The BS Column: The return of the short story

(Published in the Business Standard, August 04, 2009)
"For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Hemingway’s finest short story was written for a $10 bet, has never been bettered and hints at an entire universe of love, loss and grief in its three two-word sentences.

Most short stories occupy a more generous compass, but as with the Hemingway classic, there has often been a suggestion that divides the short story writers from the other kind: short stories are what you do for fun, real writing is more serious. This means that you, the reader, are often shortchanged—as is evident from this year’s Booker longlist. The reports in India focused on the absence of subcontinental writers from the longlist, but the bigger question is why the Booker would continue to ignore short stories as a genre.

To offer just one example of what’s missing, consider Kazuo Ishiguro, who has been shortlisted (and won) in the past for several of his novels, but who is absent from the Booker longlist in a year when his collection of music-themed short stories, Nocturnes, has been widely acclaimed.

In my brief stint in publishing, I quickly learned that literary agents and publishing houses abroad won’t look at short stories, no matter how promising. It’s a circular argument. While it’s easier to publish short story collections in India than in more fiercely competitive markets, many publishing houses still remain wary of commissioning short stories, because of the traditionally low sales for this form of writing.

There are exceptions—writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and more recently, Palash Krishna Mehrotra made their debuts with acclaimed collections of short stories, but they remain outliers. In the US, where the once-formidable magazine market for short stories has crumbled, most agents will advise their authors to concentrate on writing the far more publishable novel, rather than the hard-to-place short story collection.

This has an often bizarre effect on a writer’s work, pushing many who are temperamentally short story writers at heart to attempt a form that they never quite settle into. Some writers, like Rana Dasgupta with Tokyo Cancelled, Banana Yoshimoto with Asleep or David Mitchell with Cloud Atlas, have created a hybrid between the short story and the novel, where a running thematic link, or characters who play cameo roles in successive stories, provide a sense of novelistic connection.

It’s far more common to “discover” a writer’s short stories only after s/he has made their bones as a novelist—so Aravind Adiga’s short stories, which predate White Tiger, were released only after the success of the novel, or Junot Diaz’s early collection, Drown, emerged in non-US markets only after The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has come out. Readers will, of necessity, be reading out of chronological order, but at least they’ll get to see the breadth of a writer’s work.

There are signs that the three-to-four decade-long obsession with the novel at the expense of the short story might be changing. Some of this has to do with the power and clout exercised by better-established writers; some of this has to do with the influence of major prizes, such as the Man Booker International and the Pulitzer. And, I hope, some of this may have to do with the changing tastes of the reading public; if publishing is faced with a growing demand for short stories, the industry can no longer hide behind the excuse that “short stories don’t sell”.

Earlier in 2009, the Man Booker International forced a re-examination of the importance of the short story when it handed the award to Alice Munro. Over four decades, Munro has published 16 collections of short fiction, and for years, criticism of her writing centred around the fact that she was “only” a short story writer, and had never attempted anything more ambitious.

The novelist Jane Smiley, one of the judges, put Munro’s achievements into perspective in her speech: “…The surface of Alice Munro’s works, its simplicity and quiet appearance, is a deceptive thing, that beneath that surface is a store of insight, a body of observation, and a world of wisdom that is close to addictive, a set of thoughts that we do not want to miss about characters and events that we feel a need to understand.”


In closing, here are a few suggestions. John Updike’s My Father’s Tears examines the world, 9/11, marriages and relationships from the perspective of the elderly and the ageing. Chimamanda Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck takes you into the world of a man in jail, the politics of a writing workshop and allows you to see America from the perspective of its newest arrivals. Kurt Vonnegut’s unpublished, often viciously funny early work is out in October, captured in Look at the Birdie. And Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness offers nine stories that deal with disfigurement and the loss of children, among other things. That heap of novels can wait for a while.




(Links: My Father's Tears, by John Updike, in the New Yorker.
Cell One, by Chimamanda Adichie, in the New Yorker.
Dimension, by Alice Munro, in the New Yorker.
The Guardian Summer Short Story Special--Dave Eggers, William Boyd, David Mitchell and a host of others.)

The BS Column: In search of an Asian prize

(Published in the Business Standard, July 27, 2009)

The literary world attracts its share of harmless lunatics, and for some years, my mailbox was enlivened by the presence of a gentleman I will call Mr S K Parthasarathi. He had never been published, but had a burning desire to be recognised as an author.

For three consecutive years, he sent out exuberant emails announcing: “The S K Parthasarathi Award for Stellar and Superior Writing, judged by eminent Man of Letters Mr S K Parthasarathi, has been won by the finest Author, Mr S K Parthasarathi.” When he stopped sending the mails, it left a void in my life that nothing, not the Crossword, the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize nor the Man Asian Booker could fill.

The SK Parthasarathi Award had this to its credit: it kept all parties happy, from the author to the judge to the prize administrator. The other three evolving literary prizes on the list face considerably greater challenges.

The Vodafone Crossword award has grown over the last eleven years, evolving as a multitude of issues from the nationality of the authors to the visibility of the prize has emerged. This year, the fiction award was split between debut author Neel Mukherjee (Past Continuous) and Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies), in a decision that kicked off a post-ceremony debate. Is it fair to judge a new writer against someone who has been writing for years? The Booker judges sometimes deal with this by producing controversial shortlists, ignoring the heavyweights in order to encourage less well-known writers.

A two-winner result is a cop-out. The more “senior” author can feel slighted, the debutante can be unfairly judged, and the remainder of the shortlist can feel doubly dismissed. You could create more categories, but that can make an award a hydra-headed monster—too bewildering for the average reader to follow. Personally, I subscribe to the School of Hard Knocks theory—as a first-time author, your books are going to be judged by readers anyway against the greats. There are times when a debut author’s creativity and freshness will carry the day, and times when years of learning the craft will make a greater impact.

The Man Asian Booker has seen a sharp learning curve since its inception in 2007. The judges’ panel in the first year was drawn out of convenience chiefly from the Hong Kong literary world, since the prize was set up there; this year, the panel has a much wider sweep, with Gish Jen, Pankaj Mishra and Colm Toibin at the helm.

It remains the only major prize to encourage unpublished writers, and to accept manuscripts that have not been written in English. This puts more pressure on the prize administrators, in terms of the volume and range of manuscripts they have to evaluate, and the longlist often shows a huge variation in quality. The prize is still in its third year, and has time to evolve; if it becomes a useful scouting ground for publishers and literary agents, the Man Asian will have done a great deal to erase the invisibility of Asian authors. With a stronger focus on literary quality, this could grow into a substantial prize.

The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize was instituted in 2008 in memory of the young and talented writer/editor who died in 2007. Its guidelines offer one way of looking at the tricky issue of how to handle an Asian prize. It’s open to all writers from the subcontinent, which takes care of the phantom author syndrome—the nagging sense you get when reading an awards shortlist that someone is missing, only to realise that the author you’re missing is Pakistani or Bangladeshi, not Indian.

By limiting books to the subcontinent, it manages to duck the other thorny issue—how do you define an Asian writer? (Do you include Iran, does an author from coastal China really have anything in common with an author from Nepal, that sort of thing.) The Shakti Bhatt prize is open to all genres. The categories are clearly literary rather than general: poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction (travel writing, autobiography, biography and narrative journalism) and drama.

The stipulation that all books must have been published in India gives entries a local focus. And in a more charming caveat emptor, the guidelines state: “Books that have been published elsewhere and have already won prizes are eligible, though less likely to win.” The breadth of genres might become a tricky area for the prize—it’s hard to judge the merits of poetry versus travel writing, for instance—but the 2008 shortlist was definitely one of the most interesting, from the reader’s point of view.

I don’t know whether any of these three prizes will become the pre-eminent “Asian” prize, but I do hope Shou Xing, god of longevity, will smile on them. As a collective of prizes, they’re likely to sharpen and redefine our view of Asian writing.

N.B. There is also the Golden Quill award, promoted by Indiaplaza, but it hasn't yet defined its criteria. At present, pulp and literary fiction are grouped together, which gives the Quill a very wide but puzzling selection of books. Take a look at this year's longlist.