Earlier this month, the editors of
One Story sent out an email blast announcing the publication of the 12-year-old literary magazine’s first anthology,
One Story Collected: Stories from the 2014 Literary Debutantes. Aside from the magazine's annual "Literary Debutante Ball," honoring the seven authors featured in the collection, and a reading at Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore, the editors made no other effort to publicize the book launch. If the collection has been reviewed elsewhere, I’ve missed it. The book is being published via CreateSpace, a print-on-demand publisher owned by Amazon, which means that other than a few stray leftovers on Greenlight’s shelves, the book is only available for purchase online.
Yet despite its understated launch,
One Story Collected is one of the strongest collections of short fiction I’ve read since
Claire Vaye Watkins’s 2012 stunner
Battleborn. Not every story in
Collected is a gem, but the hits-to-misses ratio is high, and two stories in the collection,
Molly Antopol’s “The Quietest Man” and
Amelia Kahaney’s “Fire Season,” are lights-out terrific. If
One Story Collected is a stethoscope to the heart of contemporary American fiction, the news is good: despite a run of economic shocks to the publishing industry, the muscle that pumps fresh blood into the system is still beating like a tom-tom.
In a subtler way, the collection offers reassuring evidence that there is in fact a functioning system to pump new blood into. In the digital age, anyone can start a literary magazine, but to keep going past the first few issues a journal needs to develop a revenue stream, and for publications with more writers sending in their work than readers willing to pay to read it, it makes increasing sense to monetize the submission process. Hence, the boom in writing contests, and the advent of online journals like
Narrative, which offers its content for free but charges a fee for unsolicited submissions.
From its inception in 2002,
One Story's co-founders
Hannah Tinti and
Maribeth Batcha, have been more creative than most in finding novel ways to leverage their journal’s sterling reputation. The pair set up
One Story as a non-profit, enabling its donors to get tax breaks, and they have run workshops taught by Tinti and others, sponsored a writing conference on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, and thrown fundraisers like the Debutante Ball that
One Story Collected grew out of. One thing they don't do is charge fees for writing contests. (The journal did once run a fee-based contest in 2004, and
One Teen Story, the journal’s new young-adult offshoot, runs a contest today, but there’s no entry fee.) In other words, in a digital world that keeps making it easier for writers to submit to literary magazines but harder for those magazines to sell the work they publish at a price above zero, it is refreshing to see
One Story choosing to monetize its actual product, the stories it publishes, rather than all the writers itching to appear in its pages.
It helps, of course, that the stories are good. As its subtitle suggests,
One Story Collected is not a standard best-of anthology, but a celebration of the magazine’s “Literary Debutantes,” seven
One Story authors who published debut books in the past year. The best of the lot, for my money, is the opening story, Antopol’s “The Quietest Man,” a small miracle of compression that manages to fit a novel’s worth of humor and anguish into 24 pages. The quietest man is Tomás Novak, a one-time dissident in Communist-era Czechoslovakia famous for maintaining a stoic silence under police interrogation. Having settled in the U.S., where he has traded on his revolutionary past to eke out a living as a writer and teacher, Tomás has learned that his daughter, Daniela, has written a play about him, which he fears will focus not on his dissident years, but on his lousy history as a father.
The story turns on a fraught weekend Tomás spends with 23-year-old Daniela, who was raised almost exclusively by his ex-wife, whom Tomás fears has good reason to have filled his daughter’s ears with unpleasant stories. The two warily circle each other, each suppressing a secret, as Tomás struggles to extract from Daniela the version of the truth she plans to tell about him, until it dawns on him that he is using the same tactics on his daughter the Czech police used on him. And yet he can’t stop. “Part of me was saddened that my daughter was the kind of person who would crack so easily,” Tomás writes, “that the wall she’d built around herself could be so easily kicked down, but a bigger part of me just needed to know how the play would begin.”
If “The Quietest Man” is a propulsive interior detective story, the success of Kahaney’s “Fire Season,” set in a marginal subdivision on the edge of California’s Death Valley, relies more on its foreboding setting and odd, finely drawn characters. The story opens with 13-year-old Marni gazing at her face, “sloped and shiny as a waxed apple,” in the mirror, “amazed to find that without warning, an endless period of ugliness seems to have finally lifted from her, leaving someone new. Someone altogether better.” Kahaney sets off Marni’s smoldering desire for a neighborhood boy named Pablo with a wildfire burning in the hills that threatens to engulf the subdivision. As the wildfire creeps in, Kahaney writes, the “kids are jangly, squirmy” while their parents “sit like bullfrogs in darkened living rooms, having abandoned their usual puttering efficiency to stare glassy-eyed at muted televisions, lulled by the soft wheeze of air conditioners.” The story, which rises to its crescendo in an unsettling scene in which Marni and Pablo hurl rocks at each other as hard as they can, carries the emotional weight of poetry with the assurance of naturalistic prose.
A studied quirkiness is the stock-in-trade of so much contemporary short fiction, and occasionally the writers in
One Story Collected take it too far.
James Scott’s meandering “The Strings Attached” takes 26 pages of misadventures with the oddball natives of the all too aptly named town of Tangent to drain the drama from a tale of a man grieving over the deaths of his infant twin daughters. Similarly,
Rachel Cantor tries a bit too hard to crank up the wacky in “Picnic After the Flood,” though, in her case, her exertions are redeemed by sure-fire comic timing and the lingering anguish of a single mom hoping not to have her heart broken by a man who seems too good to be true.
The writers in
One Story Collected work for their readers’ attention, but there is little of the desperation one sometimes feels when literary authors start tossing in gratuitous murder plots and characters with magical powers, as if the stories of actual people leading actual lives wouldn’t be enough to stop readers from peeking at their Facebook feeds. Thus,
David James Poissant’s “Refund” taps into the hot-button issue of parental competitiveness over children’s IQ, but at bottom the story is a simple, and dead-on-accurate, portrait of a crumbling marriage. Likewise,
Ben Stroud’s “Eraser” riffs and sallies in all manner of seemingly non-linear ways, but always returns to the core story of a boy coming to terms with the gruff man his mother has chosen as her second husband.
It may seem curious at first that
One Story is publishing its first anthology on its own, but Tinti says she and the other editors never sought out a traditional publisher for
One Story Collected. “We wanted to test the waters, so [we] just thought we’d try it ourselves,” she wrote in an email. “We’re excited to make these stories available (we’ve sold out of many of these in back issues), and most important, to help promote/spread the word on our Literary Debutantes’ new books.”
This makes an interesting kind of sense. By relying on print-on-demand technology and spending little to publicize the launch,
One Story is hedging its bet. If readers find the book and like it, then
One Story will have found a new way to recoup its investment in stories it has already edited and published. If, on the other hand, no one buys it, what really has the magazine lost? But if it’s a cautious gamble, it is a gamble nevertheless, one that turns on the quality of the writers the magazine has published, rather than the desire of writers everywhere to be among their number. This is a sign that the editors of
One Story believe in the work they've published. In the case of
One Story Collected, it isn't hard to see why.
The more I learn about World War II, the more it fascinates me. I feel like most people have a vague, middle-ground understanding of the war. Two generations removed from the war, I have trouble fathoming both the global scale of the conflict and the impact it had on hundreds of millions of individuals. I had a child’s school-taught understanding of the war until I read a novel, actually. The second part of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement tells of the British evacuation from France at Dunkirk after the Germans overran the country. It was an important event in the war, but one that I had never really learned much about, and McEwan’s rich storytelling made me want to learn more. I also realized that I ought to know more about the war that both of my grandfathers fought in, one in Europe and one in the Pacific.
Hi,
I have three recommendations. They cover different sides of the war and require no special knowledge of the military in order to enjoy them. They are wonderfully written.
The first is a novel, the Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. It's about a crew of an anti-submarine corvette in the North Atlantic. I like it because you see how wearing it was. The crew gets on board in 1939 and those that live get off in 1945. The drudgery and terror are nicely described.
Eric Bergerud's Touched With Fire is great. It concerns the land war in New Guinea and the Solomons. The fighting differed from Europe in a number of ways. For one it is tropical, making the fight somewhat similar to Vietnam. For another the two sides were more closely matched in air and sea power which forced the US to fight differently. It's an excellent read.
Antony Beevor's Fall of Berlin 1945 is great, but is also terribly depressing. The end of the catastrophic Russo-German conflict is described in all its brutal horror.
Tripp
Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres is the story of a Greek island that comes under the control of the Italians and then the Germans in WWII. It's a fantastic read and one of those relatively untold stories of the war you were mentioning above. I highly recommend it.
I second anonymous' recommendation of Corelli. Just a great book.
A few nonfiction choices. In my opinion, Beevor's "Stalingrad" is the better of his two books on the war. Stalingrad was the true turning point in the European war (although you will see many smart folks argue that the turning point was Pearl Harbor, the Russian Front broke the Wehrmacht and Stalingrad, with Kursk following, was the breaking point). The scale of the battle is just amazing. I loved Atkinson's book, but reading about Stalingrad makes you wonder whether we could have won a battle like that and thankful we did not have to find out. Richard Overy wrote a very good overview of the Russian Front as well, in "Russia's War". William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" sets the standard and rightly so. For a thousand page tome it is incredibly readable and never less than fascinating. John Lukacs wrote a great book about the period immediately following Dunkirk, when any sane nation would have sued for peace and the British decided to fight on alone ("Five Days in May").
Oddly, or perhaps not, there is a lot of good detective fiction set in Europe immediately prior to and during the war. Robert Janes and Alan Furst are both good, as is Eric Ambler (the latter two are probably better described as spy novelists). If you get nothing else from this long entry (apologies), put this one in the queue: Philip Kerr wrote three detective novels that have been anthologized under the title "Berlin Noir". They are set in Berlin in 1933, 1938 or so (just prior to Kristallnacht) and in post-war Berlin around 1946. Spectacular – Kerr hasn't written anything close to this good since, but these are just fantastic. The changes in German society over the course of the three books are worth the price of admission by themselves, and the stories are quite good.
Wow. Great suggestions. I'd love to hear more if anyone else has ideas.
I second the Beevor recommendations. Both are excellent.
For a more personal look at the war, I recommend Studs Terkel's oral history of the war: The Good War. I'm a sucker for almost any Terkel book, but this one stands out even that body of excellent works.
Great post. A guy like me doesn't find many readers interested in the warrior condition much these days. I recomend Flag of Our Fathers by James Bradley. Clint Eastwood is working on making it into a movie. I could make recommendations all day long, but I think you have a good start with the books already suggested.
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich-Shier
Patton-Ladilas Farago
Macarther-Manchester
In Harms Way-Stanton
Citizen Soldiers – Ambrose
http://www.historynet.com/wwii/reviews/
The war produced a lot of good fiction. I’d say all the famous books are still worth reading: The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, The Caine Mutiny, Catch-22, even A Bell for Adano and Tales of the South Pacific. A couple others I remember liking are Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens and A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown. For contemporary non-fiction you won’t do much better than Serenade to the Big Bird by Bert Stiles.
I'm just a few chapters into Paul Fussell's Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. His The Great War and Modern Memory is one of the best WWI books I've ever read, and so far in Wartime he is proving just as insightful on WWII. He served in WWII himself as an infantry officer and that firsthand experience adds another layer to the analysis.
"Articles of War" by Nick Arvin–this new novel was inspired by Arvin's grandfather's service in WWll. I've heard it compared to Red Badge of Courage. There was lobbying here to have it as the "one book" selection for in our city–it may be set in WWll but it's certainly timely today.
See you at the party! Wendi
The Beevor book on the Battle of Stalingrad is indeed good, but here's a couple of other suggestions on the eastern front, a side of the war which Americans tend to not know much about. Years ago I read a book by a German war correspondent: it's just called Stalingrad by Heinz Schroter. It's doubtless out of print and it's journalism more than history and only from the German side. But still, it's worth reading. The author was at the battle and the horrific stories and sheer immediacy conveyed by the book gives you a real sense of what it was like to endure this military disaster from the German side. I recently also read Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army by Vasily Grossman. Grossman was a Russian writer who worked as a war correspondent; most of the book is excerpts from his journals and reporting. Again, there's some vivid writing about the unbelievably horrible eastern front, and the entire book gives you a sense of the mixture of idealism and brutality which characterized the Soviet side of that monumental conflict.
I keep coming back to this thread to note down the various recommendations that are being posted. Chatten's recommendation re: German perspectives and the Eastern front reminded me of a couple more books that I wanted to mention. One of the best books that I read last year was Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS. It's an extraordinarily powerful memoir that has to do more with the aftermath in Germany than with the war itself. I posted a mini-review of it on my blog in connection with my top ten reads from last year here. Another excellent book which covers similar territory in fiction is Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader. It's been a while since I read that one but I remember finding it deeply disturbing and very thought provoking.
"The Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer (Engrossing memoirs written by a German soldier); Ian Kershaw's recent biography of Hitler is excellent — though there are other good ones, his is bifurcated and the second volume deals with the 1936-1945 time period, which fits your bill nicely; "A World at Arms" by Weinberg (massive and slow-going, but comprehensive); "Ordinary Men" by Browning (the banality of evil — a look at the killing squads that moved through Poland in the wake of the fighting); I agree with previous posters that Beevor's books are worth your time, and also that "Fall of Berlin" is incredibly bleak; don't waste your time with "The Rise and Fall" by Shirer — it was poor history by the time it was published; also suggest you steer clear of Ambrose. One final suggestion: "The Book Thief" by Zusak (marketed as teen-lit, but a well-written).
I don't know if you're still checking this, it's been a while since anyone posted but the book that got me started reading WWII stuff, that also does a great job of conveying the emotion tied to the war is "Ghost Soldiers" by Hampton Sides. It focuses on one event in the war, in the Pacific, but is a great read, also very well researched. I'll also differ from the previous poster and suggest reading at least the first third of Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." It was very helpful in understanding how it all came about, although it is very dry and you have to be really interested to get through it.