Oprah pick Uwem Akpan in the Southland tonight

Oprah Book Club fans in the Southland can see Uwem Akpan this evening at Loyola Marymount University’s William H. Hannon Library. The author is set to appear at 5:30 p.m.

Akpan, a native of Nigeria, is the author of Oprah's latest book pick, "Say You're One of Them." The book marked two firsts for Oprah's Book Club: It was the first set in Africa and the first short story collection.

"He is the author of the most powerful collection of short stories that I believe I've ever read," Oprah said on her book club broadcast.

Akpan is a Jesuit priest who received a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Michigan. After earning his degree, he has returned to Nigeria, where he serves at Christ the King Church, Ilasamaja-Lagos, Nigeria.

"I started off going into the priesthood," Akpan said on the "Oprah" broadcast, "and the writing came later. For me, the two are very intertwined, right now, connected."

It is not Akpan's first visit to Southern California. Last year he appeared at the L.A. Times Festival of Books.  "Say You're One of Them" was a finalist for the L.A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Uwem Akpan. Credit: Comfort Ukpong / Little, Brown & Co.

L.A.'s Wordtheatre in London pairs Nick Hornby and Alfred Molina

Los Angeles-based Wordtheatre lines up actors to read short stories, a pairing that shows both in a flattering light. Perhaps that's why they get such glittering lineups -- it's a chance for actors to dig into  excellent writing.

On Nov. 29, Wordtheater takes the stage in London. Headlining the lineup is Alfred Molina, pictured above as Dr. Octopus in "Spider Man 2." That's him at his most striking, perhaps -- but to me he'll always be Kenneth Halliwell, the supportive/tortured partner of playwright Joe Orton in the biopic "Prick Up Your Ears." Although he's got the unavoidable Hollywood dreck on his resume (an appearance on "Miami Vice," for example), Molina has done more than his share of literary pictures, including "Manifesto," based on a Zola novel, "The Trial," which was Kafka via Harold Pinter, "Anna Karenina" and more. And oh, yes, "The Da Vinci Code." At this event, he'll be literary and a bit sassy: He's reading Nick Hornby's story "Nipple Jesus." 

Also scheduled to perform are Ian Hart ("Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone") reading "Man in the Water" by Rose Tremain; Sally Hawkins ("Happy-Go-Lucky") reading "The Wave" by Julie Myerson; Lucy Brown ("Primeval") reading "Up at the Villa" by Helen Simpson, and John Schwab ("The Complete Works of William Shakespeare") reading "Stories" by John Edgar Wideman.

Proceeds benefit Fairbridge, a charity for inner-city youth in the U.K. The show is at the private Shoreditch House in London, so Soho House members get a discount. But anyone with $33 -- and airfare to England -- can attend.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Alfred Molina as Dr. Octopus in "Spider Man 2." Credit: Melissa Mosely / Columbia Pictures

National Book Foundation names 5 under 35

The National Book Foundation has named its 2009 class of 5 Under 35 -- five exceptional novelists not yet 35 years old. The list includes Josh Weil, author of "The New Valley," three linked novellas; Karen Russell, author of "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," a short story collection; and Lydia Peelle, for her short story collection "Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing."

In our review, we called fourth honoree Ceridwen Dovey's "Blood Kin" "a taut and remarkably self-assured first novel." We also reviewed "All the Living," by final honoree C.E. Morgan. "This is a book about life force, the precious will to live and all the things that can suck it right out of a person. It is a first novel, and the writing is simply astonishing: The way small movements betray a character, the effects of hard labor, the damaging power of communication withheld. It is the writing of a much older (at times, even world-weary) author."

It's the fourth time the honors have been awarded; each year, five former National Book Award winners select new, up-and-coming writers. Certainly each of these has written work worthy of renewed attention.

But the honor, as constructed, can't help but call attention to its own arbitrariness. What purpose does the 35-year-old designation serve? It's not exactly young -- a young writer is Jonathan Safran Foer, 25 years old when his highly accomplished debut, "Everything is Illuminated," was published. And if it's meant to find promising emerging writers, why ignore someone like Charles Bock, who turned 38 the year his weighty  "Beautiful Children" was released?

Thirty-five means different things depending on where you sit. A professional athlete might see 35 as the twilight of his career; a hopeful mom as tick-tock time for babymaking. But in the literary world, what marker does 35 signal? Why 5 under 35 at all? Why not 5 debut novelists, or 5 exciting writers, or 5 new authors to watch?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

What we talk about when we talk about Carver

In Books this weekend, David L. Ulin looks at the new 1,020-page Library of America Raymond Carver book, "Collected Stories." The uneasy creative relationship between Carver, who died in 1988, and his longtime editor Gordon Lish came to light in a December 2007 New Yorker article. How much of Carver's "minimalist" style was a byproduct of Lish's editing? In some cases, much was cut from his original drafts; as much as 78%. In this collection, then, an original, unedited version of a story casts Carver's work in a different light.

"Beginners" is published for the first time in "Collected Stories," and although it comes at the end, it can't help but function as a centerpiece. That's either as it should be or a significant problem, depending on your perspective, but regardless, it skews the way the collection showcases Carver's career. The purpose of a retrospective is not so much to highlight individual stories as to trace how a writer's aesthetic has grown. Here, the prominence of "Beginners" adds a subtext that threatens to subvert the larger arc. That's because, in the main, the pared-down versions of the stories are better, which opens the question of where authenticity resides. Are the unedited drafts more essential because they represent the truer Carver? Or is the point the continuum of his writing, developed through the intersection of internal and external influences?...

In 1983, Granta famously labeled him, along with contemporaries such as Ford and Wolff, "dirty realists"; six years later, Tom Wolfe derided them as "K-Mart realists" in Harper's. The idea is that there's something less than artful about their fiction, that their stories are unformed, anecdotal slices-of-life. But that's not true, any more than it's true that in editing "What We Talk About," Lish eclipsed its authenticity, effacing Carver's voice while recasting the book, somehow, as his own.

Taken as a whole, Ulin says, "Collected Stories" implies that Carver's various creative influences were stops on a long path. Consider this edit by Lish of Carver's "Beginners" (published as "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"), which turns a bit of banter into a more ominous anecdote. From the New Yorker:

Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel Herb loved her so much he tried to kill her. Herb laughed after she said this. He made a face. Terri looked at him. Then Terri she said, “He beat me up one night, the last night we lived together. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Andy Lyons / Allsport

Finite summer: a short story end-of-summer sprint

Some people started the summer with ambitious plans to read David Foster Wallace's opus, "Infinite Jest" in a kind of online book group. Aptly dubbed Infinite Summer, the project has now inspired a new summer reading program at the short story website Five Chapters.

Calling its version InfiniteFiveChapters, the website will post 15 short stories in 15 days, beginning Monday, Aug. 24 and ending Monday, Sept. 7.

Authors whose stories will be included in Five Chapters' summer send-off include Dwight Allen, Lauren Gronstein and musician Joe Pernice. The grand finale will be from Tod Goldberg, a frequent contributor to the L.A. Times Book Review.

Perhaps it would have been better called FiniteFiveChapters -- because instead of seeming like a marathon-length reading challenge, this is more like a sprint, with the end clearly in sight. Sept. 7 is, sadly, Labor Day: The end of summer really is upon us.

But it's not here yet for those participating in Infinite Summer: They'll keep reading until September 22. They do have more than 1,100 pages to get through.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Vacationers at a Black Sea resort in Russia. Credit: Sergei Ilnitsky / EPA

Maile Meloy's winter in July

Maile Meloy's short-story collection "Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It," coming in July, was one of our 60 summer book picks. One of its stories, "Spy vs. Spy," has been posted in its entirety on 5 Chapters. It's a dash of winter cool for the summer months.

The first morning, they all met in the gondola line. Jonna, the new girlfriend, flashed a nervous, welcoming smile, and Claire, back from California on a ticket that wasn’t cheap, hugged Jonna tightly. Then she hugged George. Claire’s cheeks were pink with health and cold and happiness, and she wore a blue fleece hat that said UCLA on it. She asked Jonna questions as the gondola rose, and Aaron was inordinately proud of her: she was so vibrantly young and engaging and unself-absorbed.

Jonna, on the other hand, was a puzzle. If Aaron had met her on the street, he wouldn’t have pegged her for a ski instructor. She didn’t seem hardy or sporty or gregarious; she seemed delicate, prickly, and undernourished. She was wiry, about thirty-five, with a peroxide-white cloud of hair around her face, and a small diamond stud in one nostril that must have been hell in the cold. Aaron gave silent thanks that Claire had not gone in for piercing her face. Then he heard Jonna say that her father was a lift operator when she was a kid, so she skied for free, tagging along after the instructors in place of being babysat. That made sense. She was a ski brat the way people were military brats, and it had made her insecure -- which was typical of George’s girls. He liked them needy and dependent, the opposite of Bea, who ran an emergency room and was born to command. The puzzle solved, Aaron stopped listening and watched people make their way -- some quick and graceful, and some in a slow, shuddering slide -- down the mountain below.

The story follows Aaron and George, brothers locked in a lifelong rivalry, over a ski weekend. It would be too much to assume that Maile Meloy has any sense of sibling rivalry, but she does have a sibling -- Colin Meloy of the Decemberists.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: NileGuide via Flickr

Alt.country takes alternative storytelling route in new anthology

Country musicians have always told great stories with their songs. Take the line "I shot a man in Reno / just to watch him die" -- Johnny Cash sings it and keeps on moving in "Folsom Prison Blues." Who could do that? Why did he want to watch a man die? Imagine what dimensions that story might take in something longer than a radio-friendly three-minute song.

In "Amplified," a new anthology from Melville House Publishing, alt.country musicians were invited to stretch out and write short stories. Some, such as Damon Krukowski (of Damon & Naomi) and Jon Langford (The Mekons) have been published before.

Others are brand new to the form. Maria McKee, who has had a successful solo and songwriting career since the demise of Lone Justice, populates her story with quick, charming L.A. characters a la “The Player” and explores the source of creative inspiration, opening with the line, "I had a mystical experience with Johnny Cash's pants."

Although many of the stories include music and musicians -- which is only natural -- Robbie Fulks' focuses on a middle-aged writer on book tour who visits his old stomping grounds at Columbia. "David felt young, residually," he writes with a wry narrative voice that could be accompanied by a twangy guitar.

Three very different love stories are among the book's standouts. In the collection's only graphic novel excerpt, Zak Sally (from Low) has drawn a gorgeously simply and darkly unsettling story of a couple who turn out to be a surprisingly good match. Rennie Sparks (The Handsome Family) wrote "The Thicket" for her husband (and bandmate) on their 20th anniversary, and though it's a little long and a bit disturbing, it has some of the collection's lushest language. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, the story by Rhett Miller (Old 97s) focuses on two loners who may just find salvation in each other.

But good fiction can also be playful. In a nod to publisher Melville House -- named for founder Dennis Loy Johnson's relative, Herman Melville -- Jon Langford's story is told from the point of view of the white whale in "Moby-Dick."

And Texas songwriter Cam King, whose story "Road Kill" is a lesson in avoiding armadillos, says that "writing poetry generally takes a couple more beers than prose." How many beers it takes to get from a song to a story, however, remains a mystery.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Rhett Miller of the Old 97s. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

J.G. Ballard in the New Yorker and more short stories

 
The new story "The Autobiography of JGB" by J.G. Ballard, who died April 19, is in this week's issue of the New Yorker. It feels to me like he got up in the middle of the story and never came back to finish it. But then again, Ballard was always messing with readers' expectations -- maybe that's exactly what he wanted. 

Esquire has rejuvenated its love for fiction with the online publication of the short story "The Gray" by Aaron Gwyn -- it starts with a barfight, then gets ugly. Esquire promises more short fiction is to come. And the magazine is holding a new fiction contest: entries are free, deadline is Aug. 1, no more than 4,000 words and the story must fit one of three titles provided. If your story isn't called "Twenty-Ten," "An Insurrection" or "Never, Ever Bring This Up Again," it's not going to have a shot at the $2,500 first prize (or the accompanying publication in the magazine, either).

At the Emerging Writers Network, Dan Wickett points to a story by Ben Percy he anthologized in "Visiting Hours." The story, "Where to Begin," is online on Minnesota Monthly's site, and, in its own gerontological way, it's as brutal as Gwyn's Esquire piece.

Louise died, things changed. The dying part started with a stroke and ended a month later at the Muskego Rehabilitation Center ... when night came — when there was no more racket, no sunshine, no neighbors ringing the doorbell to hand him peach pies and hamburger casseroles — crying came with it. He called this blubbering. Crying was for pantywaists. Blubbering he could deal with, somehow.

Less outright wrenching and more off the beaten path is "The Museum of Whatnot" by Kevin Wilson, posted recently at 52 Stories. Honestly, if someone really was selling T-shirts to the MoW, I'd be buying.

Winners of the Macavity mystery awards will be honored in October in Indianapolis. Sarah Weinman has the complete nominee list; Laura Lippman, Dana Cameron, Tom Piccirilli, Sean Chercover and Toni L.P. Kelner are the finalists for best short story. But, darn, I couldn't find any of their nominated stories online (if you can, let us know in the comments).

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: jamtea via Flickr

Million Writers Award: more than 100 top short stories

For the sixth year running, storySouth has announced the longlist for its Million Writers Award. About 175 short stories make the list; all were published online during 2008. Many were only published online.

On May 15, 10 finalist stories will be announced and put to a public vote; three will receive monetary prizes, with $500, a respectable sum, going to the winner.

It is a loose, shambolic nominating process -- Jason Sanford, the organizer, explains that while stories had to be at least 1,000 words, a couple of too-short stories made the list anyway, just because they were good. The preliminary judges, most of whom are announced after the nominations were made public, are scattered across the country, holding a variety of academic, literary and entirely unrelated jobs.

All of which means that this big list of stories spans a wide range that's wider and rangier than most literary awards. Here, a piece from the Paris Review goes up against Tor's science fiction, university literary journals, Serendipity's magic realism and Thuglit's violence.

There was a bit of a to-do when storySouth announced, concurrently with the nominations, that Narrative magazine had earned the Million Writers Award for best online publication 2008. Narrative's eight nominations put it ahead of all other magazines, but some of its business decisions -- to charge for some submissions, and to make premium content available for a fee -- have rankled some in the literary journal community. But Sanford responded to critics:

Based on the feedback I've been receiving, there are other concerns being raised here. I suspect some of this results from Narrative becoming the first online literary journal to equal the best print journals in power and prestige. I see this as nothing but a good thing. When I started the Million Writers Award, online journals weren't considered the equals of the worst print publications, let alone the best. It's good to have one of us on top, so to speak.

It's true, online publications are starting to be seen as a place to publish good and innovative work by those who didn't, at first, see the potential of online publications' low overhead and wide reach. Admittedly, with almost 200 stories making the nomination list, there are bound to be a few clunkers. But if you have the time to spare and are curious about the boundaries writers are pushing in short fiction, this is a very good place to start.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: MisoCrazy via Flickr

Willa Cather's 100-year-old minimalism

In Willa Cather's "The Sculptor's Funeral," a train pulls up to a snowy Kansas town, carrying a coffin. The story is up now at Harper Perennial's site Fifty-Two Stories, which, as you might guess, will be posting a story a week all year long. So far, they've posted pieces by Mary Gaitskill, Louise Erdrich, Tom Piazza and Tony O'Neill, all contemporary authors with books from the publisher. Cather's story will be in their April collection "The Bohemian Girl: Stories." Originally published in 1905, the story can also be found elsewhere on the Internet, but the Fifty-Two Stories version is laid out well (and you can digg it).

The short story has evolved somewhat since 1905. Cather's has a classic setup: A stranger comes to town, in this case, with the coffin. It's nominally the stranger's outsider perspective that allows us to the see the bitter, unpleasant place the sculptor came from. Which is all good, until Cather has one righteous character explain exactly how to perceive the nasty townspeople. To my 2009-biased reading, it sounds preachy.

But Cather was writing more than 100 years ago and engaging with writing with a different set of traditions. The Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has recently posted a 1922 piece she wrote for the New Republic, in which she complains of the novel as being "over-furnished." She was frustrated that "the importance of material objects and their vivid presentation have been so stressed, that we take it for granted whoever can observe, and can write the English language, can write a novel." Cather was after something more ephemeral.

If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and brilliant form of journalism. Out of the teeming, gleaming stream of the present it must select the eternal material of art. ... Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there -- that, it seems to me, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.

After reading the minimalists that came later in the 20th century, a story like Cather's "The Sculptor's Funeral" seems like it is naming pretty much everything. But it's interesting to look back and see where she was deliberately leaving blank spaces, creating an "inexplicable presence" in the quiet form of the sculptor, whose imaginative art was lost on the place he called home.   

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Jack Delano via the Library of Congress on Flickr