Paper Laurels: On a More Diverse ‘Best American Short Stories’

Essays
January 27, 2017 | 2 books mentioned 16 3 min read

Related Books:

cover

In the latest edition of The Best American Short Stories, series editor Heidi Pitlor and guest editor Junot Díaz picked a wide and diverse selection of stories and authors for this year’s anthology. Hailing new voices (Yuko Sakata, Lisa Ko) and established alike (Andrea Barrett, Karen Russell), the editors in their respective introductions mused — as is common most years — on the relevance and startling power of short fiction today. Unlike The Pushcart Prize anthology, The Best American Short Stories allows national and transnational periodicals to submit — as long as the magazine is published within North America. For decades, the slicks (Harper’s, The Atlantic, Playboy, Esquire) played a vital role in publishing literary fiction, and these magazines were often rewarded with plaudits from the anthology. Today, only one — The New Yorker — dominates the percentage of reprinted and noted stories in The Best American Short Stories.

coverThis is understandable. Unlike its peers, The New Yorker publishes 50 issues a year, each one containing a short story or a culled novel fragment. Until a poorly-paid graduate student sets out to write a dissertation on the stories of The New Yorker, we have only subjective opinions as to what constitutes one of its “typical” offerings. Arguably there is no such identifiable thing as a New Yorker story (other than the story being well-told and the writing edited to an immaculate state). The magazine publishes a wide repertoire of stylistic and artistic modes, spanning realism and postmodernism, fables and modern-day fairytales. More to the point, the diverse array of recent authors includes George Saunders, Etgar Keret, Joy Williams, Charles Yu, Robert Coover, Salman Rushdie, and Zadie Smith. With such an eclectic group of authors, does the fiction of The New Yorker have anything in common? Perhaps critics may argue a sizable portion of the magazine’s stories concern the lives of the middle-classes and that the characters are generally heteronormative and/or white. Indeed, Marlon James once complained in a public Facebook post of highbrow magazines privileging a certain type of story that appealed to “older white women critics.” For James these stories were “Astringent, observed, clipped, wallowing in its own middle-style prose and private ennui.” Whether completely fair to The New Yorker or not, perhaps the Díaz-chosen stories in The Best American Short Stories offer a different demographic of readers a chance to see less represented voices and read about the unfamiliar inner lives and struggles of a more diverse set of characters. Perhaps change is taking place from the bottom-up, in the so-called little magazines.

Let’s look at the data: Each year for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s esteemed annual, Pitlor sifts through thousands of stories from the gamut of literary journals (and the few slicks) in the United States and Canada. In discussion with that year’s guest editor, the stories are whittled down to a manageable number. Ultimately, the book reprints 20 stories and notes 100 other “Distinguished Stories.” For the 2016 edition, Díaz and Pitlor selected 14 stories from The New Yorker. In previous years, the stats played out as follows: 15 (2015), 19 (2014), 24 (2013), 14 (2012), 26 (2011). In other words, over those six years, the percentage of New Yorker stories fell from 21.7 percent to 11.7 percent. As in 2012, it is possible this year’s selection was a down-year for The New Yorker, a blip on its record. It is also possible, though, the choice of an inclusivity-minded guest editor opened up a space for other venues to bask in the limelight. Admittedly subjective, the concerns of many of this year’s stories also speak to — and represent — traditionally marginalized voices and characters. In this time of Donald Trump’s presidency, the celebrated depiction of multitudes, of what “Best” and “American” means, can only be a good thing.

Smaller journals such as the Iowa Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Madrid, and e-flux made inroads this year, adding to the previous accomplishments of Hobart, Fifth Wednesday, American Short Fiction, and DailyLit. Yet, we must not forget that statistically, unless writers publish in top-tier literary journals — Ploughshares, Tin House, Southern Review, One Story, Glimmer Train, etc. — the odds of being honored are still against them. This is important because inclusion in The Best American Short Stories is often viewed as one of the pinnacles of achievement for short story writers and generally leads to more professional opportunities: tenure-track jobs, fellowships, book deals. Unagented writers usually become represented. (Thus, in this publishing-world ouroboros, writers lower the odds of being accepted in The New Yorker!)

At least for now, The New Yorker’s loosened grip on the Best American series offers the potential for up-and-coming writers and writers of color, and for less-commercially viable fiction, to be seriously considered for the anthology. We’ll see what next year brings.

Essays Notable Articles

Is Big Back?

Essays Notable Articles
September 8, 2010 | 2 books mentioned 23 6 min read

Is Google making us stupid? Is reading in America a dying pursuit? Will novel srviv in age of twtr? String together enough of these think-piece propositions, and you begin to notice a pattern. Ostensibly open-ended, their very existence presumes an answer in the affirmative: yes, Google is making us stupid…at least, too stupid to entertain the possibility that this is other than a yes/no question.

If the presumption is correct, we might reasonably expect to see it reflected in the evolving form of the literary novel. Just last month, in a cover story on Jonathan Franzen, Time‘s Lev Grossman postulated that “the trend in fiction over the past decade has been toward specialization: the closeup, the miniature, the microcosm.” And in practice, a young writer presenting her manuscript  to editors quickly surmises that the working definition for a novel is no longer Randall Jarrell‘s “a prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it,” but “a prose narrative of 235 to 325 pages that we can bring out as a paperback original.” Joshua Cohen, the 29-year-old author of several books, recently told The New York Observer that, of the eight publishers who passed on his novel Witz (800 pp), “One of them told me they would publish it if it was 200 pages…. One said 10 years ago they would have done it, back when people read novels.”

But if, as Grossman suggests, the “literary megafauna of the 1990s” no longer roam the earth, how to explain Time‘s interest in Freedom (576 pp)? Moreover, how to explain the thicket of big novels that surround it on the shelves of America’s bookstores – not only Witz, but also A.S. Byatt‘s The Children’s Book (675 pages), and Brady Udall‘s The Lonely Polygamist (599 pp), and Rick Moody‘s The Four Fingers of Death (725 pp), and Karl Marlantes‘ Matterhorn (592 pp), and Ralph Ellison‘s Three Days Before the Shooting (1136 pp), and Hilary Mantel‘s Wolf Hall (560 pp), and Javier Marías‘ Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (1255 pp) and Adam Levin‘s The Instructions (1030 pp)? Surveying those shelves, one begins to suspect that the spread of micro-designations like “literary megafauna” (or less charitably, “phallic meganovels”), rather than the plenitude or scarcity of the species in question, is the true marker of our changing culture.

Not so long ago, the phrase “long novel” was no less redundant than “short novel.” The serial publication practices of the 19th Century nudged the Victorian novelist toward amplitude. Multiply 16 (the number of pages in a signature) by two (the number of signatures in an installment) by 20 (the number of installments favored by Dickens and his publishers), and you get 640 serial pages – the length, give or take, of Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit, and Bleak House. Not to mention Vanity Fair and Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda… Soon, Trollope would be conceptualizing his novels explicitly as two- or three-volume affairs. My Oxford World Classics edition of Barchester Towers retains its two-volume pagination; it runs from 1 to 271, and then from 1 to 280. Toward the end of the second volume, the author begins to make asides about having to reach a certain page count.

In the age of offset printing, the long novel is more heterodox. Not much unites Moody and Marías and Mantel, other than the fact that they are currently stacked half-read on my nightstand. (There’s nothing like the birth of a child to foreground the sheer length of a book in one’s mind.) To yoke these writers together is thus to risk several kinds of reductionism. Most importantly (and speaking of Trollope): one doesn’t want to conflate geometric greatness with the aesthetic kind. Some of the best novels I’ve read recently are shorter than American presses tend to publish. (In the Spanish-speaking world, in particular, the short novel seems to have thrived in a way it hasn’t Stateside. A parallel essay may be warranted). Still, the current profusion of long novels would seem to complicate the picture of the Incredible Shrinking Attention Span.

Publishers’ willingness to take a chance on a long book circa 2010 may be directly connected to chances taken in the past. The fierce bidding, in 2007, for Jonathan Littell‘s The Kindly Ones (992 pp), a demanding work in translation, surely owes something to the rapt reception of Roberto Bolaño‘s The Savage Detectives (600 pp) and subsequent widespread anticipation for 2666 (912 pp). McSweeney’s may be hoping The Instructions repeats the success of Chris Adrian‘s The Children’s Hospital (615 pp). And David Foster Wallace‘s Infinite Jest (1104 pp) continues to have a remarkable second life on the backlist, which is still the publisher’s bread and butter. Biographical books and articles by David Lipsky and D.T. Max, as well as copious online discussion, sustain interest in the book. A clerk at a local bookstore told me last week that, for the last two months, it’s been flying off the shelves. Indeed, après Jest, doubters may catch a whiff of decadence, or at least self-consciousness, around the efforts of Cohen, Levin, and other candidates for wunderkindency.

To be even more crassly economic, in the slog of the Great Recession, the long novel offers readers a compelling value proposition. One may revile all the works of William T. Vollmann, and admire those of the Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin, but even at 55 bucks, Imperial (1344 pp) offers a wildly higher hours-to-dollars ratio (it’s roughly one-to-one) than The Beauty Salon (72 pp). (Well, Imperial isn’t actually a novel, but it feels weird to discuss long books and exclude Vollmann’s megaliths.) To put it another way: Ann Beattie’s Walks With Men (102 pp) will cost you about as much as a trip to the local multiplex, and last about as long. And let’s not forget that publishers can charge more for a long book than a short one. This helps explain why the Harry Potter novels kept getting longer and longer… On the other hand, barring a guarantee of Potter-like sales, publishers hate big books, as Cohen learned the hard way. They’re expensive to print, to ship, and to warehouse. And, to compound the problem, reviewers hate long novels. How much easier to say of Tom Rachman‘s The Imperfectionists (288 pp) than of, say, Joseph McElroy‘s Women and Men (1191 pp), “It’s so good I had to read it twice.”

For a deeper explanation of the long novel’s enduring health, we have to look toward something harder to quantify: the construction of the reader. The more we’re told we’re becoming readers of blogs, of texts, of tweets, of files the more committing to a big book feels like an act of resistance. To pick up a novel in excess of 600 pages is to tell oneself, “I am going to spend twenty-four to forty-eight hours of my life with a book, rather than the newspaper, the internet, or the smartphone. I am going to feel it in my muscles” (Some will object here that lugging Infinite Jest on the subway is more a way of saying, “Look at me!” But surely matters of style, and of gender, are at play here; no one levels the same charge at readers of Marguerite Young.) The desire to escape the hive-mind of cyberspace – to be, once more, a solitary reader – may also be at play in the rise of “the Kindle-proof book”: the book so tailored to the codex form that it can’t yet be reproduced electronically. Think of The Original of Laura, or of Reif Larsen‘s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, or of New Directions’ editions of B.S. Johnson‘s The Unfortunates, or Anne Carson‘s Nox (actually more of a scroll), or Robert Walser’s Microscripts.

At the very least, the current boom, or miniboom, in big books should tell us that novelists still believe in this kind of reader.  In the end, this may be enough to ensure her survival; just as the audience shapes the writer’s habits, the writer, by the demands she chooses to make on her imaginary readers, calls her audience into being. One  of the underappreciated things about Franzen is that he writes as if the novel still (as Benjamin Kunkel puts it) “dominate[s] the landscape like a mountain range.” And lo and behold, there he is on the cover of Time!

One doesn’t want to draw a veil over the various corporate machinations that made that possible. At the end of the day, though, a large number of readers are, like their 19th Century antecedents, currently reading and thinking about and talking about a work of fiction whose physical dimensions signal a corresponding largeness of intellect and spirit. Surely, we can agree that that’s a good thing. For amid all the debatable, slippery stuff about our evolving consciousness, the relationship between the novel and a certain quality of attention appears to be inescapable. Whether in long or otherwise demanding books, or in long or otherwise demanding sentences, or in prodigious subtleties of perspective, writers of the 21st century continue to seek out an audience possessed of that attention. And, in defiance (so far) of predictions to the contrary, readers keep rising up to meet them.

Essays Notable Articles
| 2 books mentioned 23 6 min read
Essays Screening Room

Screenwriting 101: What Fiction Writers Learn from Star Wars

Essays Screening Room
July 28, 2016 | 2 books mentioned 5 4 min read
Before my students begin to learn screenplay format, I first ask them to consider their film’s major dramatic question, or MDQ. In screenwriting, the MDQ is a yes-or-no question that is answered by the climax. For instance, in the 1977 classic Star Wars: A New Hope, the MDQ would be, 'Will Luke blow up the Death Star?'
Essays Screening Room
| 2 books mentioned 5 4 min read
● ● ●
Essays

He Hit Send: On the Awkward but Necessary Role of Technology in Fiction

Essays
August 8, 2012 | 2 books mentioned 50 7 min read

1.
“Can the hoary trope of mistaken identity still play in the age of Google images?” asks Alex Witchel in the New York Times Book Review. Witchel is talking about the premise of Michael Frayn’s new novel Skios and soon answers herself: “Well, no,” she says, “but since the author is Michael Frayn…it’s tempting to cut him some slack.”

Is it? Maybe — it’s fiction, after all, and that being the case Frayn can do whatever he wants — but as a reader, and a writer, I wonder about that slack. More generally, I wonder about works of fiction that take place in a world identical to that which you and I inhabit, except for one thing: technology is all but ignored. I’m not referring to Luddite authors here — to Jonathan Franzen’s rejection of e-books and Twitter. I’m talking about whether a character in a literary novel set in the year 2012 need even be aware of Twitter, or at the very least, email.

It isn’t hard to make a case against including technology in fiction.

First, technology can be awkward to write about. Also, to read about. The jargon is clumsy: download, reboot, global positioning device. It’s embarrassing, really. So I understand an author’s impulse to avoid littering pages of otherwise lyrical prose with the bleep-boop-beep of tech speak. For this reason, authors often forgo current technologies when they want their characters to communicate with one another, or to reveal important, plot-forwarding information. I get it. What could be less romantic than a text message?

Fiction allows for a certain level of restraint, after all, where the author need not include a protagonist’s every bathroom break or end each scene with the characters saying goodbye. Why then, if it’s common practice to avoid including other unglamorous functions of characters’ daily lives — like said bathroom break — is it necessary to show them texting and refreshing their inboxes?

Think of it this way: in most cases, a bowel movement will not move the plot forward; an email will.

Despite all the trouble technology might cause, when it’s absent from contemporary novels, a big white elephant appears on the page and starts ambling around. (Perhaps searching for an unprotected Wi-Fi network?) Usually these are good books, full of beautiful language and arresting characters that teach me what it means to be human. But, as was the case with Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, the obvious absence of things like search engines and smart phones makes me pause and think, “Couldn’t she have at least Googled her father’s name before she set off to the Arctic in search of him?”

In “A Kind of Vast Fiction” — an essay in the form of an email thread published in The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books (edited by Jeff Martin and The Millions’ C. Max Magee) — David Gates and Jonathan Lethem discuss strategies for including, and avoiding, technology in fiction. Midway through the conversation, after Gates admits to being wary of certain social networking sites, Lethem asks, “So you’re Googling and YouTubing, if not Twizzling or Fnorgling, fair enough. But are your characters doing the same? Do you find it as difficult as I do to get this un-Brave, no-longer-that-New World onto the page in any credible way?”  Gates’s response is packed with insight:
I have no idea how to handle this new mode of living (I guess “living” is the word) in fiction. I probably spend more time emailing and reading online than I do having non-virtual human contact — and I bet I’m not that unusual. If my characters were like that, would their lives be eventful enough to write about? On the other hand, if I write about people for whom the internet is — as far as the reader can see — peripheral or nonexistent, am I not essentially writing historical fiction? In the last story I finished, I used the expedient of sending my main character on a vacation where she’s sworn to limit her internet and cell phone use. And how do you deal with the problem of writing something that may be dated by the time the book comes out? My novel Preston Falls, which appeared in 1998, has a now-hilarious account of an email exchange — “He hit Send,” and so forth. And I just received a piece of student fiction which mentions Facebook and Skype in adjacent paragraphs; my instinct is that this is showing off, but maybe it’s no different from Jane Austen mentioning a fortepiano and a huswife on the same page.
I’m interested in novels that render what Gates calls “this new mode of living” — those that successfully incorporate technology into their characters’ experiences. The following came to mind when I began to think about what recent works of fiction had either pulled this off or at least tried.

2.
Consider Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding:
The fact that they didn’t communicate by cell phone, didn’t chat or text, could reasonably be chalked up to the fact that they didn’t need to, they lived fifty yards apart and saw each other five days a week, but then again the students did little but chat and text, text messages were their surest form of intimacy, and to never have texted or been texted by Owen, not to know Owen’s number even for emergency purposes, not that this was an emergency, seemed suddenly to expose a great gulf between them.
The above appears almost 300-pages into this 512-page novel. Though The Art of Fielding takes place on a college campus, this is one of the first mentions of texting in the book. And I can recall no mention of social networking in the first few hundred pages. This struck me as odd, perhaps because I recently spent two years on a university campus as a graduate student; I’m all too aware of how fiercely attached students are to technology. (I saw more bicycle accidents than I can count at USC because cyclists tend to keep both their hands and their eyes glued to iPhone screens while they ride.) So when these basic technologies are finally acknowledged in the book, the moment feels inevitable, as if the white elephant has at last grown impatient and begun to scuff his great foot, threatening to charge.

But the above excerpt is more than a cursory reference to text messages. This paragraph-long neurotic meditation, written from the point of view of sixty-year-old Westish College president Guert Affenlight (who has fallen in love with a student), provides the book’s most profound thoughts on modern relationships. College student or otherwise, who hasn’t known the specific despair of being unable to get a hold of a lover? These days, to get a hold of means to text or to Skype or to email with an all caps subject line. Chad Harbach knows this. He might have fought it at first, but with this passage he illustrates that there is no way around mentioning technology — that if your characters aren’t going to use it they still need to acknowledge it. Because either way, it’s going to affect them: they are alive and in love in the Twenty-First Century.

Now here are a few sections from early on in Jennifer Egan’s 2006 novel The Keep. In it, Danny has traveled from New York to stay at his cousin’s remote castle-cum-New-Age-resort, somewhere in Austria, Germany or the Czech Republic (he isn’t sure), where there is no internet or cell connection:
Danny tried to get away after breakfast to set up his satellite dish. The need to be back in touch was getting uncomfortable, distracting, like a headache or a sore toe or some other low-grade physical thing that after a while starts to blot out everything else.
And when he finally does get his satellite dish hooked up (is there any less elegant sounding piece of equipment than a satellite dish?), it soon falls into a mucky, black swimming pool and he in turn chucks his phone into the forest:
Eventually Danny calmed down enough to start looking for his phone. The longer he groped in the cypress, pulling threads in his jacket and sending fat little birds squawking out into the air, the more precious that clunky plastic thing started to get in his head. Like a relic. Just to have it. And there it was, finally, caught between two branches. Danny felt like sobbing. He couldn’t resist holding the phone up to his ear one more time.
Maybe that’s all a tad melodramatic, but isn’t it accurate that even in 2006 a person who’d been separated from his cell phone would be brought to some level of hysteria? It isn’t for nothing that there are two ways of being haunted by a missing cell phone: the phantom weight of it in your jeans pocket, and the phantom vibration of a call you couldn’t possibly have received. You miss the object — the gadget — and you miss what it represents. Egan’s use of technology in this book is successful because it speaks to both gadget lust and a longing to be in touch in a way that only technology can deliver.

A quarter of the way into his 2009 novel Await Your Reply Dan Chaon plugs in a concise, seemingly arbitrary chapter written in the second-person. After briefly painting a portrait of “you” as an unknowing target of identity theft and victim of suburban malaise, the narrator says:
You don’t feel particularly vulnerable, with your firewall and constantly updating virus protection, and most of the predators are almost laughably clumsy. At work you receive an email that is so patently ridiculous that you forward it to a few of your friends. Miss Emmanuela Kunta, Await Your Reply, it says in the subject line, and there is something almost adorable about its awkwardness.
“Dear One,” the email begins.

What follows is perhaps my all-time favorite fictionalized email, if not my favorite page of published writing of the last decade: a spam email claiming to have been sent by a nineteen-year-old girl from the Ivory Coast. The fact that the passage nearly brings me to tears each time I read it has to be proof that what we tag as technology (email and the like) is surely more human than machine. Or maybe it’s proof that Dan Chaon is a master of the art of fiction. I’d argue both.

Technology propels the plot throughout Await Your Reply, a book about shedding and remaking identities. Chaon is smart enough to capitalize on the many ways that the internet and gadgets make this work more possible now than ever before. Where he excels is in knowing just how and where to aim his lens at these tools. Rather than blur the human element of the narrative, technology helps bring into focus an honest story about our modern life: computer viruses and stolen identities and missed connections:
“Who falls for this?” you would like to know…But for some reason, driving home, you find yourself thinking of…Miss Emmanuela Kunta in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, the orphan daughter of a wealthy gold agent…and she walks along a market street…and she turns and her brown eyes are heavy with sorrow. Await your reply.
If an email can demonstrate this kind of vulnerability and hope, then email it will be. Technology it will be.

3.
It turns out that each of these instances of technology in fiction has to do with the way that technology connects characters. And what are characters if not people like us — people for whom the stuff of connecting with others is messy and hard and all we ever really want?

Maybe, then, if this is the truth about technology, there shouldn’t be any slack given to those authors who forgo including it in their books. You might even say it’s foolish to miss the opportunity to show that technology is not a series of tubes, or a high-pitched beeping sound, or an awkward element to work around, but rather a vital part of the modern human experience.

 

Image via Nate_Steiner/Flickr

Essays
| 2 books mentioned 50 7 min read
● ●
● ●

16 comments:

  4. Have never been able to grasp the popularity of Junot Diaz. The Oscar Wao book was far and away the most overrated novel of the last decade.

  5. Diaz is pretty much a straight-up racist. A friend of mine (a Caucasian woman with a Latino boyfriend) went to one of his readings a few years ago and tried to talk to him and he completely ignored her until her boyfriend arrived. Then Diaz got all smiley and friendly with her; a complete and total phony, she said. The goal is to pick the BEST stories. If that happens to be 20 white guys, so be it. If it’s 20 black women, so be it. “Celebrating the multitudes” is code for quota-ism. Who the sitting president is has absolutely nothing to do with art. Anything with “Best” in the title should be judged blind, on merit alone. The author should be irrelevant to art anyway, but some people, when given the power to select things, cannot be trusted to not let their identity politics get in the way (ie: Sherman Alexie, who was famously punked and admitted that part of the reason he chose a poem for a Best American Poetry anthology was because he thought its author was Asian).

  6. It’s easier to “address the problem” with quotas than it is to reverse the momentum of American culture and interest “minority” kids in reading… reading broadly, even, outside of their assigned zones. That’s where Writers come from: Readers. Talent is a numbers game… the larger the pool of wannabe-writers to choose from, the more likely you are to produce a few genuine talents.

    Of all the kids who are currently book-mad, in America, how many will carry the obsession through into high school and then college and from there to the first wobbly steps as Writers themselves? Statistically speaking, most of these kids are going to be “white”… and most of them will be mediocre. A handful will be pretty good. One in a blue moon will be a Great Writer (and it doesn’t help that TV/movies have moved (and widened) the goalposts: people seem to think, increasingly, that a Great Book is anything featuring a character arc. The technology of Lit is becoming an arcane practise; too few Writers and an underwhelming surfeit of Scriptwriters).

    Now apply that above-mentioned winnowing to the much smaller starting-pool of “minority” bookworms… the odds are depressing if you care for Lit. If you want Great Writers of Color, you have to expand the pool by improving the initial conditions. Quotas and Hype won’t change a thing. And, in the meantime, we’ll just keep getting this shameful shitstorm of award-winning Meh. Coming soon to a theater near you.

  7. Sean H,

    Both disagree and agree with this comment. As far as Diaz’s selection in this BASS goes, he is free as guest editor to apply whatever metric he wants. If, in his opinion, a part of being “best” is a for a story to concern a relatively unique or underrepresented cultural experience, and not, say, a failed dinner party in Brooklyn, so be it.

    I will entirely agree, though, about Diaz being an asshole and phony, as well as a misogynistic self-promoting scumbag who enjoyed every institutional privilege imaginable on the way up, and then shit on everyone who helped him in order to aid his bs anti-establishment pose. And yeah, Oscar Wao sucks.

  8. BASS has been shit for a long, long time, and isn’t getting any better. Junot Diaz has always been shit. That is all.

  9. Why was my comment on “Forty-Two” censored? It wasn’t any meaner than other comments in this thread.

  10. Happy for the diversity fetishists. But it can’t be the “best” by definition. It’s now the Best Most Diversified” American Stories.

  12. Richard Albarino,

    “Happy for the diversity fetishists. But it can’t be the “best” by definition. It’s now the Best Most Diversified” American Stories.”

    I see. So if, say, TC Boyle picks a story for BASS that he finds compelling, both in terms of writing style and subject matter/milieu, we can assume he brings none of his own biases to the table, and is picking mostly white people solely based on merit. But if Diaz picks a story using his own metrics, about subject matter/milieu he finds compelling, we should assume he is making biased choices, and that the enterprise is no longer merit-based.

    Do you see what a completely obvious, racist double standard this is? As I said upthread, I cannot stand Diaz personally or artistically, but come on people, you can do better than this.

  14. I’m not usually big on the term “white fragility,” but if there’s a better example of it than this thread, or the general pearl clutching displayed on this site any time the idea of diversity is put forward, I’d like to see it. Or no, I wouldn’t.

  15. :/?

    I tend not to like the term white fragility, as it immediately puts people on the defensive (see: your response), but it describes a real thing, i.e. white people’s incredible sensitivity to the notion that the deck might be stacked in their favor or that they might have their own identity biases (see: this thread, and any other like it on this website when notions of diversity are put forward).

    The responses here of “white people bad” and “down with whitey” are perfect examples. No one is saying white people are bad besides you–it’s just a defensive reaction when notions of inequality are put forward, an oversensitivity to having to think about identity and privilege, and a resulting impulse to turn any minor criticism into “Oh, you just hate white people.”

    Hope that helps!

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

● ● ●
Essays

The Survivor: On Magneto, Mutants, and the Holocaust

Essays
May 23, 2014 | 2 books mentioned 14 9 min read
You can read Magneto as the nightmare of every post-1945 Jewish humanist. He is the Jew who lost the soulful liberalism of the Yiddishkeit, and who has allowed the Holocaust to turn him into everything he despises. He is the Jew who will bomb Gaza and say, with some credibility, that it is for defense while privately acknowledging a pleasure in revenge. He is the Jew who has allowed the Holocaust to instill in him a debilitating paranoia.
Essays
| 2 books mentioned 14 9 min read
● ● ●
Essays

Refusing to Look Away: On Leila Guerriero and Joan Didion

Essays
August 22, 2017 | 2 books mentioned 1 4 min read

In Latin America, the name Leila Guerriero is spoken among journalists, editors, and basically anyone who enjoys the written word with the respect and reverence accorded to a savant. Or at least that is how I feel.  She is still not very known in the English-speaking world, but her book A Simple Story: The Last Malambo, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle, was published this year by New Directions.

Leila Guerriero is an Argentine journalist. Shortly after graduating from tourism in 1992, she got her break into journalism by sending an unsolicited short story to Página/30, the magazine of the newspaper Página/12. Jorge Lanata, director of the magazine at the time, called her four days after she had sent the story and offered her a job as an editor. From that point on she paved her own way into journalism and editing. Her work has been featured in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and countless and respected magazines from all-across Latin America like Gatopardo and El Malpensante.

Guerriero’s craft is deeply entwined with how she sees and approaches the world. Her books are usually not very long, favoring meaningful sparseness over ornamentation. Full, winding sentences circle around her subjects like a cat inspecting a new visitor. The words she uses are oftentimes technical and specific, but selected with such respect for the story that they don’t lack warmth. Her writing is so very precise that when one runs her paragraphs through Google Translate (don´t ever do this for any writer) the result is not entirely offending to the soul.

Before Guerriero decided—inspired only by a short note in a newspaper—to write a book on the Argentine folk dance malambo and its most important contest, this part of Argentine culture had been covered in typically folksy or dispassionate terms. As Guerriero spent more and more time in the village of Laborde, blending in with the local audience and participants of this long-standing tradition, she managed to do much more than construct merely a colorful profile of a dancer and a dance contest. The real question coursing through her descriptions of boots and rehearsals and hats and anxious phone calls is: in a way of life that can spare so little, how do people pour so much of themselves into a single and finite contest? The question is not only directed towards Rodolfo González Alcántara, the dancer she shadows, but to the region as a whole.

When describing one of the dancers after his turn on the floor, Guerriero notes, “That was the first main malambo I saw in the competition at Laborde, and it was like being attacked. I ran backstage and saw the man—Ariel Pérez, the hopeful of the province of Buenos Aires—rush into his dressing room with the urgency of someone repressing love or hate or the desire to kill.” A Simple Story becomes then an ekphrastic of a dance tournament and of the people who make up this community.

In an essay about writing from the book Frutos Extraños, Guerriero tries to answer the question of how to write a good profile: “The answer is: I don’t know, but, in any case, what works for me is to be curious, overflow with patience, and cultivate discretion: ask as if you don’t know, wait as if you have time, and be there as if you weren’t.”󠀪 Her point of view is the style itself.

Guerriero’s closest American analog is Joan Didion. Although I had heard of her, I read Joan Didion for the first time two years ago, having recently moved to the U.S. Reading through Slouching Towards Bethlehem felt both new and familiar. The people in it I had never met, but the way she wrote, the curiosity driving each of the stories, and the accuracy of her observations made me feel exactly as reading Guerriero’s books felt. Like meeting someone who reminds you of your best friend. Nathaniel Rich writes in the foreword to Didion’s most recent offering, South and West, that Didion’s insistence on showing us the South’s “dense obsessiveness” and “the vindictiveness that comes with it” was proof of a certain clairvoyance on her part “that the past was also the future.” Her future, our present.

South and West is in a very distilled way a travelogue. In other hands, a scene of Mississippi state pride would read as caricature; Didion achieves a certain detached anthropological respect for her subjects that is echoed in Guerriero’s work.

Didion and Guerriero are able to produce such detailed and truthful accounts of their subjects because they are totally willing to be uncomfortable; they never shy from awkward moments that reveal the subtle, strange ways in which people behave—and that usually carry more meaning than words themselves. From the first time Didion takes note of a Confederate-flag beach towel we realize this is no dashed-off observation. As she moves further into her travels, the towels keep reappearing in her notebook—never quite acquiring a full body, but never out of her sight. We read writers like Guerriero and Didion so we don’t forget that looking at people is the most uncomfortable and powerful thing a writer can do.

In one of the most intimate passages of A Simple Story, Guerriero tells the readers:

And as I stare at the back of this man whom I know nothing about, who reads the words of his God before he goes out to gamble it all, an uncomfortable certainty flares up inside me: this is the most frighteningly intimate situation that I’ve ever shared with another human being. Something in him screams, ‘Don’t look at me!’ But I’m there to look. And I look.

Ultimately this is what I search for in nonfiction, and I always find it in these women’s work: an unflinching eye and a deceptively simple way with words that creates a remarkable intimacy with the reader. Now, when recommending Guerriero’s book to my English-speaking friends I use Didion as comparative and hook, and the same thing in reverse when urging my Spanish-speaking friends to seek out Didion’s books. So they too can see what I’ve seen.

Essays
| 2 books mentioned 1 4 min read
● ● ●