Which is the biggest challenge for an aspiring author—the demands of the short story to get to the point as succinctly as possible in chiseled prose that draws gasps of admiration from readers, or the longer haul assault on the novel form, with possibly a panoply of characters, settings and time frames and a plot that will compel them to keep turning page after page?
Not every author tries his or her hand equally at both. O. Henry famously stuck strictly to the short form, while Guy de Maupassant churned out 300 short stories but only six novels. And Canadian author Alice Munro, who won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for her prodigious output of short-story collections, confessed that she didn’t think she had a novel in her. Upon her historic win, she told the Canadian Broadcast Commission, “I really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art not just something that you played around with until you got a novel written.”
Bay Area author Adam Johnson traverses both worlds with confidence and grace, winning high acclaim for each by netting the Pulitzer Prize for the North Korea-set novel “The Orphan Master’s Son” in 2013 and the National Book Award two year later for his short-story collection “Fortune Smiles.” A creative writing professor at Stanford University, Johnson had this to say to the Stanford News about the latter prize. “The short story has a particular coil power, like an emotional battery that can store feelings and release them in a very unique way. In a collection, when it happens many times, it can have a big effect. A short story collection can have an overarching theme or even a bigger range than a novel.”
In a highly unusual development, the prize for “Fortune Smiles” marked the second year in a row that the fiction award went to a book of short stories, after Phil Klay received it for “Redeployment,” his first book, in 2014. Klay’s effort, however, which recounted the experience of a dozen soldiers and veterans of the war in Iraq, was a sudden substitution for a novel he had been trying to write. In a video interview on imagejournal.org, he confessed that “in an odd way, I found the novel form too limiting. I didn’t want a coherent narrative running through the collection. I wanted the 12 different voices to bounce off each other and inform each other without being shoehorned into some narrative arc. The disjoint felt right for the reading experience I wanted to create.”
Yet Klay, like Johnson, did indeed produce a novel, 2020’s “Missionaries,” also about war, mostly in Colombia but also the Mideast, and interconnected in theme, following the story arcs of four characters who are eventually brought together. It landed on Barack Obama’s favorite book list for that year and was also listed on the Wall Street Journal’s 10 best books of the year. NPR called it “a deeply ethical novel, and one that often pauses to question the purpose of war and possibility of redemption for combatants of all kinds.”
San Francisco author Ethel Rohan is another writer who has invested her time and talent in novels and short stories. Her multiple prize-winning first novel, 2017’s “The Weight of Him,” came out after she already garnered high praise for two collections of 30 short stories each, “Cut Through the Bone” in 2010 and “Goodnight Nobody” in 2013. She then reverted to short-story form for 2019’s “In the Event of Contact,” which won the Dzanc and Independent Publisher prizes and impressed me enormously with its 14 stories, each one a polished jewel of 18 pages or less. At the time, she told me this about her approach to writing them: “My style is to get in and out as quickly as possible and to only stay inside the story as long as is absolutely necessary and not a word longer. Story endings are extremely difficult, and that’s particularly true of the short story, because of course, there’s much less space to work with and zero room for missteps.”
Now that Rohan will be bringing out her second novel “Sing, I” (TriQuarterly, $24, 320 pages) on April 15, I took the opportunity to touch base with her again on the challenges posed by each medium, which she says she enjoys equally herself as a reader. “As a writer, the short story remains more of a mystery to me and therefore is more challenging,” she said. “For much too long inside the short story, I’m never quite sure how it works or what I’m doing. It’s unmooring. Whereas I can somehow enter and navigate the novel with far greater confidence.”
The protagonist of “Sing, I” (and that odd title is thoroughly explained in the book) is a woman at midlife, a wife and mother in Half Moon Bay, who becomes the victim of a terrifying crime that sets her off on a search for her own true self. Rohan has several Bay Area appearances lined up: 7 p.m. April 18 at Bookshop West Portal in San Francisco; 11 a.m. April 22, Towne Center Books, Livermore; 7 p.m. April 24, A Great Good Place for Books, Oakland. She will also be featured in conversation with author Colm Tóbín about his just published “Long Island,” his sequel to “Brooklyn,” at 2 p.m. May 5 at the United Irish Cultural Center in San Francisco. The latter is a ticketed event. Find out more about it at bookshopwestportal.com.
From the who knew? department: Best-selling author Amy Tan has a new book coming out on April 23 that another best-selling author, Ann Patchett, is calling “unexpected and spectacular,” and I couldn’t agree more. “The Backyard Bird Chronicles” (Knopf, $35, 320 pages), written and cleverly illustrated by Tan, is her lively, amusing and informative record of the wildlife observations she had been making for five years from her woodland-surrounded home in Sausalito. It turns out that Tan is both a highly knowledgeable birder and a talented artist. World-renowned bird expert David Allen Sibley provides an admiring foreword. That chubby little specimen in the top right corner of her book jacket is Tan’s rendition of the chestnut-backed chickadee.
Diverse verses on nature: April is National Poetry Month, and the 24th poet laureate of the United States is letting us know it. On April 2, Ada Limón, in collaboration with the Library of Congress, releases “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World” (Milkweed Editions, $25, 176 pages), an anthology she edited that collects recent works by 53 contemporary poets, all musing on our connections to the environment. Brenda Hillman, Joy Harjo and Matthew Zapruder are among the contributors, who come from all over the country. See the full list at https://milkweed.org/you-are-here-poetry-in-the-natural-world.
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on current literary buzz and can’t-miss upcoming book events. Look for it here every last Thursday of the month.
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