Short Story Week at The Millions: A Brief Introduction

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February 18, 2008 | 1

Recently, the innovative literary magazine One-Story launched a campaign to “Save the Short Story.” As the essay below suggests, we at The Millions found this effort admirable, and also puzzling. Is “the short story” even a single thing? And, if so, does it need saving? On both questions, the evidence seems mixed. We can agree, however, that short stories seem to have lost some of their prominence in the popular imagination. Mainstream book coverage tends to track the agendas of the publishing industry; those agendas, in turn, tend to be driven by coverage. With our “Short Story Week,” we aim to subvert the cycle. Between now and Friday, we hope

  • to revisit the work of living masters,
  • to celebrate the writers who paved their way,
  • to talk a bit about teaching the short story, and writing it,
  • to link to interesting short-story sites and periodicals
  • to provide a selective bibliography of our favorite story collections,
  • and, as always, to hear from you.

In short: we hope you enjoy it. We’ll be linking to the week’s installments below.

is the author of City on Fire and A Field Guide to the North American Family. In 2017, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.

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Weird Tales of the Unexplained…

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January 29, 2007
Buzz Poole's Madonna of the Toast documents the mysterious appearance of icons sacred and profane, in rock formations, housewares, and foodstuffs the world over. A potato chip shaped like Bob Hope? It's here. Vladimir Lenin on a shower curtain? Likewise. And it wouldn't very well be Madonna of the Toast without the titular grilled cheese, which - you guessed it - NEVER GOES BAD.Poole has launched a blog where observers of related paranormal phenomena can document their encounters. If you've recently run across a Charlotte Bronte-shaped underarm stain, or a puddle that looks like William Shatner, we can only suggest you head over to the blog and share your experience... Inquiring minds, after all, want to know.
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The Blow-Up

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August 7, 2007 | 1
Following the lead of powerhouses Bookforum and The New York Review, the interdisciplinary magazine BOMB appears to be in the middle of a major project to make a lot of its content available free, online. This should be a boon to highbrow bibliophiles. For years, BOMB's author interviews have offered deep perspective on the state of the art, while its monthly publication schedule has indemnified it against the faddishness that characterizes so much cultural coverage. Visitors to the new version of www.bombsite.com can browse interviews with the likes of Peter Nadas and Roberto Bolano (archived from 2001)... as well as the current cover-story: a conversation with Kate Valk, my favorite actor in New York and "a national treasure." Be sure also to peruse the BOMB's excellent literary supplement, First Proof.
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Birthday Loot

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January 9, 2006 | 2 min read
I got a package today from my inlaws who decided to get me five books for my birthday (which was Jan. 5). They came right off my wishlist, so, of course, they're exactly what I wanted. Two of the five are coffee-table books. I'll be spending a lot of time with the utterly gorgeous book The World on Sunday. Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano have put together really nice reproductions of Joseph Pulitzer's colorful newspaper. Baker's foreword and Brentano's captions really elevate the book. I wrote more about it last month. The other big book I received is a monograph, put out by Aperture, of photography by Robert Capa. Capa is famous for his war photography from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. His photographs, all in black and white, are unflinching and powerful. He's essential to the grand tradition of war reportage. (This one actually wasn't on my wishlist but they knew I'd like it.) In keeping with the Capa theme, I also received his illustrated memoir of World War II, Slightly Out of Focus. I also got The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux which Andrew wrote about a few months back, and Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Oster, which I think I first heard about at Language Hat.
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From the Book Pages, Briefly

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February 26, 2005
A nice rememberance of Hunter S. Thompson by his friend Paul Theroux in The Guardian.William T. Vollmann's substantial look at Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare by Phillip Short in the NY Times.Deborah Solomon sits down for a long chat with Jonathan Safran Foer which reveals this: "he received a $500,000 advance for his first novel and a $1 million advance for his second, meaning that he is probably the highest-earning literary novelist under 30."
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One comment:

  1. "Short Story Week" – what a terrific idea! You'd think in these over-scheduled days the short story would be more popular than ever, but when was the last time you saw a short story collection on the NYT Bestseller list? Or on any national bestseller list? Why only five days, though? Does the short story deserve only a short week? Some of your readers (this reader at least) mostly access this blog on weekends. [Note: this comment was written on a Saturday morning.]

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Meta-Critic Madness

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July 14, 2007
The Rake put together a terrific column on lazy reviews, the prevalence of lists masquerading as criticism, and the army of meta-critics that has emerged online. I'm late in linking to it, but it's a very worthwhile read. A taste:Yes, Virginia, your pal the Rake has been willing witness to countless hours of VH1's laziest programming. He's not made of stone. The professional listmakers' core insanity lies in the way in which they hold up sub-B list comedians and other cultural freaks as insightful, worthy commentators. Certainly there are subjects upon which Ron Jeremy is an expert, but the Top 100 Scorchtastic Movie Kisses is not one of them, not least of all because the very object of his commentary is chimerical.There's more, too.
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Visual Lit Crit

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October 9, 2007 | 2
I've got an affinity for diagrams. I find the books of Edward Tufte fascinating, and my interest in such things extends even to the "infographics" contained in most newspapers. I like the idea of distilling something complex down to a visual representation.And what is more complex than Finnegans Wake, which was the subject of a dense and mysterious-looking diagram from the book Vision in Motion by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Richard Kostelanetz highlights the diagram in an essay about Moholy-Nagy, about whom he writes "Need it be said that no other modern artist wrote as well about literature?"Kostelanetz goes on to write "What Moholy established in Vision in Motion was a model of writing about all the arts as a single entity, to be called art, whose branches (literature, painting, etc.) were merely false conveniences conducive to specialization and isolation." (via)This multi-discipline approach would seem to be of particular use in our multimedia world. It's brings to mind another creative attempt to parse a complex work of literature via non-traditional means: the Pynchon wiki.
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