephen King and Patricia Highsmith as by their novels. Raymond Carver and George Saunders never made any apologies for writing short. And there’s the much-too-neglected field of humor writing. As far as I’m concerned, some of the humor pieces of Ian Frazier and Roy Blount, Jr. qualify as short fiction masterpieces.

It’s all high-quality -- maybe even great -- stuff. And you may have noticed my ploy in the previous paragraph. Look at those stories and writers: literary, erotica, sci fi, crime, horror and humor. They go together nicely, don’t they? What does it really matter that they come from different camps?

So here’s my final feeling about the question. Let’s enjoy the wars, the tiffs, and the manifestos. They give us something to talk about, and they give at least some writers reasons to sit down at the computer. But let’s not overlook what our favorite short fiction shares too: insight and inspiration.

As well as the special thrill of doing self-contained pieces of fiction in short form.



Polly Frost.com
“The Fold,” the webseries Polly has co-written and co-produced. (R-rated!)
Her husband, Ray Sawhill's site.

Genre in fiction 1: Mundane Sci Fi?

As editor of the Short Review, one of my tasks is to assign each collection that we review to one or more categories on the Find Something to Read by Category page. I decided from the outset that books could appear under more than one category heading, because it didn't seem to make sense to confine them to only one: Horror, say, or Mystery. There are funny gritty stories, quirky horror, magical realist crime stories, anthologies that contain a whole wealth of different types of writing.

Recently this has led me to think about "genre" fiction: what is it and why do we need this distinction? I am new to science fiction - having been a fan of Star Trek as a kid - but reading two books for review, the Logorrhea anthology and Kelley Eskridge's Dangerous Space, have opened my eyes to what the genre is and what it isn't. It isn't necessarily aliens, starships and space wars. It is often highly imaginative, magical and what some would call "literary fiction" (another genre... more on this in a later blog post.)

On this topic, I was delighted to read this in today's Guardian Books Blog:

OK, I admit it, sci-fi is boring. After endless Star Trek re-runs, innumerable badly scripted Hollywood movies and a thousand video games with pixel-deep narrative, the once wondrous ideas of sci-fi have become yawn-inducing. Fortunately for me, beyond the world of tedious mass media sci-fi, lies the exciting world of literary science fiction or "SF" constantly producing new ideas to satisfy my hunger for wonder. Now a radical sect of SF writers and critics claim that SF needs to abandon all those wondrous ideas, and concentrate instead on the everyday and the mundane. All hail the Mundane Revolution!

This "radical sect" has a blog: Mundane-SF, which has actually been in operation since 2004 (the website it initially pointed readers to seems to have disappeared). The blog is comprised, in great part, of reviews of what it calls "mundane science fiction", science fiction which, in the words of Guardian blog writer Damien G Walter, eschews

powerful myths like faster-than-light travel and alien civilisations, myths that have been much overused and have no basis in scientific fact ... in favour of scientific realities like biotechnology or environmental change.

This is pertinent to the world of the short story because, says Walters,

Where literary fiction has long since abandoned the short form in favor of the fertile intellectual territory of Waterstones 3 for 2 tables, SF has continued to value short fiction as the arena where the genre innovates and evolves.

Readers will now have a chance to judge Mundane Sci Fi for themselves: the latest issue of British sci fi magazine Interzone, due in shops on May 8th, is the first Mundane SF special issue. But the most important point, for me as a reader looking simply for great short stories, is Walters' summing up of these stories:

The effects of climate change and the potential wonders and horrors of bio-technology loom large, as does the impact of the internet on politics, society and the individual. But very real, very human emotion lies at the heart of these stories, conveyed with a sense of literary style that puts most literary fiction to shame....A wave of technology promises (or perhaps threatens) to effect such enormous change that the next 20 years will make the last 100 look positively sedate in comparison. Mundane SF is the literature exploring how those changes will change our lives, and for all of us living through them it should be essential reading.

The point is - these are not just "science fiction" stories for fans of the "genre" - these are great pieces of writing for anyone who loves short stories. Why should SF fans be the only ones to enjoy them? Step outside your "genre" box, readers, and get stuck in to some great stories. The Fix's review of the Mundane SF special issue is here.