Self Taut

He also offers a widely shared explanation.

"I think I know why stories don't sell," Simonoff says. "I think people who read fiction like to enter into an imaginary universe." There's a "setup cost" to get accustomed to that universe, then "you settle in for a long ride." With a story collection, by contrast, "every 30 or 40 pages the rug is pulled out from under you."

Simple enough.

But how then to explain another Simonoff client, who published a debut story collection in 1999? BookScan's numbers don't go back that far and Simonoff won't confirm sales figures, but Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies," which went on to win the 2000 Pulitzer, is said to have sold over a million copies.

Call it the exception that proves the rule.

"It was selling extremely well before the Pulitzer," Simonoff says. "It was amazing to watch."

A 'Fiendishly Difficult Form'

So why is it -- in the face of readers' apparent preference for novels and publishers' strong bias in their favor -- that supremely talented writers such as the PEN/Faulkner Four keep turning out stories?

"There's no shortage of people writing those things," as D'Ambrosio points out, "and no one's getting paid." Story writers survive by grace of teaching positions, nonfiction magazine gigs, frugal lifestyles and spouses with real jobs.

One attraction is that it's easier to find the time to finish a story. The legendary Raymond Carver used to tell his editor, Gary Fisketjon, that he could lock himself in the car long enough to crank one out.

Still, a really good story collection, Fisketjon believes, is actually harder to write than a novel. "There's no margin for error," he says. "It's just a more fiendishly difficult form."

It's also a form to which Jones, Hempel, Eisenberg and D'Ambrosio are deeply attached.

Jones is the most ecumenical in his views on novels versus stories. "There is no difference for me," he says; both are just a matter of pulling characters out of his imagination, of saying, "How can I make this person real for a reader?"

Hempel, by contrast, has written nothing longer than a novella. She reads a lot of poetry, which she finds helpful because -- like her stories -- it deals in "precision and distillation."

Eisenberg, too, appears wedded to the short form. "My impulse is to compress," she says. "I love to compress." Someone once told her that the short story is "the poetry of the novel," and she has noticed that it tends to be poets who like her writing the most, because "they understand leaving things out."

Unlike her three fellow finalists (and most other short-fiction writers, it seems), Eisenberg is not the product of a postgraduate creative writing program. "I took high school English and I never took another English class in my life," she says. Born in 1945, she started writing 30 years later, in part because the "wonderful man" she still lives with -- playwright and actor Wallace Shawn -- talked her out of her total lack of ambition.

"He said, 'You will not be happy if you do nothing at all. Nobody does nothing at all.' " Eventually, she gave up waitressing. A University of Virginia teaching job now pays the bills.

Might she ever write a novel? It could happen, but there's a problem. Novels usually depend on "a kind of propulsive plot, a very energetic sort of clean line" -- and she doesn't see reality that way. With stories, freed from the requirement of getting a reader from Page 1 to Page 573, she can "explore very evanescent aspects of experience."

As for D'Ambrosio, he says he started writing stories in the late 1980s while working construction in Hoboken, N.J., mostly from a lack of faith that he could finish anything longer. "I felt that I could begin and end them in a future I found believable," he explains.

He got pretty far into a novel once, but put it on hold. He put story writing on hold, too, having lost confidence in his fiction -- despite having once received an out-of-the-blue fan letter from Roth, who'd read one of his stories in the Paris Review, which he calls "one of the great moments of my writing life." Eventually, encouraged by the New Yorker's purchase of a story the magazine had initially rejected, he got going again.

And the future?

D'Ambrosio hopes to become one of those writers who's at home in both short and long forms. He's got another novel going and he's working on the second draft. But for now, he says -- with his wife taking time off from her teaching job -- "we're going to try to live off short stories for a year."

The award-winning writer laughs.

"I'll probably end up mowing lawns," he says.