Short stories deserve a prize

Writers have to be careful of prizes — careful of thinking about them, or not thinking about them. Sitting down to write, one needs one’s head clear of all the apparatus of vanity and status anxiety and self-doubt that may clutter it the rest of the time. No one who’s any good puts words on the page to win prizes: good writers aim at something much bigger and more difficult. And yet prizes do change the literary landscape — they draw writing habits and patterns and fashions inexorably after them. It goes without saying that they are a bit of a blunt instrument: getting it right sometimes, wrong sometimes, not fine-tuned to the taste of every discriminating reader.  But they help sell books, and we all need books sold. They provide a kind of seasonal sport which keeps fiction in the public eye and the public mind. They lend a public, monumental dimension to careers carved out in the intimately private forms of fiction.