Friday, July 26, 2024

FFB: THE STORY OF STORY MAGAZINE by Martha Foley (assembled and notes added in part by Jay Neugeboren), W.W. Norton 1980; and Neugeboren's new Foley family essay in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Summer, 2024

A redux post, sparked by Jay Neugeboren's new essay in The American Scholar (Summer 2024) about his helping the granddaughters of Martha Foley finally meet each other, as the children of her long-dead son David Burnett. (Courtesy Paul Di Filippo.)

Friday, August 22, 2014

FFB: THE STORY OF STORY MAGAZINE by Martha Foley (assembled and notes added in part by Jay Neugeboren), W.W. Norton 1980


Jay Neugeboren, in his introduction to the published form of Foley's memoirs in progress at the time of her death, notes the dire state she found herself in, barely getting by on her royalties from editing Best American Short Stories (after four decades at that desk, she had taken over from the founding editor, her friend, after he was killed in England by Nazi bombing from the air), mourning the death of her son (who had been a drug addict, apparently a heroin junkie), isolated and ailing. Which seems very strange indeed, given the breadth of her early career, before and during founding and editing Story (or, as she always refers to it, STORY...all caps and in italics), and leaving Story to take on the BASS position and divorcing Whit Burnett, who kept the magazine they had co-founded (and ran it into the ground, though also saw it revived fleetingly thrice before his death, the first time as a hardcover "magazine" published by Ace Books owner A. A. Wyn, the third time, with a new editor, by Scholastic Magazines, and the eventual fourth revival of the title for a decade by the Writer's Digest people).

Incomplete as the account is, Foley had packed a lot of living into her first decades, beginning her memoirs with a reminiscence of lonely and abused childhood after her parents became seriously ill and had to place Foley and siblings with resentful relatives (or other surrogates), but loving the legacy of the library her parents had assembled, which traveled with the younger Foleys. Not long after high school, Alice Paul finds Foley doing some small tasks at the Socialist Party HQ in New York, when coming over with other Women's Party activists looking for reinforcements to protest that antifeminist crusader, Woodrow Wilson, returning from Europe (particularly amusing when we consider how famously his wife would be the voice of the, and probably the acting, President in his ill last years (he is easily among our most overrated Presidents); Foley, Paul and the other protestors were jailed but not processed, and Foley's firsthand career investigating the corruption of the larger society had begun. She would be drawn into journalism, working with Cornelius Vanderbilt in Los Angeles (and serving as one of the key editors on CV's paper there), meeting Whit Burnett and moving with him to New York and then onto foreign correspondence for major papers in Paris and Vienna, and beginning to publish Story in the face of the early 1930s narrowing of the short-fiction markets, particularly among the more intellectual and arty generalist magazines (Mencken and Nathan's move from the fiction-heavy The Smart Set to the essay-oriented The American Mercury being a key impetus, another being the closure of the key experimental little magazine transition to fiction, rather than poetry, just before Foley and Burnett took the plunge). Meanwhile, Story would publish the first stories, and later work, of folks ranging from John D. MacDonald to J. D. Salinger, Zora Neale Hurston to William Saroyan, (almost) Ernest Hemingway and his inspiration, Gertrude Stein (neither of whom Foley was ever terribly impressed with as people) to (definitely) Nelson Algren (whom she liked enormously till his public rudeness about his affair with Simone de Beauvoir), Carson McCullers to John Cheever, Kay Boyle to Erskine Caldwell, Peter de Vries to Norman Mailer. While building this legacy, she developed long friendships the likes of fellow reporter and historian William Shirer and a banker turned writer/publisher who was going by Rex Stout (and she introduced him to the model 
note Foley credits her son with co-editing


for Nero 















Wolfe...Foley suspects Stout modeled Archie Goodwin on himself). 

And as incomplete as this review is under the current circumstances, most of this book is written in great good humor (with the necessary seriousness brought to many issues of the times, and nostalgia never allowed to go unchecked) and touches on the careers and Foley's interactions with many more folks than I cite here (hell, Neugeboren, in going through the notes and the completed majority of the manuscript, finds himself wondering what happened to such Foley discoveries as A. I. Bezzerides--apparently no film buff, Jay). Eminently rewarding, as well as sobering as one considers how Foley's late life was spent. 

Please see B. V. Lawson's Friday review and the list of other reviews for this week.

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

SSW: DARK AT HEART edited by Karen and Joe R. Lansdale (Dark Harvest 1992); LORD JOHN TEN edited by Dennis Etchison (Lord John Press 1988); STALKERS edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg (Roc/New American Library 1993)




Two gray books. Or, at least, two 
gray jackets. 





Lord John Ten ed. Dennis Etchison (Lord John Press 0-935716-43-2, 1988, $25.00, 240pp, hc) Largely original anthology of 35 stories, poems, articles, and other items, celebrating the publisher's tenth anniversary.

Dark at Heart ed. Joe R. & Karen Lansdale (Dark Harvest 0-913165-64-6, Apr ’92 [Mar ’92], $21.95, 307pp, hc, cover by Peter Scanlan) An original anthology of 20 crime and suspense stories, many by writers also of fantasy and horror fiction.

And another in mostly darker tones:

Stalkers ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg (Penguin/Roc 0-451-45048-5, Dec ’90 [Nov ’90], $9.95, 386pp, tp) Reprint (Dark Harvest 1989) original anthology of 19 horror stories. This edition adds a story by Barry N. Malzberg.
  • 1 · Introduction · Ed Gorman · in Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 2 · Trapped · Dean R. Koontz · na Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 59 · Flight · John Coyne · nv Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 99 · A Day in the Life · F. Paul Wilson · nv Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 145 · Lizardman · Robert R. McCammon · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 158 · Pilots · Joe R. Lansdale & Dan Lowry · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 175 · Stalker · Ed Gorman · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 193 · Getting the Job Done · Rick Hautala · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 209 · Children of Cain · Al Sarrantonio · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 229 · A Matter of Principal [Quarry] · Max Allan Collins · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 242 · Miss December · Rex Miller · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 264 · A Matter of Firing · John Maclay · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 271 · The Sacred Fire [Newford] · Charles de Lint · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 285 · The Stalker of Souls · Edward D. Hoch · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 306 · Darwinian Facts · Barry N. Malzberg · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Penguin/Roc, 1990
  • 321 · The Hunt · Richard Laymon · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 340 · Mother Tucker · James Kisner · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 350 · Jezebel · J. N. Williamson · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 361 · What Chelsea Said · Michael Seidman · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 375 · Rivereños · Trish Janeshutz · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
































This is a trio of impressive volumes that I've been meaning to review in depth for several years, now, and perhaps with this posting, I will compel myself to get off the starting point. I hope that you're already familiar with all three, but suspect that's least likely in the case of Etchison's Lord John Ten...but they are all worth the effort to find. (I have a number of relatively ambitious multi-item reviews as yet unfinished, but several of them are at least a bit further along than this one...but not yet enough to justify the posting.)

For more of today's short-story posts, please see Patti Abbott's blog.



Wednesday, July 3, 2024

Short Story Wednesday: WEIRD TALES, March 1943, edited by Dorothy McIlwraith: 20th Anniversary issue, featuring stories by Robert Arthur, Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury

A while back, I did a quick survey of the two U. S. newsstand fantasy fiction magazines, F&SF and Fantastic, that had produced 20th Anniversary issues in 1969 and 1972, respectively.  Both magazines made a bit of a fuss, as well they might, for as I realized as I thought about it that only one other primarily fantasy newsstand magazine in English, Weird Tales, had managed to get that far along...not even such notable colleagues as Famous Fantastic Mysteries, nor the little magazine Weirdbook, nor the UK's Science Fantasy had lasted two decades (one could suggest that Fantastic Adventures, which had been folded into its sibling Fantastic in 1954, after a couple of years of simultaneous publication, could count, but only by stretching the point).

The cover painting for this issue is definitely not among WT's best.

This issue can be read here.

The ISFDB index:

Cover art supplied by Galactic Central

Contents 

Weird Tales has few rivals in its influence among fantasy-fiction magazines. and those cited above might be most of that crew, if we add reference to Unknown Fantasy Fiction, Whispers and Famous Fantastic Mysteries and perhaps Beyond, Twilight Zone, Realms of Fantasy and Cemetery Dance, among a very few others.  And the periodical book series, such as Shadows...Gerald W. Page's volumes of the DAW Books annual The Year's Best Horror Stories were also notable for publishing some first-publication fiction of note.

But editor Dorothy McIwraith, and the publishers of WT, did nothing to commemorate the 20th anniversary, at least not in an advertised, formal way. But they did feature fiction, as in many issues, from several of the most popular of their regular contributors, among them here Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury and Robert Arthur (among others, but I've just read or reread their contributions to the issue), and none of them are the regulars' best work for the magazine...even given that Bradbury's story, "The Wind", is one of his better-known works of the era. However, as urgently as the story tries to get across the cosmic uncanniness of a seemingly malevolent spirit of Wind pursuing the protagonist, the haunting is a bit more clumsily over the top than persuasive, as presented. Likewise, Bloch's "A Bottle of Gin" (where the bottle in question actually contains a djinn, or "genie") is more frantic than genuinely witty, striving too hard for comic effect and the effort distracts. Arthur's "The Book and the Beast" is a bit more sure-footed than his colleagues' contributions, but is also straining for effect, and slight...I seem to remember from reading it elsewhere that the Henry Kuttner novelet, at least, is a slightly better showing, but I'll check back in about that...Bloch, Bradbury and Arthur at their best are brilliant. They are close to their worst with these stories, thus still readable but uncompelling, despite the reputation "The Wind" had at one point (Arthur even included it in one of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies in the '60s, where I first read it decades back).

For more of today's short fiction, please see Patti Abbott's blog.