Last month, a New Pages review of Dzanc Books' Best of the Web 2008 anthology called the book "expansive"--and that rings right with my perusing of the eclectic book. Seems to me that the anthology's greatest strength is that it brings together fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and flash fiction; a lot of compelling voices brought to a common space and the juxtaposition among genres gives the book a dynamism that's missing from most "Best of" books.
I've been thinking a lot about the two introductions to this anthology from series editor Nathan Leslie and guest editor Steve Almond, where the pair explicitly acknowledge the skepticism with which many folks approach literary work that's published online. Print holds the literary prestige still today, in a digital age where so many of us are consuming a great deal of online news media. Leslie and Almond point to the great writing in Best of the Web 2008 and make the implication that this is writing that transcends its online medium, as if the internet is a neutral container for the writing that suffers merely from an uneven literary reputation.
While it's evident that wonderful literary writing appears online all the time, it's important to recognize how much the medium shapes the writing it holds, as every medium does. Whether its pages of a book or the website of a prestigious lit journal or a blog or a soup can, the medium isn't serving as the cold boundaries of the writing; it actively participates in creating it.
Michael Martone is renowned for exploring the dynamism between medium and content. Whether it's the series of "contributor's notes" that Martone initially wrangled to get lit journals to place in context of the actual contributor's notes, or the fictional travel pieces about Indiana that he published in newspapers where a reader could not be blamed for taking the piece in as nonfiction, Martone makes it apparent how medium and context shape the reading experience. (Both of those experiments were collected in Michael Martone and The Blue Guide to Indiana, respectively)
In an essay collected in another anthology--Martone's Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art--the writer discusses "framing the frame."
A frame, then, renders the story, in some ways, safe. We can read it as a story and not have to confront the content solely. We can read it as a confession of a rape and a pretend confession, for instance. Or another story presents us with an explanation of adultery and the awareness that it is a made-up explanation of adultery. The anxiety of the reader is relieved; a distance is created. The (student writing) workshop is very good at disarming or exposing the story's camouflage, so good that its function as a frame is rarely or never, I've found, discussed. The workshop proceeds as a given, and we are meant to forget its very complex function as context in which we read. By ignoring the workshop as a fictional frame, we miss teaching our students about the artistic manipulation of the frame. We concentrate on the object at the table, the stories, and ignore the table they are on.
... I am, after all, a fiction writer ... I am not simply the creator of objects but also the creator of the contexts in which these objects are created and displayed, in which they show forth and do work.
Just so, the frame of literary work appearing online contributes to meaning of that literary work. In Best of the Web 2008, Leslie and Almond needn't imply that the collected writing overcomes a medium that inherently breeds bad stories and poems. First of all, bad writing appears in all mediums; it's simply more accessible online. Second, the literary work of the anthology is great in part because of its online context; the introductions might've been a space to discuss how the meaning of the literary work shifted by moving from the web to a print anthology with the word "Best" in the title.
That all said: there is the book at hand.
A couple days ago, there was an online Best of the Web bonanza. TimeOutChicago has said the book "really cooks ... The Internet is built for this work: short and weird." That's about right: this is the perfect book for readers with high standards, many moods, and an itch that tends to keep them reading many books/stories/poems all at once (ahem.)
Special shout out to Amy Minton's story, "Overhanded." Collected in the anthology, it was published originally at Hobart. And it's real good. Lucky me, to be in a writing circle with her. Now, I just have to ride those coattails ...
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