The literary journal One Story was recently asked to name its 10 top short stories. On its blog, the top 10 were listed, along with a long list of 26 other contenders. Some of the comments expressed shock that Hemingway wasn’t included. I was more overwhelmed by the fact that One Story, which publishes one short story every three weeks, has more than 15 staffers.

And Hemingway-Schmemingway, the list also didn’t include William Trevor (pictured) — an even greater oversight, in my opinion. But as the folks at One Story admit, this task is “pretty impossible” and “always changing.” Off the top of my head, my list might include one story from their top 10 list (“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and another from its long list (“Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” by Robert Olen Butler).

Some locks for me would include “The Piano Tuner’s Wives” by William Trevor, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, “We Didn’t” by Stuart Dybek, “Tapka” by David Bezmozgis, and “The Sandman” by Donald Barthelme. I remember loving “A Letter That Never Reached Russia” by Nabokov, but it’s been a long time. Lorrie Moore, Junot Diaz, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Chekhov might make my list, too, but I would have to go back to figure out which story in each case. This exercise is making me wish (even more than usual) that many of my short-story anthologies weren’t in storage. Might be time to pay them a visit.

As Hollywood prepares its full-on assault of summer stupidity (I’m looking at you, Green Lantern), Bookforum cleverly devotes its summer issue to best sellers. Ruth Franklin offers an essay about the history of the beast, including its origins:

The term best seller has always been a misnomer. Fast seller would be more appropriate, since the pace of sales matters as much as the quantity. The first list of books “in order of demand” was created in 1895 by Harry Thurston Peck, editor of the trade magazine The Bookman. Publishers Weekly started its own list in 1912, but others were slow to follow: The New York Times did not create its best-seller list until 1942. Now, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today also compile national lists, and each of the major regional papers has its own — all generated in slightly different ways.

And like most things, the best-seller list used to be more interesting, less predictable:

A combination of factors brought about the homogenization of the best-seller list that began in the late ’70s and continues today. . . .

In the past, it was common for a novelist to have a few hits and then fade from view. [Warwick] Deeping, for instance, never made the list again after 1932, though he continued publishing through the ’50s. Now, by contrast, there began to emerge a core group of writers who could regularly sell a million copies in a year and then come right back the following year with a new best seller — a trend that continued through the ’90s and shows no signs of abating. . . . Danielle Steel — who published her first best seller, Changes, in 1983 — holds the current record with thirty-three. Stephen King, whose first hit was The Dead Zone in 1979, comes in second with thirty-two. John Grisham, who started with The Firm in 1991, is third with twenty-three. Rounding out the list are the prolific newcomer James Patterson (seventeen), Tom Clancy (thirteen), Patricia Cornwell and Sidney Sheldon (eleven each), and Michael Crichton and Robert Ludlum (ten each). Some of these writers are stronger than others — both Clancy and Crichton have at least produced readable books — but none approaches the stature even of a Wouk or a Uris. The middlebrow, represented now by writers like John Irving and Garrison Keillor, had become a minority. Meanwhile, the only new literary novelists who made the list in the ’80s and ’90s did so with the help of movie tie-ins (Umberto Eco) or assassination threats (Salman Rushdie). The “flood of fiction” that Peck lamented in 1902 had become a tsunami drowning out outlier voices.

Reason #4,789 that it’s hard to feel too bad about whatever crisis publishers are currently facing can be found here.

Later today, I’m going to post a belated review of Jessica Francis Kane’s The Report, a novel that’s both quiet and forceful. Kane has a new piece up at The Morning News that could be described the same way. She recounts a recent visit to London, and if you’re like me, her introduction will be more than enough to draw you into the rest of her discussion about history and its relationship with fiction:

The man walked with a limp and a cane and couldn’t stand quite straight. He made his way slowly, deliberately to the front row of the auditorium in the London Transport Museum, a custom-made fluorescent yellow vest over his dark blazer.

Printed on the vest were various facts and figures of the Bethnal Green Tube station disaster: 173 people killed on the stairs the night of March 3, 1943; death in all cases by asphyxiation, there were no bombs; largest civilian accident of WWII.

He’d come to hear me speak on the topic, the subject of my first novel. He sat down and looked up at me on the stage. To say his expression was skeptical would be an understatement. I am a relatively young American novelist. He is Alf Morris, one of the accident’s oldest survivors.

Malcolm Jones at Book Beast talks to John Gray about his new book, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death, which I’m writing about here soon (in relation to a couple of other books). Gray says, “I’m old enough to remember that when photocopiers came along we were told that they would destroy tyranny. I’m sure people said the same thing about radio or the telegraph, just as now they say the same thing about the Internet.” His book, which reads far more smoothly than its inelegant title, is, in part, an argument for being “friendlier to our mortality. The transience of our lives is one of the things that makes it valuable. We might, at least as individuals, actually shake the hold of some of these dreams of technological immortality. Although I don’t think the culture as a whole can be changed, because the culture as a whole is possessed by the idea that science can deliver us from our actual condition.” One more extended quote:

I’m not a believer, but I’m friendly to religion, partly because it goes with being human — it’s an odd kind of humanism which is hostile to something which is so quintessentially human as religion. I’m very opposed to investing science with the needs and requirements of religion. I’m equally opposed to the tendency within religion, which exists in things like creationism and intelligent design, to turn religion into a kind of pseudo-science. If you go back to St. Augustine or before, to the Jewish scholars who talk about these issues, they never regard the Genesis story as a theory. Augustine says explicitly that it should not be interpreted explicitly, that it’s a way of accessing truths which can’t really be formulated by the human mind in any rational way. It’s a way of accessing mysterious features which will remain mysterious. So it was always seen right up to the rise of modern science — as a myth, not a theory. What these creationists are doing is retreating, they’re accepting the view of religion promoted by scientific enemies of religion, and saying, no, we have got science and it’s better than your science. Complete error.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

I don’t stick to a strict reading schedule. I’m always buying books, so I always have a lot of books I haven’t read. I imagine this condition will last forever. The unread books are in a constant state of flux, some of them occasionally floating toward the top of the pile, which pile is more mental than physical. Sometimes I will learn about a book or become suddenly interested in one that skips to the front of the line, but few of those books have been as unlikely to do so as The Chris Farley Show, an oral biography of the comedian.

Last week, a friend at work sent me a very brief, silly clip from a Farley movie to expound on some joke we had just made. And in the way of YouTube, I then found myself watching an appearance Farley made on Letterman in 1995. Something about the interview piqued my interest. Or rather, several things: Farley’s agile double-cartwheel entrance; his earnest-fan handshake with the legendary host; his unsurprisingly over-the-top (and possibly intoxicated) but still riveting performance; his strangely child-like responses to certain moments; the way Letterman was genuinely cracking up, which is rare.

Farley died at 33, his popularity far outrunning his resume. There were a handful of good Saturday Night Live characters (like the motivational speaker Matt Foley, and Farley himself as a befuddled interviewer of the stars) and a few funny scenes in Tommy Boy. But in several of his roles, there was a sense that Farley was an actor who could convey a character and not crack up in the middle of whatever outrageous thing he was doing. I don’t think I would be interested in a straight biography of him, but the oral format was perfect. I read it in about a day.

The child-like thing was no act, as Farley had a fairly serious case of arrested development, being mothered from afar after he moved to New York from the Midwest and generally obsequious to all authority figures. He was also obsessive-compulsive. (Writer and performer Bob Odenkirk, who wrote the Matt Foley sketch: “I cannot express to you how much he licked everything. . . . He had to lick his shoelaces to tie them. He’d lick his finger and touch the stair, lick the finger, touch the stair, and do it all the way up the staircase. It was totally nuts.”)

He was also very generous, spending time with some of New York’s most forgotten people. The full extent of his charity work, through his church and other outlets, wasn’t known even by those close to him until after his death.

The middle of the book focuses on Farley’s magnetic stage presence. His friend Pat Finn says of watching him perform at Chicago’s Second City: “There was a scene where he played a waiter. The people eating dinner were the heart of the scene, but Chris came out and got a huge laugh with “Can I get you something to eat?” That was it. He went over to the other side of the stage to make the drinks and the sandwiches in the background, and every single head in the audience slowly turned to watch Chris. It was the oddest thing. Even if he was doing nothing, you wanted to watch him do nothing.” Fellow actor Michael McKean said, “It was nice to share the stage with that kind of manic energy. For one thing, you knew the focus was elsewhere. No one was watching me. I could have sat down and eaten a sandwich during some of the sketches we did together.”

But above everything else, Farley was an addict, and the book moves inexorably toward a series of grim remembrances that end more than once with, “And that was the last time I ever saw him alive.” As his friend Ted Dondanville puts it earlier in the book: “The first hour of drinking with Chris was fun. The second hour was the best hour of your life. The rest of the night was pure hell.” The book mostly reads as a cautionary tale about what you can — and can’t — do to help someone with their own demons. It’s far more harrowing than funny, which seems only right, since that could also be said of Farley’s life off-camera.

A 1994 interview with famed editor Robert Gottlieb in the Paris Review was passed around online this week. It breaks from the magazine’s normal format. Instead of featuring Gottlieb and an interviewer, It features him and extended comments by a chorus of writers with whom he’s worked, including Toni Morrison, Michael Crichton, Cynthia Ozick, Robert Caro, and others. The whole thing is worth reading, but below are three of my favorite excerpts:

Gottlieb:

Joe Heller and I have always been on exactly the same wavelength editorially, and the most extraordinary proof of this came up when we were working on Something Happened. It’s a deeply disturbing book about a very conflicted man — a man who is consumed with anxiety and all kinds of serious moral problems — and his name was Bill Slocum. Well, we went through the whole book, and divided it up into chapters and all the rest of it, and at the end of the process I said, Joe, this is going to sound crazy to you but this guy is not a Bill. He said, Oh really, what do you think he is? I said, He’s a Bob. And Joe looked at me and said, He was a Bob, and I changed his name to Bill because I thought you would be offended if I made him a Bob. I said, Oh no, I don’t think he’s anything like me, it’s just that this character is a Bob. So we changed it back. It was absolutely amazing. How did it happen? I don’t know. I suppose our convoluted, neurotic, New York Jewish minds work the same way.

Robert Caro:

In all the hours of working on The Power Broker, Bob never said one nice thing to me — never a single complimentary word, either about the book as a whole or about a single portion of the book. That was also true of my second book, The Path to Power. But then he got soft. When we finished the last page of the last book we worked on, Means of Ascent, he held up the manuscript for a moment and said, slowly, as if he didn’t want to say it, Not bad. Those are the only two complimentary words he has ever said to me, to this day.

Gottlieb:

I have idiosyncrasies in punctuation, like everybody else. Because one of the formative writers of my life was Henry James, it’s all too easy for me to pepper a text with dashes. Many people don’t like dashes. With Le Carré, I’m always putting commas in, and he’s always taking them out, but we know that about each other. He’ll say, Look, if you absolutely need this one, have it. And I’ll say, Well, I would have liked it, but I guess I can live without it. We accommodate each other. When I was a young firebrand it never occurred to me that I might be wrong, or that I wasn’t going to have my way, or that it wasn’t my job to impose my views. I could get into twenty-minute shouting matches over semicolons, because every semicolon was a matter of life or death. As you grow older you realize that there are bad lines in King Lear and it has survived.

Peter Stamm’s Seven Years, translated from the German, tells a familiar story in a startling way. The story is that a husband is vaguely dissatisfied with his marriage, and ends up cheating on his wife. But Alex, an architect, chooses (or doesn’t choose, but is inexplicably compelled toward) an exceedingly odd object of affection. His wife, Sonia, a fellow architect, is brilliant and beautiful. His occasional lover, Ivona, is . . . not those things.

Alex is both “excited and repulsed” by Ivona. We have to take his word about the excited part. Ivona is nearly mute, and when she does speak, it’s to awkwardly blurt out her obsessive love for him. The physical descriptions of her are thoroughly off-putting. God help me, but I kept picturing her as Kathy Geiss from 30 Rock.

Alex seems most drawn to Ivona because she is a void. Life with Sonia requires Alex to care about the usual signposts in life, his career, his children, his home and his cars, his retirement fund. As for Ivona: “She took me without expectations and without claims.” But this is not enough of an explanation. Many people might satisfy the condition of no expectations while providing a clearer sense of pleasure. Alex tells the story in installments to Antje, a friend staying with him, Sonia, and their daughter, Sophie. Complete with a twist, this framework of the book — the telling of it to Antje — causes it to unfold as an unnerving fairy tale, a stubbornly unrevealing philosophical investigation of the origins and purposes of desire.

Earlier this year, I read Light Years by James Salter, a very different book also about a couple coming apart at the seams. I’d been meaning to read Salter, and followed Light Years with A Sport and a Pastime.

Several of the most powerful moments in Light Years are stark and aphoristic (“In the end she would forget him; that was how she would win.”), and more potent for appearing in the midst of Salter’s otherwise complex (but still elegant) prose.

Geoff Dyer called the book’s central couple, Nedra and Viri, “possibly the most irritatingly named characters in literature.” It’s not just the names. The central characters are pretentious and easily dissatisfied, and say things out loud like, “The only thing I’m afraid of are the words ‘ordinary life.’” Despite a lack of fellow feeling with the characters, I liked Light Years quite a bit, because Salter can flat-out write. Here he describes the feeling of a relationship just after it has been sundered: “A fatal space had opened, like that between a liner and the dock which is suddenly too wide to leap; everything is still present, visible, but it cannot be regained.”

Elsewhere, in a rich and hilarious early scene, a maniacally fastidious tailor ends up comparing a badly made shirt to “the story of a pretty girl who is single and one day she finds herself pregnant. It’s not the end of life, but it’s serious.”

After reading two books by Salter, I want to read more. I also feel that I understand why he’s beloved by a certain set of writers and editors but never reached quite the audience of some of the writers who sing his praises.