Self Taut

A look at the sales figures for the PEN/Faulkner Four makes this all too clear.

According to Nielsen BookScan, which offers the most complete sales figures available (though it leaves out those from Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, food and drug outlets and specialty stores), Eisenberg's "Twilight of the Superheroes" has sold roughly 10,000 hardback copies to date, plus 3,000 more in paperback. Hempel's collection has sold 16,000 hardback copies and D'Ambrosio's 3,000, with paperback sales mostly to come.

Jones's numbers look a bit better. "All Aunt Hagar's Children" has sold 29,000 in hardback (it will come out in paperback in September). But that modest success may have come, in part, because Jones's novel, "The Known World," won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, sending its paperback sales (715,000 copies to date) through the roof. And even in hardcover, with almost two-thirds of sales coming before the Pulitzer, the novel has outsold the stories by 50,000 copies.

As for the winning novelist: Roth's "Everyman" has sold 73,000 copies in hardback (in part, clearly, due to his name recognition). The paperback edition, just out last month, is selling briskly.

Small wonder publishers are novel-obsessed.

D'Ambrosio has a patient agent who totally believes in him. "Charlie's just special," Evans says. "He's one of the two clients I've taken on on the basis of one short story." Still, she minces no words in outlining what story writers are up against.

"The potential for a short story collection is so much more limited," she says.

This lack of "upside" has to do not only with the clear preference of American readers, but with the even deeper bias of readers overseas. "It's very difficult to sell a collection abroad," Evans says, noting proudly -- but with a hint of astonishment -- that D'Ambrosio's book has actually made money for its German publisher.

What's more, she says, most short-story writers "don't have a glimmer of hope" of augmenting their meager incomes with a movie deal. There are exceptions, of course: "Brokeback Mountain," for one, and the recently released "Away From Her," based on an Alice Munro story. But for the most part, studios trolling for what Evans calls "franchise characters" find them in novels.

The indignities continue. Publishers encourage story writers to sign two-book contracts, on the condition that the other book not be a collection. Agents push this strategy, too. "You say, 'Are you working on a novel?' and then you'll do a two-book," Evans says.

Marketers, in their search to avoid the short-story curse, will often package a short fiction collection in which the same characters recur as "a novel in stories." They'll also grasp at far looser thematic similarities. Evans once sold a collection whose author had titled it "Female Impersonators." The stories all began with a quote from Mae West. "By the time the publishers got through with it," Evans says, the book was called "Come Up and See Me Sometime."

Eric Simonoff, who is Jones's agent, shares Evans's views on the hurdles short-fiction writers face. "I feel as if I'm girding on armor when I go out with a really good story collection, in a way I don't with a really good novel," Simonoff says.