User:Chris Gabbard

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The Short Story Review [ISSN: 0741-0786] was an independent San Francisco-based literary journal operating between 1983 and 1989. It played a small part in the short story renaissance of the 1980s. "The 1980s were the golden age of the short story," writes Bob Hoover of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Mary Robinson, and others reawakened interest in what had been a dormant genre.

Showcasing emerging short story writers as well as authors of established reputation, The Short Story Review began operation at roughly the same time as several other literary magazines in the San Francisco Bay Area, most notably Wendy Lesser's The Threepenny Review, Jay Schaefer's Fiction Network Magazine, and Howard Junker's Zyzzyva (magazine). With the partial exception of Fiction Network, The Short Story Review differed from the others by focusing exclusively on the short story as a formal literary genre. The editors' aim was to cater to the local community of fiction writers in the same way Joyce Jenkins's Berkeley-based Poetry Flash served the bay area poetry community. The editors were eager to carve out a niche for a young generation of short story writers in a region strongly dominated by the poetry of the aging Beat Generation.

In addition to serving as a venue for original short stories (it regularly published manuscripts from its slush pile), it actively solicited new work from well-known authors. Along with original fiction, it included interviews with writers, reviews of recently released short story collections produced by both small presses and major publishing houses, and a monthly calendar of local fiction readings.

Over the six years of its existence, it appeared under three names. From December 1983 until June 1985, it published monthly as Fiction Monthly and was distributed free. Because financial constraints forced retrenchment, from fall 1985 to spring 1986 it appeared less frequently and under the name FM Five. Thereafter it came out quarterly as The Short Story Review and was sold in bookstores. Throughout its duration it was printed in tabloid format, and the number of paying subscribers, to whom the periodical was mailed, at one point peaked at several hundred, with subscribers in all fifty states as well as in Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

Notable contributors

The Short Story Review was the first literary journal to publish work by Chinese-American writer Amy Tan. On the advice of author and then San Francisco State University creative writing instructor Molly Giles, Tan sent an unsolicited manuscript to the journal, which printed it in its Spring 1986 edition (then FM Five) as "End Game." A literary agent saw the story and obtained an advance for Tan. Later renamed “Rules of the Game,” her original story in FM Five became the basis of the best-selling 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club and the 1993 film of the same title.

Although not similarly debuting, other writers the review published who later gained prominence were Dagoberto Gilb and Antonya Nelson. Authors with already established reputations whose work appeared were Alice Adams (writer), Rudolfo Anaya, Jane Cutler, Corinne Demas, John Dufresne, H. E. Francis,  Herbert Gold, William Heinesen, Nicholasa Mohr, and Paul West (writer).

Other notable authors it published were Molly Giles, Richard Cortez Day, R. A Sasaki, Judith Slater, Toni Graham, and Mark Coovelis.

Additionally, it featured interviews with Lee K. Abbott, Paula Gunn Allen, Madison Smartt Bell, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ron Carlson, Denise Chavez, Carolyn Chute, Tom Clark (poet), J. California Cooper, Michael Covino, Harriet Doerr, Dagoberto Gilb, Amy Hempel, Amy Kaufman, W. P. Kinsella, Ron Loewinsohn, Tim O'Brien (author), Shannon Ravenel, Anne Rice, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Tobias Wolff.

It also included a reminiscence by Alvah Bessie on Jack London

Editors

The journal's founders and chief editors were Chris Gabbard and Stephen Woodhams, both of whom had studied creative writing at San Francisco State University under Gina Berriault, Michael Rubin, and Herb Wilner. The editorial board included Beth Overson, Elea Carey, Leza Lowitz, Lynn Gray, Anthony Caquelin, Tema Goodwin, Susan St. Aubin, Cathy Jacob, and Ted Rajfur. Ted Rajfur also illustrated a number of the stories. Lynn Gray and Judith Slater conducted most of the interviews.

By selecting medium-length, minimalistic pieces written in spare prose and in the mode of literary realism, the editorial board attempted to follow in the tradition of the genre's masters: Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Kate Chopin, Eudora Welty, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Flannery O'Connor, to name a few.

In 1989, the review's funding source dried up, and the board voted to cease operation with the Spring, 1989, issue (vol. 6, no. 2). As a print periodical, advertising and subscription revenue never covered production and distribution costs. Had it survived longer, it might have transitioned to Internet publication.

Archived

The Thomas G. Carpenter Library at the University of North Florida (UNF) in Jacksonville houses a complete run of The Short Story Review. The contact people for the now defunct journal are Dr. Chris Gabbard (English department) and Jim Alderman (Carpenter Library Special Collections) at UNF.