You’ve Got To Read This

"Ron Hansen and I did what career counselors suggest: Find a thing you do anyway and find a way to make it pay. In our case, we realised while standing around at writers’ conferences like Bread Loaf that we didn’t often talk about each other’s work, since that could get awkward, and that we didn’t often talk about business, since that could get so depressing. Usually, what we did was pick each other’s brains for stories that we admired and thought other people should read. If you’re standing there with Tim O’Brien you can’t just keep saying to him, “I love your work”. At some point, you need to discuss something different. We often turned to the question, “If I could read just one story, what should I read?” So we came up with the idea of an anthology where we asked a number of writers we admired to pick a story that they love and introduce it. What’s wonderful about the anthology was that some writers chose works that they thought everyone on earth needed to read. So Sue Miller chose Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. And others, like Charlie Baxter, just said, “Well, I’m not going to choose somebody that everyone knows about, I’m going to choose someone that nobody knows about.” So he chose Lars Gustafsson’s “Greatness Strikes Where it Pleases”. And we ended up with a nice balance between canonical stories and woefully neglected stories."