Friday from the Archives: “Old Wine in New Bottles: Shannon Ravenel and Algonquin” by Michael Griffith in NCLR 1997
Congratulations to this year’s NC Literary Hall of Fame inductees. This year’s cohort includes Shannon Ravenel, long-time editor at the ground-breaking beloved publisher Algonquin Books (now part of Hachette Books). Of the many titles and authors Ravenel brought to audiences, perhaps her widest known work is as the editor of the anthology New Stories of the South, which she debuted in 1986 and edited for twenty years.
Griffith’s essay is ostensibly about the 1996 issue but really delves into the at that point ten year history of the anthology, particularly Ravenel’s exceptional curation at an incredibly difficult task. He wrote:
“New Stories’s large readership gives Ravenel an extraordinary amount of influence; as a taste maker she wields more power, practically speaking, than any single southern critic or writer. So inquiring into the parameters she sets for the “southern” story-geographic, thematic, and otherwise takes on more than merely academic significance. Algonquin Books (based in Chapel Hill) has become the South’s most prominent publisher, and though its offerings are increasingly eclectic, the core of its list is still fiction of an avowed regional character: novels by Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith, Lewis Nordan, Kaye Gibbons, and others. Ravenel knows quite well why critics and reviewers keep inquiring into her working definition of “Southern”: no matter how modestly she may want to set the scope of her undertaking, her book functions – for the substantial group whose exposure to literary southern fiction begins and ends with New Stories – as an ad hoc canon. For better or worse, no definition of “Southern short fiction” has wider currency than the one implicit in Ravenel’s choices for this anthology.”
And don’t forget: Blair Publisher (another fundamental North Carolina publisher) has acquired and rebooted New Stories from the South! We eagerly await the first volume out soon.
Read the entire review on Gale Literature. Add the 1997 issue to your collection today!
