“The reader,” says National Book Award-winner Sigrid Nunez, “will forgive the novelist certain things. Like, in a 400-page book, you can have a dozen flat sentences. But in a [short] story? No. You can’t.”Article continues after advertisement
Twelve middling sentences, in a book of maybe 6,000, comes to an authorial hit rate of 99.8 percent. It’s a high bar. But Nunez has thrown the number out as an aside; she’s not speaking to the novel but rather to the semantic density of short fiction, which she’s been pondering in the lead up to her first ever story collection, It Will Come Back to You, out July 14 from Riverhead.
“I finished writing The Vulnerables,” says Nunez of her 2023 novel, “and then, for me, an unusual thing happened. I had an idea for a story, I wrote it, and I was happy with it. This doesn’t usually happen. And then,” she says, “strangely enough, I had another one. And then another one. And one more. So I had a group of stories that were written very recently.”
Along with some encouragement from her agent, the hot hand convinced Nunez that she had something. She roped in the start of an unpublished novel and a few older pieces, but only those that stood the test of time without edits. “If something’s published already,” she says, “there’s something about going back and touching it that’s weird. Also, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”
