Another Brief Reading Interlude

Here’s another quick entry and a plug for a local writer. Robin Black was recommended to me by Richard Wertime, Director of Graduate English at Arcadia University and author of the memoir Citadel on the Mountain: A Memoir of Father and Son (making this entry actually a double plug for two local writers). Black is a Philadelphia writer and an Arcadia grad, so they’re quite proud of her short story collection, recently published by Random House, If I loved you, I would tell you this. This is another locally-popular book for which I was on a huge waiting list at the library, and it took months to come. I’ve only read three of the stories so far, so I can’t really tell you too much about the book, but I find her work to be well-written, and I particularly liked the story “Immortalizing John Parker.”

The ongoing life and existence of the short story collection is a matter of much debate among those who debate literary topics. Is short story writing merely an exercise for MFA students? (It is likely that Black, a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program, may very well have written these stories, or some of them, while a student, since this is her first published book.) Does the reading public read short story collections? Do you?

Certainly it is harder for new writers to interest publishers in story collections than it is in a novel, and there are fewer mainstream magazine outlets for short stories than there once were. From what writers I’ve spoken to tell me, a short story is much harder to write than a novel. It’s harder to tell a story in a shorter space—fewer pages to develop your story, fewer words to get your point across.

Here’s an interesting piece on the topic from former NYTBR editor Charles McGrath from a few years back but still relevant:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0C13F83E5A0C768EDDA10894DC404482&ref=lorriemoore