Roundup Baby Got Books

Baby Got Books digs into Lauren Groff’s Delicate Edible Birds.

Bookdwarf reports that her bookstore has begun delivering by bicycle. Match that, Amazon!

Does the recent influx of Pakistani literature indicate that it’s supplanting India as the hot geographic/ethnic trend in literature?

Earthgoat interviews Paula Morris, whose recent short story collection Forbidden Cities is a globe-trotting adventure.

Obama, forget the public infrastructure spending — try buying your way out of a recession by funding short story writers.

VQR acts the provocateur by posting about the Short Story Bubble. Generally, the contention is that AWP has contributed to an over-inflated culture of the short story:

All around the country, thousands of young fiction writers are scribbling furiously, focusing their creative and psychological energies on producing and publishing short stories, not necessarily because the short story is their favorite form. But, rather, because it’s the form best suited to the workshop, because they think it’s the easiest way to get published, because it’s what everyone else is doing. All the while, the literary magazines these young fiction writers hope to publish their stories in are supported largely by their own tuition, subscription, and contest entry dollars. It doesn’t take John Maynard Keynes to see that this is not a sustainable market. As long as MFA programs continue to grow, as long as short story writers are willing to pay $25 to submit to a contest, this closed feedback loop will continue growing. But, as a lover of the short story, I fear for the day when the bubble bursts. The global economy may not collapse, but I won’t be surprised if a few literary magazines do.