Short Story Reviews, Marketing and Tethered Ferocity

Maud Newton has a review of Cate Kennedy’s Dark Roots (which I listed in my short story roundup at the beginning of the year) in NYTBR. There’s also a review of Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser, a book which I enjoyed immensely and wrote a review that should come out in the next issue of Rain Taxi.

I love this description I just found on Kate’s Book Blog defining the short story as “tethered ferocity.”

Over at The Literary Outpost, there’s a great article by the editor of Other Voices, Gina Frangello, including a section (about halfway down) on the state of short story collections. Check out this excerpt, which discusses the real reason why short story collections aren’t flying off the shelves:

Often, when I presented at panels, writers in the audience asked why short fiction had met with such a decline in popularity. After all, many reasoned, if the contemporary attention span has become geared towards sitcoms and videogames, then aren’t short stories the ideal medium for the hip young reader? The answer, I often suspected, had nothing to do with what the contemporary reader would actually read, and much more to do with what marketing departments could successfully tell them to read. While a novel can be easily marketed with a few plot-summarizing taglines (and a memoir even more so, especially if its author is famous and his/her life already well-documented in the tabloids), it is much harder to “sell” a collection of 10 or so diverse stories with no common characters or plots.

This spoke to the larger problem of marketing departments, chain bookstores with pricey displays, and media book clubs increasingly dictating what books the modern reader even knew about, much less felt compelled to read. The corporatizing of publishing, in which shareholders demand bottom line profits, had already marginalized the power of editors’ own aesthetic tastes, and the Barnes & Nobles and Borders revolution had all but ended the days in which independent booksellers made thoughtful recommendations to their loyal patrons. Publishing was all about publicity engines, and short story collections were not compatible with modern marketing.