Pushing the edges of the short story form: PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories 2010

Read two more stories in the "PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories 2010" collection, and from the first 4 stories that Laura Furman selected a pattern of taste emerges. Both the Adichie story, The Diligent (?) Historian, the the Wendell Berry story - like the first two in the collection - cover a large span of time, generations actually. It's unusual to find today stories of this scope, especially successful stories, and the selections here seem very much a reaction to the minimalism and the moment-in-time or day-in-the-life epiphanies that for the structure or organizing principle of almost every published story today. Magazines don't often go for the broader story - for one thing, they tend to be longer as these first four in the collection are - and for another they often read like sketches for a novel or screenplay. To their credit, each of these stories stands on its own. I suspect the editors was drawn to Adichie, who's had success with two novels and several appearances in The New Yorker, writing about her Nigerian childhood and background (obvious comparison here with Achebe), and Berry is an old pro who's too often consigned as a regionalist - and in this collection that may have helped him, as these editors seem to be moving away from the million stories about angst in Manhattan and at the Iowa Writers Workshop. I myself have written about 20 stories, most of which not published, and as I try to think back I believe nearly every one takes place in a single day and at the few longer ones takes place in a relatively short time span, a few weeks maybe - it seems really a challenge to push the edges of a short story farther than that, and we'll see whether others in this collection try the same unusual strategy.