Wednesday, January 10, 2024

SSW: MIDNIGHT GRAFFITI edited by Jessica Horsting and James Van Hise (Warner Books 1992); THE WAYS WE LIVE NOW: CONTEMPORARY SHORT FICTION FROM THE ONTARIO REVIEW edited by Raymond J. Smith (Ontario Review Press 1986): Short Story Wednesday



Executive summary:
Anthologies from two of the more notable little magazines of their era; OR having lasted a third of a century, and this, the only anthology from it so far, drawing on its first dozen years, the magazine ending with the death of its editor and co-publisher Raymond Smith, as cofounder and widow Joyce Carol Oates chose not to continue it. MG having been more of a mayfly in the horror small press, but having gathered an impressive roster of contributors, with the editors and publisher continuing their writing careers afterward, if perhaps not robustly (not sure if their romantic/domestic partnership continues, another parallel); the book apparently includes reprints from the magazine and fiction perhaps still in inventory after the last issue of the initial run was published in 1992, or solicited for the book--with one story already a reprint when published in the magazine, and another possibly resold to Pulphouse after MG's long delays in publishing (two more issues, one a 1994 "special" and the 1997 other one apparently mostly nonfiction, sporadically followed the book's publication); for its part, the OR book includes a Margaret Drabble story (and not a hundred-word vignette) published two years before in the UK edition of Cosmopolitan, but not previously in North America. Both books rather neglected, even at time of release, with only two editions each...hardcover and apparently trade paperback editions of the Smith volume released by OR Press, and a mass market paperback original release from Warner Books and a Doubleday Book Clubs edition in hardcover for the MG volume. In their introductions, Raymond J. Smith and Jessica Horsting go out of their way to note how very much concerned with the world of today the fiction in their magazines has tended to be, perhaps even more so than that of most comparable magazines in the eclectic literary magazine and the horror and suspense fields (both magazines with dollops of satirical and other sorts of fantasy included), with these selections perhaps highlighting that tendency, which might even be why they seemed a good pair for an essay about just that (Raymond Smith even revising Trollope's novel's title to fit his anthology's tendencies); it's not as if, say, Conjunctions nor Whispers was oblivious to such concerns, but perhaps not quite as intent on being attuned to them. Also notable is the degree to which talented writers, from those who never need worry where their next meal was coming from to rather new and usually promising professionals, would place work with the magazines which presumably paid modestly if at a reasonable going rate. Smith is relatively restrained in presentation, running the stories alphabetically by author, and offering only brief contributor notes in the last pages, including the datum that Oates "helps edit" OR; Horsting is more intent on curation, breaking stories into themed batches, each with a brief introduction by her; each story also has an uncredited headnote, where perhaps an invisible hand of Van Hise is felt. Also notable is how starkly textual how both books feel, compared to the imagery, illustration, photography or otherwise, their magazines featured in each issue.

Both magazines leaned toward shorter fiction, rather than novellas or serialized or even excerpted novels; when one removes the dust jackets from both the hardcover volumes, one finds that the OR volume is red with black lettering on the spine, the MG black with red lettering, making for a sort of visual harkening to Stendhal jointly and severally. Unsurprisingly, Ways is a better-built volume, sewn in cloth-covered boards on better paper but with slightly less easy-to-read typesetting;  the book club edition of the other has a then-typical D-day glue binding on less sturdy boards containing slightly cheaper paper, but also depends on the more thoroughly professional typeface choices in play at Warner Books, and with fewer words per page, probably has about as much content as the thinner volume.

Neither book was too thoroughly reviewed, as far as I can tell, at time of release...the OR volume seems not to have been reviewed in such a way that I've found indexes for those reviews at all, while MG received a number of mostly unimpressive Goodreads responses and not too much more, though Will Errickson's womanfriend Ashley Louise did guest-review it for his blog in 2010.


Midnight Graffiti

edited by Raymond J. Smith (Ontario Review Press, 1986; 0-86538-054-6, x+301pp, hc; 978-0865380554 tp)
        Details supplied by Dennis Lien, augmented by TM.
    • ix · Preface · Raymond J. Smith
    • 1 · Molly’s Dog · Alice Adams · ss The Ontario Review 21, Fall 1984/Winter 1985
    • 12 · The Man from Mars · Margaret Atwood · ss The Ontario Review 6, Spring/Summer 1977
    • 29 · Saving the Boat People · Joe David Bellamy · ss The Ontario Review 21, Fall 1984/Winter 1985
    • 45 · Town Smokes · Pinckney Benedict · ss The Ontario Review 25, Fall 1986/Winter 1987
    • 58 · My Life as a West African Gray Parrot · Leigh Buchanan Bienen · ss The Ontario Review 15, Fall 1981/Winter 1982
    • 69 · At the Krungthep Plaza · Paul Bowles · ss The Ontario Review 13, Fall 1980/Winter 1981
    • 74 · The Black Queen · Barry Callaghan · ss The Ontario Review 13, Fall 1980/Winter 1981
    • 77 · Homework · Margaret Drabble · ss Cosmopolitan (UK) November 1975; The Ontario Review 7, Fall 1977/Winter 1978
    • 84 · Death’s Midwives · Margareta Ekström · ss; translated by Linda Schenck, The Ontario Review 20, Spring/Summer 1984
    • 93 · Fruit of the Month · Abby Frucht · ss The Ontario Review 20, Spring/Summer 1984
    • 102 · A Pure Soul · Carlos Fuentes · ss; translated by Margaret S. Peden, The Ontario Review 12, Spring/Summer 1980 
    • 116 · The Harvest · Tess Gallagher · ss The Ontario Review 19, Fall 1983/Winter 1984
    • 129 · Some Gifts · Reginald Gibbons · ss The Ontario Review 5, Fall 1976
    • 137 · Black Cotton · William Goyen · ss The Ontario Review 17, Fall 1982/Winter 1983
    • 144 · Any Sport · William Heyen · ss The Ontario Review 24, Spring/Summer 1986
    • 152 · The Mango Community · Josephine Jacobsen · ss The Ontario Review 20, Spring/Summer 1984
    • 168 · A Metamorphosis · Greg Johnson · ss The Ontario Review 8, Spring/Summer 1978
    • 178 · On This Short Day of Frost and Sun · Maxine Kumin · ss The Ontario Review 5, 1976
    • 185 · Baby · Joyce Carol Oates · ss The Ontario Review 23, Fall 1986/Winter 1987
    • 199 · Confessions of a Bad Girl · Bette Pesetsky · ss The Ontario Review 23, Spring/Summer 1985
    • 209 · Tea Party · Sarah Rossiter · ss The Ontario Review 15, Fall 1981/Winter 1982
    • 221 · Shadow Bands · Jeanne Schinto · ss The Ontario Review 23, Fall 1985/Winter 1986
    • 235 · Rough Strife · Lynne Sharon Schwartz · ss The Ontario Review 7, Fall 1977/Winter 1978
    • 252 · The Girl Who Loved Horses · Elizabeth Spencer · ss The Ontario Review 10, Spring/Summer 1979
    • 267 · The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud: A Story · Daniel Stern · ss The Ontario Review 24, Spring/Summer 1986
    • 273 · Mourning · Robert Taylor, Jr. · ss The Ontario Review 14, Spring/Summer 1981
    • 281 · Interviews with Insufficiently Famous Americans · John Updike · vi series 
    •     281 · The Counselor · vi The Ontario Review 12,  Spring/ Summer 1980
    •     283 · The Widow · vi The Ontario Review 16, Spring/Summer 1982
    •     285 · The Undertaker · vi The Ontario Review 15, Fall 1981/ Winter 1982
    • 287 · A Lesson in the Classics · Gloria Whelan · ss The Ontario Review 18, Spring/Summer 1983
    • 299 · Contributors · Anon · bi

  • The stories: as too often, life has been less cooperative than I'd like in rereading the stories in either volume over the last week, but among those I refreshed my memory of, it's amusing to compare the fantasy stories "My Life as a West African Gray Parrot" by Leigh Buchanan Bienen and "Bob the Dinosaur Goes to Disneyland" by Joe Lansdale (the book never gives him his middle initial); the Buchanan Bienen, by a writer who had been and remains primarily a lawyer (particularly involved with women's rights cases, which informs the story), professor and author of legal volumes, as well as contributor of short fiction and critical essays to little magazines, involves said parrot, being as many non-human animals in the story a karmic? reincarnation of a human, recounting her less that joyous life with a human married couple who looked upon their purchased bird as  more conversation piece and investment than pet; all the reincarnated animals in the story, such as her keepers' tomcat, can converse with each other (somehow), but apparently another non-human animal she interacts with has not been blessed with reincarnation from human form nor a common language. While the Lansdale involves a present of a wife to a husband of an inflatable T. rex toy, which upon inflation begins to act like a young child, not altogether like Pinocchio, but unsurprising in this to its new "parents"...the plastic dinosaur quickly becomes obsessed with the prospect of going to the original Disney theme park and meeting the cartoon characters and the like, an excursion Bob's parents enable with perhaps surprising results. Animal/toy fantasy, a bird with an old soul awaiting its next incarnation and an artificial youngster recapitulating human childhood and adolescence. The Lansdale is funnier, if slighter, and has been reprinted more often; the Buchanan Bienen was included in the O. Henry Prize Stories volume for 1983, and both are a bit eccentric even for their first publication sites. 

Both books have a triptych of short fictions, the OR example by John Updike (arguably the "biggest name" in the Smith volume--though Oates, Margaret Atwood and Carlos Fuentes are among the many potential challengers there, particularly in 2024) and the MG being three of four stories by R. V. Branham, not quite a "discovery" of the horror/dark fantasy magazine (he'd gone through the Writers of the Future program and had sold several stories to Gardner Dozois's editorship of Asimov's Science Fiction), but the only fiction contributor to have two distinct entries in the Horsting/Van Hise volume. Not even Neil Gaiman, much less at time of the anthology's publication Lansdale, was as close as they are now to being nearly as prominent as Stephen King among the MG volume's contributors, which does have a rather lopsided representation of male to female contributors, vs. that of the OR.

  • Jessica Horsting



James Van Hise






















Raymond Smith and Joyce Carol Oates


To read some individual issues and contents of those issues, please see
and

For more of today's Short Story reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.


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6 comments:

  1. pattinase (abbott)January 11, 2024 at 8:32 AM

    THE ONTARIO REVIEW certainly attracted the A list ss writers. Always dreamed of sending them a story although their hey day was before I tried my hand.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Todd MasonJanuary 11, 2024 at 11:14 AM

    I'd say it was still a lively and more than readable magazine right up to the end, though breaking in, while not quite NEW YORKER unlikely, was probably tougher than most of the other "elite" little magazines...given who else was ready to hand them material and how they had relatively slim issues, twice a year for most of the run, and with the visual art inserts. Oates and Smith seemed comfortable putting what money was needed into it, and I wouldn't be surprised if it hadn't outsold such similarly one/two wealthy patron(-supported fellow littles as GLIMMER TRAIN and possibly even TIN HOUSE or, toward the end, the likes of ZOETROPE ALL-STORY. CONJUNCTIONS, using twice or three times as much copy, had to be a slightly easier sell.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Todd MasonJanuary 11, 2024 at 11:17 AM

    It relentlessly dropped the article THE and was solely ONTARIO REVIEW sometime after the first decade, if not sooner...the last logo looked better, thus, I'd say.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Todd MasonJanuary 11, 2024 at 11:20 AM

    MIDNIGHT GRAFFITI's contributors were of a similar caliber in its focus...albeit running for six years or so doesn't allow one to notch up the stats the way 34+ years does.

    ReplyDelete
  5. GeorgeJanuary 12, 2024 at 12:21 PM

    I read the ONTARIO REVIEW occasionally. I missed MIDNIGHT GRAFFITI completely.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Todd MasonJanuary 12, 2024 at 3:11 PM

    Well, MG had relatively few issues spread over its several years...and I'm not sure I ever saw it on a newsstand, even in bookshops devoted to fantastica.

    ReplyDelete

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