An activity as solitary as reading a work of fiction may actually help us become better at connecting with others, writes psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley in Greater Good.

Oatley says fiction is about “possible selves in possible worlds,” and can aid interpersonal skills in two ways: by helping readers develop “theory of mind”—imagining what others are thinking and feeling—as well as showing how people interact with one another.

Readers of fiction were found to have higher social ability than those who preferred non-fiction. The reason?

“Fiction is principally about the difficulties of selves navigating the social world. Non-fiction is about, well, whatever it is about: selfish genes, or how to make Mediterranean food, or whether climate changes will harm our planet. So with fiction we tend to become more expert at empathizing and socializing. By contrast, readers of non-fiction are likely to become more expert at genetics, or cookery, or environmental studies, or whatever they spend their time reading and thinking about.”

Source: Greater Good Magazine

For the Winter 2009 issue of The Hudson Review, the quarterly's editors have assembled a primer on non-English works from around the world. This "Translation Issue" is a heady collection, featuring excerpts from seemingly every genre and time period: classics like Antigone and Le Cid up through A Doll's House; 19^th century Japanese and Russian poetry; elegant contemporary reviews on books about language; and much, much more. Such a phenomenal swath of literary history in a single volume can't help but whet the appetite for more translated works (works that Utne, incidentally, has been championing for some time).

Barrelhouse is currently holding its “Barrelhouse Invitational: Office Life Edition.” The DC-based journal invites “cubicle drones to submit your fiction, essays, and poems about the highest highs and lowest lows of the disproportionate amount of time you spend in an Office Of Some Sort.”

According to the hilarious and snarky Interoffice Memorandum (pdf), your account of office life doesn’t have to resemble Dunder Mifflin, but still should have some relation to the official theme. “Barrelhouse understands fully the nature of the flexible situation vis a vis the modern office environment, in that this circumstance is increasingly flexible. . . . Therefore, submitted works of literary merit need not seek to portray said topic in a strictly cubicle-defined locality, but rather should ideally represent the mindscape of The Office in the broadest and most effective terms deemed appropriate for each specific work of literary merit.”

Submissions are due by March 1, and winners will be published in Barrelhouse #8, released in June 2009.

(Thanks, NewPages.)

Hip, young, Russian-born American fiction writers are a hot literary trendlet, one that all began with Gary Shteyngart's 2002 novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, argues Emily Gould for Russia!.

These writers, Gould explains, offer U.S. readers an outsider’s view of America, coming from a “writer with a sellable life story.” American audiences can have their pick: “a witty, suffering exotic with Chekhov and Dostoevsky in his bloodstream, or an underdog whose very completion of a book in English represents a triumph.”  

Despite traits their works seem to share—"a wry, fatalistic humor... and characters with an unhealthy dependence on vodka"—most Russian-American authors, Shteyngart excluded, chafe at being corralled into an “ethnic literature” category. (Even though they do have a pretty good moniker—the Beet Generation—coined by author Anya Ulinich’s husband.) Most just want to be known as good writers, not as good Russian-American writers.

“I have no national allegiance when I write,” Ulinich told Gould. “It’s not my role to give my readers some kind of rounded, objective, and definitive view of Russia and Russians. I only represent my characters to my readers.” Ulnich's 2007 novel Petropolis is about a Siberian mail-order bride from the fictional town of Asbestos 2.

Marketing novels as “Russian-American,” however, doubtlessly will continue, as long as book-buying readers are tempted by offers of insight into the Russian soul that can’t be gleaned from, as Gould puts it, “reading the front page of the newspaper” or “wading through reams of analysis.” 

Image by Darwin Bell, licensed under Creative Commons.

Canada is no bucolic backwater, writes Canadian novelist John McFetridge for Canada's book news magazine, Quill & Quire (article not available online). It's a criminal hotspot, and it's providing plentiful material for crime writers. McFetridge points out Canadian criminals like the Montreal mafia that ran the French Connection drug smuggling ring; warring biker gangs in Quebec who killed more than 200 people; and an estimated 100,000 people working in Canada's $4 billion marijuana industry. Canadian crime fiction writers Louise Penny, Giles Blunt, Sandra Ruttan, and Anne Emery are reaping the creative benefits of domestic disorder, “beginning to stay home and investigate what's going on here” with crime novels set in Canada.

Image by Simon Davison, licensed under Creative Commons.

You probably don’t need an excuse to spend more time lurking in the stacks at your favorite bookstore. But here’s one anyway: To find the prizes offered in a nationwide literary treasure hunt orchestrated by lit mag The First Line, you should chart a path to the fiction anthologies section of “a national chain of bookstores” near you, read deeply into the “bad poetry” clues they’ve provided, and behold your reward: a free subscription. There are just two planted in each state, so hunt wisely.

And while you’re at it, craft a story for The First Line’s Spring 2008 issue. They’re looking for 300 to 3,000 words beginning with that issue’s preselected first line: “Sometimes the name they give you is all wrong.”

—Danielle Maestretti

Most Americans know Anton Chekhov for his plays—produced in frequency only behind Shakespeare’s—and yet, his greatest legacy to the literary world might be his short stories.

Chekhov never left a reader settled, breaking the comfy rules of Victorian fiction and paving the way for future iconoclasts like Virginia Woolf. Although Chekhov died at 44, he left behind hundreds of stories, 201 of which are collected online under public domain at ibiblio, a collaborative project between the Schools of Information and Library Science, and Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

A word of warning: All the translations are the work of Constance Garnett, who both introduced the English speakers to 19th-century Russian literature and sullied some of its richness with Victorian quaintness. Luckily, the stories are annotated by site complier James Rusk for cultural clarity, and he points out where Garnett took liberties. Rusk also provides an introductory reading list.

—Eric Kelsey

(Thanks, Open Culture and MetaFilter)

In the September 30th issue of the New York Times Book Review, Stephen King warned that the short story is in a state of decline. According to King, the form suffers because fiction staples such as Tin House and the Kenyon Review get shoved on the bottom shelf on magazine racks, while “moneymakers and rent-payers” get prominent placement. How and why fiction gets second billing is beside his point; King focuses on what happens to writers when they know they’ve got a diminishing audience. According to King, their stories become "self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers."

J.M. Tyree argues at the Smart Set that short story isn’t dying, just that people aren’t looking in the right spot: Writing has shifted to the digital medium. It's only the technophobes who prize the bound specimen over the words. “The online world, especially for the older crowd, is still conventionally depicted as a kind of South Bank of London filled with the literary equivalent of bear-baiting," he observes. While Tyree acknowledges that “the short fiction available online cannot compete in quality with the better print quarterlies,” his survey of literary activity in various mediums makes surveying just one form—say, the print short story—seem shortsighted.

On his blog, Brooklyn, New York-based writer Ed Champion responds to King’s “distress call,” and offers an unusual solution. He wonders if audio books were performed more like radio dramas, instead of largely lifeless recitations, that if the $871 million industry might help American literature regain a chunk of the readers it has lost. “If the short story were truly important in the United States, then someone would step in and find a way in which to reach the great American public,” he writes.—Eric Kelsey