fiction
Carmel Bird
Peter Craven (ed)
The Best Australian Stories 1999
Bookman Press $19.95pb, 346pp,1 86395 353 1
THIS IS THE FIRST EDITION of a series of annual collections of short pieces of fiction, published by Bookman Press. Peter Craven is careful to state in his Introduction that the book is not an anthology of short stories only, that it includes fragments of longer works and also poetry. Both this book and its companion volume The Best Australian Essays 1999 are jacketed in a way that invokes the familiar American anthologies .
The decision to do this must have been a difficult one, for the jackets invite immediate comparison with their American templates. Bold and intrepid Bookman. To begin a story series in Australia now is pretty brave too, when you consider the lack of interest in reading and publishing new short pieces of fiction. There aren't many magazines where writers can publish pieces of fiction; and publishers are said to be unwilling to publish collections by single writers because such things do not sell.
In 1982 Pascoe Publishing started putting out four issues a year of Australian Short Stories, and continued until the end of 1998. In that period, there was a time when small magazines flourished (if that is the word) and when publishers were less nervous about collections. There were three years in the late nineties when Australasian Post published a weekly short story by top Australian writers, ten of whom have work in The Best Australian Stories of 1999. Those were the days. I am told that Australian Short Stories still exists, with a different publisher, but it has disappeared off my radar (a radar which is, I have to tell you, quite sensitive to these things). So it is with astonishment and hope that I open the new book. Where could all this have come from? For the American collections always (I believe) draw the material from stories published in the year named in magazines and such. There I go, expecting the template of the collection to follow that of the jacket. I am very pleased by what I find.
People often skip reading the introductions to collections, but in this case I think it is very important for it to be read, since the philosophy of the selection is clearly outlined, and pre-empts some of the questions that might be asked. It illuminates the mystery of where the work has come from. The editor explains, for instance, 'I have placed no impediments in the path of inclusions other than my own likes with the hope that this would yield its own standards.' This seems to me to be open and fair, and is in fact something always implied when a collection owns to having an editor. It turns out that the method of collecting the stories is utterly different from that used for the American books (where the editors read as many magazines for the year as they can find). Our book has one story each from Meanjin, Heat and Granta ; the remaining eighteen pieces are unpublished fragments from novels already published, or else sections of novels about to be published. And an unpublished piece of poetry by Alan Wearne.
The pieces all stand alone, telling stories, resembling short stories. Peter Craven states that the ideal of the short story is 'to achieve the precision of poetry and sustain a tone which is lyrical and absolute to the last syllable.' I think all the pieces qualify. Perhaps it is no longer possible to talk about, to write 'short stories'. So much has changed in the way we live and think and read and write. In fact Gerald Murnane (who is frequently invoked in the Introduction but who has not contributed a piece of writing) used always to be insistent that his work, at least, was 'fiction' and could be described in no other way. Publishers still want to market 'novels' of course. But if all you ever do is sell novels, much of the writing such as is found in The Best Australian Short Stories will probably never be seen. So here we have twenty-two samples of writing from some of the best writers in Australia in 1999. Sometimes publishers (I can think of Random House) publish a similar kind of thing.