In Which the Author, Unsure of His Own Awesomeness and Certain No One Has Heard of Him Before, Reacts to a "Best Of" List Making the Rounds Online

I generally don’t like “Best of” lists when it comes to writers and books.

I say this as someone who owns every edition of Best American Short Stories stretching back to 1988 (as well as the Best American Short Stories of the Eighties anthology). Of course, I haven’t been buying them since then. 1988: The year Raymond Carver died, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” was inescapable on American radio waves, and I finished my first year of middle school.

I’ve written elsewhere about the scourge of “Best Writers Under [a certain age],” and why even the backlash against such a list—which often aims to include seemingly overlooked writers—is likewise problematic.

But this new list, “Ten Awesome Authors You’ve Never Heard of Before,” is troubling because its insult is built-in. Several of the authors on the list have commented this week about the back-handed compliment.

Here’s the list. These writers are generally awesome, it’s true. But who is the “you” in this list’s title? It can’t be me, can it? I’ve heard of these authors, for starters.

Matt Bell
Tina May Hall
Craig Davidson
Holly Goddard Jones
Kyle Minor
Roxane Gay
Benjamin Percy
Lindsay Hunter
Alan Heathcock
xtx

I have exchanged e-mails with six authors on this list. I published one of them in the online journal I edit. Three authors from the heart of this list are included in 24 Bar Blues: Two Dozen Tales of Bars, Booze, and the Blues, an anthology I edited that will be published ahead of this year’s AWP Conference. I have attended public readings by six of these authors. I own books by eight of them. I own (or have pre-ordered) more than one book by four different authors on this list. One of them had her story included in a collection of Leo Tolstoy’s stories (!) as a cross-promotion. One is adapting his own novel for the screen, to be directed by a fancy-pants director. Two of them are among the new crop of important literary editors. Just this week, one of them dropped a 94-point word on me in a game of Words with Friends (“freshens,” if you must know), while another convinced me to give my Lodge iron skillet a try and use it to make fried chicken.

So either I AM THE MOST CONNECTED PERSON IN THE HISTORY OF THE LIT-BIZ, or this list isn’t worth its pixels.

Most of these authors already have respectable audiences. As the authors remain awesome and perhaps even become more awesome, those audiences will grow. 

This column at LitReactor is called Storyville. I admit that I have never heard of this column. When others posted the list this week, I thought it was from the Storyville app. A slightly newer, but similar, list cropped up this week, too, but I won’t link to it*.

I am almost certain that readers who haven’t heard of these authors won’t learn about them via LitReactor, which aims to be “a destination for writers to improve their craft; a haven for readers to geek out about books; and a platform to kickstart your writing goals.” Two of those three are goals explicitly aimed at writers. Writers have heard of most of these authors. 

*Inexplicably, Alan Heathcock made both lists. Listen, people. Volt was reviewed in something like 40-50 outlets, which is ten times as many reviews as most authors receive. People have heard of him.