It’s often reported that Playboy pays something like $10 a word for our fiction and nonfiction. We don’t. We do try to do well by our writers; we try to be competitive and more. We are a commercial magazine with the same bottom-line considerations as any other publication (perhaps more because we are a publicly traded company), and yet we are committed to the short-story form, one that is increasingly marginalized, underrated and underfed in this country.
Sam Lipsyte knows that. He knows that we’ve run fiction by Michel Houellebecq, Tobias Wolff, Margaret Atwood, Tony D’Souza, Nadine Gordimer, J. Robert Lennon and more in the last two years. He’s eager to read the Robert Stone story scheduled for our April issue, and he’s heard about a new Denis Johnson novel that we plan to serialize over the summer.
That’s why he chooses to publish his singular fiction with us (his beautifully calibrated and darkly funny The Gunderson Prophecy ran in our November issue), and unlike lots of writers he’s not afraid to say so. I saw Sam recently at a National Book Foundation event. He was the host of an evening dedicated to honoring five writers under 35. This seemed an arbitrary age cut-off, something that wasn’t lost on Sam. In his introductory remarks, the text of which is below, he shows himself to be the subversive wit we know he is, as well as a con man and a champion of literature. The books singled out were worthy of our standing through the evening of readings (see this link to read about the books). They did not provide chairs, as if to underscore just how enfeebled the rest of us were. Sam certainly gave us courage:
But I digress. What tonight is truly about is to encourage younger, emerging writers, to acknowledge their accomplishments and to boost their confidence for the hard work to come. For it is hard work, it is vital work, and we need them to do it. Still, sometimes encouragement and confidence boosting is not enough. Even our faith in their talent may not suffice. So what we also attempt to do tonight, with a sort of noble deviousness, is to con our younger writers into thinking that their efforts will be consistently celebrated, that they are right to resist other temptations and keep their focus necessarily on the making of literary art, that they will be rewarded for it always. I mean, hey, if we need to trick these 35-and-unders so they will stick around and write the books that will save us, or at least console us the way only literature can, so be it. In this case, the ends justify the means.
It is now my honor to introduce some co-conspirators in the plot to dupe our potential saviors. I will introduce them in the order they will be introducing the readers they have chosen. Please applaud loudest for the former NBA finalist you most admire. No, just kidding. Please save your applause until the end. I wouldn’t want people to suppose that the National Book Foundation fosters any sort of cutthroat, dog-eat-dog competition in the arts.
—Sam Lipsyte
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Comments on this entry:
Yes, there are fewer and fewer magazines that publish short fiction, so it's even more of a great thing that Playboy continues to do so. Little-known and well-known writers alike (and I'm eagerly looking forward to John Updike in the January issue). Please keep it up.