Publisher's comments

I’ve been a short story guy from way back and first became a fan of Ed Falco’s when we published one of his stories, “The Gift,” in The Missouri Review in the mid-eighties. This is a classic, by the way, one I think could stand to be in every anthology of American fiction there is. Over the years we published several more of his stories, and I began looking for his work in other magazines.  He has a voice that you trust as a reader, and a skilled, artful way of telling layered stories that are about something important. His stories are filled with plot and believable characters who are often so clearly realized you feel as though you know them. Often these characters have some dark flaw—either of basic personality or arising out of circumstance—that they must face, if not overcome, in order to protect their family, especially their children, from some real physical or emotional catastrophe that arises with sudden unexpectedness—a brush with outside evil—or from their own private demons that have been buried in the past. They ask moral questions, force risky moral choices, and in many ways are very traditional pieces, but with a distinctly contemporary edge, with a tension that can build to a razor edge in a flash, without a lot of commotion. Some of these turn out well enough, some become cautionary tales. All of them are emotionally complex, tinged with ironic or unexpected consequences.

            For a long time, Fred and I have wanted to publish a story collection. But they’re difficult to do successfully for a commercial publisher because the sales are so often not what you would hope they’d be. For whatever reasons—I have a few ideas, but they’re only theories—people don’t tend to buy story collections. There are, of course, exceptions every year, but the exceptions are so unpredictable. Still, we both admire the form and love reading stories ourselves. And part of our mission at Unbridled—as its been everywhere, really—is to support the best voices we can find, over the long haul whenever possible, and to publish work that we believe has a chance to last.

            I absolutely love Ed Falco’s writing—it has everything I look for in fiction. He has a large body of work but he hasn’t reached a broader audience that I think he deserves. We decided that if we ever were going to do a story collection, this one was it. We decided to make it a selected works because he has such a large opus that, for whatever reasons, hasn’t yet reached that large audience and we wanted to make a statement—we wanted to tell people that, hey, here’s a guy who is one of the very best practitioners of the short story form, and has been for years, and now you have this chance to read him, perhaps see what you’ve missed. I’m very proud, and Ed should be proud, that every story in this collection stands on its own. There are no fill ins. We were very careful about making sure that every story we included paid off.

Greg Michalson

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

Greg,

As much as I've enjoyed what you and Fred have put together in the past and so far with Unbridled, I was very excited to see the two of you tackling the short form, and really hope Ed's book has done well enough that you'll consider doing something similar for some other great writers out there that have a great deal of excellent collections out there that are on small, or university presses, and have not seen great exposure - the Alyson Hagys, Greg Johnsons, David Huddles, of the world.

[michalson]

I think there are more good short story writers out there now than ever. We've been coming through a new golden age for the form. Unbridled Books would certainly like to be part of that. Oddly, although the form may be experiencing something of a renaissance, readers seem reluctant in general to buy collections. This is almost counter-intuitive, given the quickening of our lives, etc. But we're excited about the kind of attention Sabbath Night is getting.

[Dan Wickett]

I've had somebody explain to me (in fact, I believe it was of those authors I mentioned above) that they thought that it was actually because of our short attention span society that we are not seeing people buying and reading story collections in great volume. The comment was that taking the time and making the choice to read, and not watch television or movies, or go online, etc., is in itself a process. And that those that are making that effort, may be more interested in novels, or a non-fiction effort, because they only have to go through the process of getting into a set of characters and their motives and plots, etc. one time and not the 9 to 12 times that will generally occur in a short story collection.

I'm not sure I totally agree with that, but then, I choose to read short story collections frequently. Curious to hear your thoughts on that idea.

[michalson]

I hadn't thought of it quite that way. I do believe readers like to setttle into a character or place/time and live there in their imaginations for a while. There might be the worry that the next group of characters won't be as satisfying somehow, or that a collection of stories might be uneven in quality. Similar to a music CD with one or two good tunes. Maybe people are just used to finding stories in magazines and prefer to read them there, one at a time.

[reverse phone lookup]

as governor of California.)
Can you say something about flip side of historical settings, Jeff? How do you go about making the contemporary world as influential in a story as the historic setting is?

[xlpharmacy]

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