| Excerpt From
the Book:
A Prerambling
There I lay, recovering from a flu shot,
when I thought
So, if no one is buying short story collections anymore
So, if most large publishers or even mid-list publishers
won’t publish them anymore,
So, if no one is reading them anymore,
So how come so many of these entries are so damned good?
No one can play piano or guitar very well without listening to
pianists or guitarists,
And a great many of these stories and entries exceed “very
well.”
So, did the Muse drop in to visit these authors in a vacuum?
I think not.
And, so, I continued to . . . ahem . . . muse,
If this Tartt First Fiction Contest, a new kid on the block,
Can attract such well-versed authors,
Aren’t there plenty more out there in America-land?
And didn’t they all get well-versed by being well-versed?
More so, in America, land of stop-and-grab-and-go,
How can it be that readers wouldn’t / couldn’t like short
stories?
The original plot-, character-, emotion-, and
thematic-quick-fix?
Well, a friend tells me that John Barth told him
(Note the lovely removal of ownership)
That it’s because slick magazines have dropped the story,
So people are no longer accustomed to reading short stories.
Or, maybe it’s television and video games.
Some even blame the plethora of college writing programs.
So, with enough paint thinner we could paint America blue.
A rather meaningless and hard-to-verify blue, it’s true. . . .
At any rate, Sherlock Holmes (speaking of short stories) is long
gone.
So, instead of looking for reasons, should we question the
premise?
No, I can affirm from Livingston Press’s minuscule experience:
Novels versus story collections by single authors run 10 to 1 in
sales. |
