Padgett Powell, Ron Rash, Elizabeth Spencer, Wells Tower. The table of contents reads like some idealized issue of The Southern Review—and there are 21 more names just like that.
But this isn’t some perfect-storm literary magazine; rather, these are the writers filling the pages of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill’s New Stories from the South 2010, edited by the masterful short-story writer Amy Hempel, who taught at Duke in the spring of 2000.
With content like this, a tradition hardly seems necessary. True to its southern roots, though, New Stories has a rich and colorful history, reaching back to its first iteration in 1986. The latest is the 25th edition of the series and the fifth to feature a guest editor responsible for selecting the featured stories.
Though Hempel chose the pieces that ended up in New Stories 2010, a few stages of the process preceded her involvement.
Kathy Pories, a senior editor at Algonquin, has served as the New Stories series editor since 2005 when Algonquin co-founder Shannon Ravenel, who started the collection, edited her last anthology. Pories’ duties involve going through the 400 or so issues of literary journals and magazines that are mined for possible stories; this year, she selected 65 that she then sent to Hempel, who whittled the group down to her 25 favorites.
“It was just sort of coincidental,” Pories said. “[Hempel] wrote to me and said, ‘I have 25 stories, is that too many?’ And I said, ‘Well, actually it’s the 25th year, why don’t we just kind of go with that serendipitous decision—25 stories for 25 years.’”
In reading over the journals, Pories looks for not only high quality but also those traits that might categorize the story as southern in some way—this is what gives the collection its unique theme and feel.
“It’s funny that everyone wants us to say, ‘This is the South, and this is not the South, and this story fits, and this story doesn’t,’” Pories said. “But really what we’re trying to do is put together an anthology that reflects the best stories that touch on the South and the southern experience and the southern character. It’s not like we’re trying to make rules.”
Like any continuous effort, New Stories has evolved over its past 25 years. The series’ start was almost concurrent with that of Algonquin’s, which, as a publishing house, began in order to provide authors access to the industry without needing to go through New York.
Being a regional house, Algonquin clearly has a particular interest in the South. The anthology was created by Ravenel not only to highlight the area’s best work but also to attract and eventually sign talented southern writers—which is how Algonquin mainstays Larry Brown and Jill McCorkle, among others, ended up there.
For the anthology’s first 20 years, Ravenel picked the stories, but after she stepped down in 2005, guest editors began to make the selections with the help of Pories. Hempel is the first of the guest editors who is not a southern writer.
Hempel’s choices are split between high-profile, established writers like the aforementioned as well as up-and-comers, giving New Stories 2010 a wide variety of content despite the regionalism.
“I like that there is a mix of the older-generation—Elizabeth Spencer, Michael Barry, for example—along with Wells Tower, Adam Atlas, Megan Mayhew Bergman, people like that,” Hempel said. “It just happened that way; I wasn’t looking to do it—I was just choosing the stories I like—but I’m glad it worked out like that.”
Other than the need to be informed by the South, one other binding guideline for stories was that they had to have been published in 2009. And there is room for flexibility even within these confines: The story from Wells Tower is his third revision of “Retreat,” which was first featured in McSweeney’s in 2007 and was then included in his anthology Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned in substantially altered form. It was then printed by McSweeney’s in 2009 in yet another iteration. In choosing “Retreat,” Hempel confronted both her charges as guest editor: to consider the series’ past and to frame the series’ present.
“[Tower] continued to revise it, and that was my loophole,” Hempel said. “The original version in 2007 had not been included in the anthology, and I made damn sure I was going to get this one.”
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