Strong showing for US authors on €35,000 short story prize shortlist counters recent suggestions that American fiction is in decline
Alison Flood, guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 July 2010
Just two weeks after the critic Lee Siegel launched a literary war by declaring American fiction "culturally irrelevant", US writers have established a bridgehead on the world's richest prize for a collection of short stories, taking five out of six slots on the Frank O'Connor award shortlist.
On a day when small presses and debut authors elbowed aside longlisted authors including Louis de Bernières, Patrick Gale and Helen Simpson, the judges selected five American writers, from the acclaimed TC Boyle and Ron Rash to debut authors Robin Black, Belle Boggs and Laura van den Berg. The British author David Constantine is the only writer from outside the US still in contention for the €35,000 prize.
Van den Berg - whose debut collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, is published by the independent Dzanc Books - said that the Frank O'Connor shortlist was "a testament to the health of the short story in America".
"People just love to declare things dead, don't they?" she said. "I mean, how long have people been calling for the death of the novel? A hundred years?" Siegel's suggestion that fiction is a marginal enterprise is neither "new or noteworthy," she continued. "In the US, people are always bemoaning the death of the short story. But year after year, people keep writing story collections and selling them to publishers large and small; year after year, they are reviewed and discussed and awarded prizes. I believe these things - the novel, the short story - will endure and evolve."
Rash, who said it was a "great honour" to be selected for his collection Burning Bright, rejected Siegel's description of American fiction as "a museum-piece genre, most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers".
Alison Flood's full report at The Guardian online.
The Full Shortlist:
If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Picador UK, 2010) by Robin Black
Mattaponi Queen (Graywolf Press, 2010) by Belle Boggs
Wild Child (Bloomsbury, 2010) by TC Boyle
The Shieling (Comma Press, 2009) by David Constantine
Burning Bright (HarperCollins, 2010) by Ron Rash
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009) by Laura van den Berg
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