We'll be covering National Short Story Month in various ways today and the following 30 days and one of those will be discussing some of the short story collections that Dzanc Books has published--and we figure that might as well start with the very first collection, Roy Kesey's All Over.
Steve and I sent out emails to about half a dozen journals that we both loved, asking if they had recently published anybody that they knew most likely had a collection they were looking to publish. One such journal editor, Aaron Burch of Hobart, emailed back that he knew he had read a ton of stories by Roy Kesey and thought he'd be a good choice. We both kind of kicked ourselves as not long before that we'd been talking about his great story, "Levee," that had been published in Orchid maybe a month or so earlier. Roy was one of the few authors we solicited out of the gate along with the hundreds of manuscripts submitted within the 2nd day of the house's being announced. We had four readers at the time: one burned her lunch because she forgot it was on the stove while she read his manuscript, another thought maybe one word could be changed, etc. Oh yes, this was one of two manuscripts Roy had sent us and the other was also fantastic (and later published as Any Deadly Thing).
All Over stood out for many reasons. I think the biggest was that the title was so dead on accurate. This collection didn't have two similar stories in it at all--not style, topic, the points of view varied, and each and every one was scary good--like written by a master of that particular style. I've personally read this book now in completion at least ten times and randomly opened it to a story and read from it somewhere in the triple figures since we received the manuscript and I get the same chills every single time. Knowing that we published this, and helped get such a fantastic book into the hands of readers...well, pride's not something to be espoused too frequently in my opinion, but it's there for Dzanc and this collection.
As a bonus, I got to travel to Ann Arbor, NYC, and Chicago with Roy for his first trio of readings and realized that beyond the great collection, Dzanc couldn't really have found a much better debut author--he was a fantastic reader, outgoing (what? a writer? great for me because I'm not), friendly (later on the tour, at least one person he ate lunch near showed up to see him read--now that I read that, not the best example of his friendliness but it did happen), and just a really good guy. He also looked surprisingly good with his calves and ankles waxed, but that's another story.
The book is a decade old now and it's still fantastic, still holds up, and the writing and language and even ideas are still fresh today. It's a collection I can't recommend enough, and would do so whether it said Dzanc Books on the spine, or ANY OTHER publishing house.
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