Granta & Tin House Receive Recognition for Their Fantastic Short Stories

 

Another literary win is in the bag for Benay clients, Tin House and Granta. The O. Henry Prize recognizes great pieces of short fiction and is “intended to ‘strengthen the art of the short story and to stimulate younger authors.’” Tin House has two winners with Kristen Iskandrian’s “The Inheritors” and Dylan Landis’ “Trust.” Granta has one winner with Mark Haddon’s “The Gun.” 

You can read “The Inheritors” in Tin House’s summer 2012 “Summer Reading” Journal Issue 52.

You can read “Trust” in Tin House’s summer 2013 “Summer Reading” Journal Issue 56.

You can read “The Gun” here (but you must be a subscriber to Granta Magazine).

Benay is always excited and happy to see our clients get well-deserved recognition. We wish Tin House and Granta the best.

Short Stories That Every Neurotic Can Enjoy: "Someday This Will Be Funny"

Red Lemonade scores a New York Times book review with author Lynne Tillman’s book of short stories, Someday This Will Be Funny.  The review praises Tillman as “A terrific prose stylist whose work should have wide appeal.”  The short stories are an engaging read and are up Red Lemonade’s site for those intrigued by her characters and their neuroses.  For instance the story “That’s How Wrong My Love Is” painstakingly details a narrator who forges an obsession with a couple of mourning doves nesting in the empty planter of an adjacent apartment. Watching the doves becomes a ritual, and at some point, the narrator even considers buying a telescope to better observe the birds, only to “remember Rear Window,” concluding that to use a telescope in New York City is “dangerous or at least provocative.” The speaker seems barely aware of his (or her) bizarre behavior, but is quick to judge the hoarding habits of a downstairs neighbor. Her public life as a “bubbly young woman who zips happily around the neighborhood” is so different from her private life as a hoarder that the narrator goes as far as to try and diagnose her as “possibly a schizophrenic.”

In the case of the mourning dove fanatic and the characters of other stories from Someday This Will Be Funny, the characters lack the self-knowledge to obtain their true desires. The New York Times book review puts it perfectly, “Inevitably, painfully, what Tillman’s characters ask for and pursue has little to do with what they actually want.”