A literary tradition that I've learned to respect

When I was younger, I loved science-fiction short stories. And my biggest dream for myself was to be a successful story writer—someone like Robert Reed or Michael Swanwick, who appeared regularly in the sci-fi journals and was a routine contender for the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

During this time of my life, from ages 17 to about 22, I read every major sci-fi writer and most of the minor ones. At some point I bought a lot of fifty sci-fi anthologies from eBay, and I’d spend my afternoons and evenings reading through Full Spectrum or The World of If. Later when I had access to a university library, I read all of the twenty plus volumes of the Gardner Dozois Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology, and many volumes of the Hartwell / Cramer Year’s Best as well. One of my bucket-list items was to eventually be reprinted in that Dozois Year’s Best—I loved it so much, and when Dozois died I was sad the dream would never come true.

I sometimes subscribed to sci-fi journals, but didn’t read them religiously. However, I followed the blogs and forums fairly closely, and if a story writer started getting a lot of buzz, I’d read their stuff. If I enjoyed an author’s stories, I also tried to track down whatever collections they’d released.

Then when I was about 23, I started thinking, “What about everything else?” That’s when I started reading the classics, and stopped paying such close attention to science fiction.

Literary fiction didn’t interest me as much

A few years later, I entered an MFA program, and I drifted more into the literary fiction world.

But I never really paid as much attention to American literary fiction as I’d paid to science fiction. With sci-fi, I made sure to read everything. I went through the lists of Hugo winners, even from decades past, and I read their books. Even minor writers, like Alfred Bester, C.M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak—I read them.

When I started reading the classics, I read the big consensus American authors—Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Henry James, and a few dozen others—but those writers are mostly from before World War II. I really did not pay that much attention to post-War American fiction. I mean...I read more than a civilian: I read Cormac McCarthy, Richard Yates, Jonathan Franzen, and dozens of others—but I never put the kind of work into reading post-war American writers that I put into reading sci-fi or into reading the classics.

Right now, that seems like such an obvious and foolish gap. I should’ve read John Cheever a long time ago!

But...part of the problem is that I bought into the literary world’s hype: Literary fiction sells itself as being a continuation of the tradition embodied by the canon. Literary fiction aspires to whatever is best in literature. So I figured that if I read Tolstoy and Balzac and Stendhal and Zola and Dostoevsky and Melville and Chekhov and Dickens and Proust and Joyce and Euripides and Lady Murasaki then I’d basically understand what literary fiction was supposed to be.

What I didn’t understand until after many years was that postwar American literary fiction is a genre of its own. It’s not just ‘fiction that is good’—postwar American literary fiction is a particular tradition that’s not necessarily senior to any other genre of fiction. I didn’t realize that Clifford Simak and Richard Yates are both equally in the shadow of the great writers of the past. And both of these writers also worked within particular culture-bound forms (science fiction and American literary fiction) that had their own rules and their own mores.

With science fiction, I really understood the rules. One of my best bits of writing this year was my piece on Ted Chiang, where I explained that what outsiders notice most about his work (the overt sentimentality) is actually not that remarkable for an award-winning sci-fi story. Because sci-fi awards are determined by the popular vote, they need to arouse a strong, immediate reaction, just so they can appeal to as many people as possible.

This means that in a sci-fi story, you ideally combine a very simple, highly-emotional story with a very thought-provoking concept. It is a form that is unique to this particular Hugo / Nebula awards ecosystem, but there are ways to do it well and ways to do it poorly. There is a certain level of finesse, even when it comes to these tear-jerking stories, which I respect and aspire to emulate.

But with literary fiction, my belief, at least initially, was that it had no rules. I thought lit-fic was the catch-all genre for whatever was different, experimental, bold. And because of this I kept bumping up against rules that I didn’t know existed.

This confusion isn’t totally my fault. I was just buying what the literary world was selling. When you do an MFA program, all the professors are into the canon. When you read an interview with your favorite writer, they’re always talking about the canon. They view the canon and literary fiction as being interchangeable—the canon flows effortlessly into literary fiction, and literary fiction is the only fiction that offers a path to canonization. In fact I literally just had a talk thirty minutes ago with a friend who’s an acclaimed literary writer, and he was talking about how, for all its faults, the MFA system is the only place in America that seems to provide a home for true literary art.

That’s really the view inside the literary world. They are so hemmed up in the walls of this world, that they don’t necessarily see that they’re working in a particular form that has its own rules.

Because of that, in the literary world, there’s also a lot of confusion about what you ought to read. Literary writers hesitate to say that you need to read Raymond Carver or John Cheever or Alice Munro if you’re going to write a contemporary literary story, because they just assume that anyone who cares about literature is naturally going to read the world’s most important literature (i.e. 20th century literary fiction). In contrast, sci-fi writers naturally understand that sci-fi is just a small part of what’s being written. That’s why if you’re in the sci-fi world, you know it’s important to read widely both within the genre and outside it.

The whole reason I started reading the canon is that sci-fi writers tend to be extremely emphatic about the idea that to be a good writer, you must read outside your genre. As Michael Moorcock famously put it: “I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from Bunyan to Byatt.”

The straight line of literature

Within this weird world where I found myself—the literary fiction world—people have a mental map that tends to run straight from Shakespeare to Philip Roth. The story they tell about literature is quite simple, and it involves a few big genius writers who dominate each era: the early 19th century was the time of Jane Austen and Keats; after that came Dickens and Eliot; then Henry James and Wharton; all the way to the late 20th century with its Roth and McCarthy and Munro.

I was sympathetic to this story for the most part, and was happy to educate myself about all these famous writers, but I found myself very resistant to all the names from the last 75 years. Like, right up until The Grapes of Wrath (1939), I was completely onboard with the progression. But after that the story seemed to fall apart. I just did not believe that these writers—Pynchon, Roth, Gaddis, McCarthy, Carver, etc—were actually the best, and I certainly didn’t believe they were as essential as Hemingway, Proust, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Woolf, and the rest of the early 20th-century crew.

Incidentally, the 40s and 50s are where the sci-fi world really got cooking. And I think after that point, I was just too aware of all the great writers that were being left out of this story. As a result, although I read some of the big post-war names, I avoided many of them.

At this point, twenty years into my career, the avoidance feels purposeful. It does seem a little weird, to me, that I would so eagerly read Stefan Zweig and George Gissing and Elizabeth Gaskell and a whole host of other minor 19th and early 20th century writers, but I never considered reading Raymond Carver or John Cheever.

I think basically I felt resentful of the literary world. I always felt like an outsider. Especially after I started publishing young adult novels, I really felt like my background told against me, and that I was prejudged and condescended-to by many of the literary writers I encountered.

Not reading authors like Carver was my way of condescending right back. That’s because most literary writers, in my experience, have read too much post-war American literary fiction and not much else besides—that’s why they love to gush about Roth, but never mention Tolstoy. They’ve read too much Roth, too little Tolstoy. That’s terrible for them, and I think it’s a major handicap. But I used my classics-reading as a way of feeling mentally superior to other writers who were oftentimes much more successful than me, getting much more praise, getting more attention from editors, agents, critics, etc.

This was really not the best move. Instead, I should’ve just worked harder and made myself a master over their precious post-war canon. Yes, a lot of literary writers coast on their potential and don’t read widely, but that’s no excuse for me to ignore all these 20th century American writers who really were worthy of my attention. I don’t think post-war American literary fiction is more worthy of my attention than science fiction, but I’ve come to believe that it’s at least equally worthy.

You can’t learn much from Hemingway

One reason to avoid reading these near-contemporary writers, was that it can be hard to learn from authors who’ve been too deeply assimilated by the culture. Imitating Carver will not get you anywhere in this world, because half the writers in America are imitating him. Then there are some authors who are just bad examples. The great modernist writers have given us a bag of tricks that feel too much like tricks. When you read a novel in 2025 that’s deeply interior, stream of consciousness, mixes reality and reverie, it just reads like someone is doing their take on Ulysses. Which is fine, but the influence is too naked—it makes you seem derivative and limits the amount of pleasure anyone can get from your work.

But I feel like I’ve gotten a sense for which writers I can imitate in a fresh way. Surprisingly, the most generative influence lately has been O. Henry. I have been tracing O. Henry’s lineage through F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara—there’s a whole world of entertaining, commercial-market short stories that’s vanished because the underlying magazine ecosystem has vanished, but...the underlying techniques are still sound. They can still produce surprising effects, great endings.

Structure is also the easiest to steal. Because if you hang your own voice and content onto someone else’s structure, the story is always going to seem like your own. Wheres if you try an open pastiche of someone else’s voice, it’ll always seem like just an imitation.

The Eight-Hundred-Pager

Anyway, for most of the last six months I’ve been reading these eight-hundred-page short story compendiums. First there was Carver, then O. Henry, Robert E. Howard, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever, Alice Adams, Mavis Gallant, John O. Hara. I’ve written about some of these writers for Woman of Letters, but with others I’ve been holding back, and I’ve been toying with some ideas for a longer essay about the literary short story.

I am really enjoying these eight-hundred-page compendiums. In most cases, the authors initially published some number of stories in various periodicals. Then, throughout their career they released single-author short story collections, in which they collected the best ten or twelve stories that they’d published since their last collection was released. Then at some point, after they’d died or near the end of their life, someone arranged their short fiction into a single volume.

There are varying approaches to the problem of putting together an author’s final compendium. If the author’s oeuvre is small enough, sometimes the anthologist will go with a ‘complete stories’ approach, like with the Carver Library of America volume. And in that case they can either list all the stories chronologically, by order of publication, or they can reprint the text of each individual collection. Personally I think the latter method is preferable, because it gives the compendium at least a little shape.

The Carver volume I read had the full text of all his collections, in order of publication, and then I believe some uncollected stories at these back. That was also the scheme followed by the Hemingway volume I read. Usually when the author puts together a collection, they try to make sure the stories speak to each other somehow, or at least they alternate lighter and darker, short and longer stories. But sometimes when anthologists just organize everything chronologically, it can create a wearisome experience.

These eight-hundred-pagers really vary widely in quality. The problem is that these stories were almost never intended to be read in an eight-hundred-page compendium. The stories were written to be read one at a time, in Esquire or The New York World or The New Yorker or Weird Tales. Authors know that unless their stories succeed in the primary market, then they might never have an afterlife. When your story hits the magazines, you want it to excite people and potentially get reprints and awards-nominations. That means it needs to be written as if it’s potentially the only story of yours that the reader will ever see. Each story is a seduction: you care about this voice, you care about this style, you want to finish this story.

Certainly that’s how I write my tales. I always think, “What if this is the first tale of mine that anyone reads?”

But with an eight-hundred-page collection, it’s not the first story of yours that they’re reading. It could very easily be the tenth or twelve story that they’ve read that night.

I find that the more-commercial writers tend to produce better eight-hundred-pagers. Because these writers saw their work at least in part as entertainment. That’s why it’s so much easier to read eight hundred pages of John O. Hara or F. Scott Fitzgerald or O. Henry, and so much harder to read eight hundred pages of Hemingway.

The more commercial writers also tended to write many more stories, so there were many more stories to choose from when putting together the 800-pager. And because they wrote many more stories, the quality of the included stories is more even. With the Hemingway volume, it includes basically every story he published in his lifetime—that means there’s some real clunkers. If he’d written one hundred more stories, then maybe everything in the book would be at least on par with “Indian Camp” or “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”.

The Single-Story Career

If you’re going to achieve true immortality as a short-story writer, it usually happens on the basis of a single story that gets heavily-anthologized. It’s the same with poets—every poet gets boiled down to one or two poems that’re taught in school and included in anthologies (e.g. “Ozymandius” or “Ode On A Grecian Urn” or “This Is Just To Say”).

Most short story writers are remembered for just one story—“Babylon, Revisited” (Fitzgerald), “The Gift of the Magi” (O. Henry), “The Swimmer” (Cheever), or “Cathedral” (Carver). If you don’t have that one story, then usually you’re not remembered. That’s one reason Mavis Gallant has never quite broken through—you can’t reduce her to a single story that you can assign in school.

I have no idea how this story gets determined. I am sure it goes through fads. LikeFor instance, I’ve seen Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” in many anthologies (it’s a great story), but I wonder if the story will still be as ubiquitous once she’s passed. There are some writers who aren’t really known as story writers but are famous just because they’ve got that one story! Like Jamaica Kincaid and “Girl”. Has she actually written another short story? I’m sure she has, but “Girl” is so famous that it’s overshadowed the rest.

The institution of the canonical 20th-century story also owes a lot to writing programs. Surely the MFA-industrial complex will begin to flag at some point—the number of people going through college- and grad-level creative-writing classes will go down, and thus the number of people exposed to stories like “Girl” and “Where Are You Going…” will also go down.

Having one canonical story is certainly fame, but it’s shallow fame. I don’t know how much a story like “Where Are You Going…” or “Girl” really sticks with you. I’d read Carver’s two most famous stories (”Cathedral” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”) a number of times, but it wasn’t until I read his three collections that I really felt a connection to the author.

Where do I fit in?

I’ve slowly been coming to terms with the idea that I, me, Naomi, am a story writer.

This was what I wanted to be when I was just starting out, but I never really got traction as a science-fiction writer. You know, in this sci-fi world the culture is that you write a lot of stories and you submit assiduously to the same ten or fifteen ‘professional’ journals, and at some point you break through and start publishing regularly. I never really broke through in the way some of my friends did. I sold stories to all the major journals, but I didn’t establish a relationship with any of these editors—I never felt confident that I was producing something that excited these journals, and my work surely didn’t excite their readership very much either.

I learned over time about how awards get handed out. It does really help to be personally popular with the subset of fans and writers who do the nominations for the awards. And many people don’t just sit back and wait to be nominated: it’s quite common to engage in backstage log-rolling and campaigning behaviors. I spent a few years attempting to work some of these levers, but even when it comes to log-rolling and campaigning for awards there’s a certain magic that needs to happen. People do need to be excited about you, or you won’t take off. With some people, I was genuinely excited for them and happy when they won awards—they had a magic that suffused their whole presence, their whole persona, and made people excited about advancing their career. Which is to say, with some people, their work was decent, but you also liked them a lot, and that’s why they won awards. With other people, it was just about the work. There were very few people where the work was actually bad, and they won awards just on the basis of their personality.

This world was never particularly excited about my work, so I think my opinion should count for a lot when I say...the science-fiction world was actually a pretty merit-based world. Like, the quality of your writing mattered a lot. Sometimes there were people nobody knew, but they wowed everyone with their work. Other times, there were people you’d known for a long time, but their work turned a corner, and became worthy of notice in a way it hadn’t been before.

It was a very small world. If you’d hung around online or gone to any conventions, you knew basically everyone. Long before I sold a story to her, I knew Sheila Williams, the editor at Asimov’s. I also got to know John Joseph Adams, the editor of Lightspeed, and Neil Clarke, the editor of Clarkesworld, and Charlie Finlay, the editor at F&SF. And when someone suddenly broke out and started getting a lot of attention, it wasn’t mysterious—I basically knew the kinds of people who became Hugo and Nebula voters, and when an author started getting awards traction, I knew it was because they’d gotten popular with this subset of voters. Sometimes I didn’t care for a writer myself, but I always believed that the enthusiasm they’d aroused was genuine.

My rocky relationship with the short story

After I’d been publishing stories for a few years without gaining much traction, I decided that story-writing was too difficult a business. I would focus on novels instead. They’re honestly much easier to publish, and it’s much easier to get traction with novels. With a short story, even in the sci-fi world, your story has to be the best! It has to stand up to the best that’s ever been written. With novels, your book just needs to be entertaining and reward the time that the reader put into it.

And when I entered the literary world, I just got no traction with stories at all. In the sci-fi world, I was selling regularly to most of the top journals—many of which are much more selective than the top literary journals. But I never really broke through with even the middle-tier literary journals, could never get The Kenyon Review or The Missouri Review to return my calls.

But now it’s completely different. Short stories are my thing. I’ve been working for the past six months on putting together a collection, and it is highly possible that if I’m remembered at all, it’ll be as a story writer. Very strange turn of events.

I find myself very much in sympathy with some of these commercial story writers, like Fitzgerald and O. Henry, who wrote stories primarily for the money. I am the same as them. Like them, I consider my primary audience to be the audience in front of me. Because I work outside established journals, I don’t have the option of gaining awards, gaining prestige, accumulating a lot of tokens that can be traded in posthumously for some kind of recognition. For me, all that exists is my immediate connection with my audience. Someone here, right now, needs to be aware of me, or there’ll be nobody around to remember me in ten years, much less after I’m dead.

But I certainly think about posterity. That’s the aim, right? I hope that I’ll contribute a strand of DNA to the American short story, and that I’ll have my own little line of descent, line of influence. And if that’s going to happen, then I can’t stand alone—I need to be a link in a chain. It can’t just be that Naomi was doing her own thing, and it wasn’t related to the sci-fi world or to the literary world—it was just some crazy online thing. No. I need people to understand me as some fusion of the two worlds, equally influenced by both. And that’s what I am, or someday will be, I hope.

These two journals, published within five years of each other, contained two short stories that are equally famous and equally great. If you’re a sci-fi fan, you’ve definitely read the story on the left. If you’ve read any literary short stories, you’ve probably read the story on the right.

The Literary Reputation Poll Closes December 8th

I’m conducting a poll to assess the critical reputation of various authors. So far we’ve gotten 1100 responses! More responses makes the data better and allows me to meaningfully disaggregate along demographic and other lines. Basically, the more responses I get, the cooler the charts I can make. Poll closes December 8th, so act fast if you want to be counted.

Two more Samuel Richardson Finalists announced!

My award for best self-published novel continues apace. The judges have announced two more finalists:

• Lillian Wang Selonick
  selected
  Colin Dodds
  ’s Ms. Never:

  Ms. Never is a contemporary-world fantasy about a young woman, Farya, who has an inexplicable and uncontrolled magical ability to erase pieces of reality, along with everyone’s memories of whatever has disappeared. This has the effect of altering huge swaths of history and geography. These incidents of erasure, which Farya conceives of as ‘seizures,’ happen in moments of depression, distraction, or else fear and rage

• Phil Christman
  selected Daniel Falatko’s The Wayback Machine:

  The plot is basically this: We all pretty much know by now that that millennial bible Vice was, to one degree or another, sus. (I’ve heard people call it a CIA front before, though I don’t know how strong the case for that is.) Falatko simply follows through on that premise. He takes up a character named Nathan, a former music journalist who wrote for Vice and Pitchfork (here “Bad Habits” and “Dagger”) “twice had sex with Cat Power,” “met and emailed with MIA,” fucked American Apparel models, witnessed Pete Doherty mid-bender, etc. etc. Now Nathan is an ex-con (drug dealing, of course) who squats in a dead friend’s apartment, and his only way to make money is through his appearances on a Gen Z podcast deliciously titled “The $200 Mason Jar Podcast.”

This makes six finalists so far. The others are:

• Merritt Graves’s Drive A

• Michele Howarth’s Glitterballs

• Alexander Sorondo’s Cubafruit

• Will Caverly’s Here, The Bees Sting

The remaining finalists will hopefully be selected in the next week. Then, in the next round of the judging, all the judges will read all the finalists and write up their favorite. If you want to join in, please do! If you post a review of any of these books (whether positive or negative), I’ll link to it in Woman of Letters.

Elsewhere On The Internet

The past two weeks have seen no fewer than five people in my life publish big, important articles:

• Alexander Sorondo
  wrote a long profile of Alan Moore for The Metropolitan Review. I am always impressed by the level of research he does for these profiles—it feels like he spoke to everyone Alan Moore knew. It’s truly a loving and fascinating tribute to the man.

• Henry Begler
  ’s approach is less biographical and more purely literary than Sorondo’s. When Begler writes about someone, you really feel like you’re getting the final word on their place in the literary canon—I really enjoyed his long write-up on Janet Malcolm, a writer whose The Journalist and the Murderer has made me permanently suspicious of all members of the press.

• James Tussing
  used to be known as “Secret Squirrel”, under which name he was one of the best commenters on Substack notes. He recently re-evaluated the work of Alice Munro—he re-reads her stories in light of the revelations about how she covered for her husband’s pedophilia and abuse of Munro’s daughter. Seen through this light, many of the incidents in her fiction take on a distinctly darker tone, and pose a challenge to the way she’s historically been read, as some little old lady, some sage of the Canadian heartland. I was fascinated by the piece, and it made me much more interested in Munro’s fiction, which I know sounds heartless to say. But go read it for yourself I suppose. It’s presented open access by the journal Literary Imagination (edited by
  Paul Franz
  ).

• Also in Literary Imagination,

  John Pistelli
  critiques the theorist Rene Girard—a very trendy thinker these days—for not being more humble in the face of literature’s complexity. I don’t know much about Girard, but I became somewhat more interested after reading this article. At least he says something about literature that people can actually understand. Obviously any theory you have about the meaning of a novel is going to be incomplete—every novel is too complex to be summarized. But that doesn’t mean the summary has no value.

FINALLY AND MOST IMPORTANTLY

My wife, Rachel Rutishauser, had a last-author paper come out in Nature yesterday.

This is a huge deal, Nature is the world’s oldest scientific journal and the most important journal in her field. She was involved in a clinical trial in which seven out of ten HIV-infected participants successfully controlled the virus without medications for months.

Basically, for decades scientists have been trying to figure out how to get the immune system to fight HIV, and my wife was involved in a team that has started to find some kind of answer. Obviously, this is very early stages, it’s not a clinical product yet, but it’s a very exciting finding.

My wife wasn’t alone. There are forty people on the paper, and she just handled one critical part (she’s an immunologist, she studied how exactly the treatment protocols were affecting the T-cells and what kinds of changes they were stimulating), but she was certainly important for the overall effort (that’s why she’s last-author). And I’m very proud of her. If you want more info, the study has been written up by The Washington Post, Science, and The San Francisco Chronicle. She tells me the Chronicle article is the best:

Dr. Rachel Rutishauser, a UCSF immunologist and infectious disease expert, said that in the field of HIV research she’s been intrigued by so-called elite controllers — rare individuals who are able to prevent HIV from proliferating and destroying their immune system without any drug intervention. The question becomes how to induce that immune reaction in people who are already infected.

“The biggest takeaway is that it’s very hard to understand how you get the immune system to fight HIV,” said Rutishauser, a lead author of the Nature paper.

The new study, she said, “is one of the first examples where the immune system has been shaped to more effectively control HIV.”

My wife has also summarized the paper here, in a Bluesky thread.