Editor's Comment

Abstract

There is perhaps no more dramatic evidence of the growing vitality of fiction in American creative writing than the fact that The New York Times devoted the entire magazine section of the Sunday paper on July 12, 2020 to original short stories. Linking the concept of a special issue of this type to the publication of Boccaccio's The Decameron in the fourteenth century, the editors hailed a similar triumph of art over illness with the publication of these innovative examples of contemporary literature. Although, as they have demonstrated continuously in their weekly book review section, they are largely innocent of the long history of the short-story cycle as well as the scholarly volumes that discuss it in detail, they use the coronavirus epidemic as a link to the bubonic plague that devasted Florence in 1348. Both occasions, they explain, produced an important body of contemporary stories unified not only by the circumstances of composition but by setting, character, and theme, many of them with plots that explore the vagaries of tragic love. The editorial comments do not go on to discuss what principals of unification bind the new narratives together, which leaves work for energetic young scholars to pursue, but they do provide an impressive list of stories by working authors making their way into the canon. These include Sophy Hollington, Abang, Richard A. Chance, Marly Gallardo, Sophi Miyoko Gullbrants, Alexander Harrison, Klaus Kremmerz, Kyutae Lee, Maria Medem, Linda Merod, and Monica Ramos. It is gratifying for a scholarly journal, in its first volume of publication, to be able to welcome such an impressive contribution to the growing body of modern short fiction made by the most important newspaper in America. We offer our congratulations.As editor, I had anticipated devoting this column in the autumn of 2020 to the panels the society had sponsored at the American Literature Association convention in Boston in May, but it was finally sacrificed to the problems surrounding a world-wide pandemic, including the injunction against gathering large groups in an indoor setting. For the same reason, we were also forced to cancel the international conference scheduled for October in Austria under the able leadership of Gudrun Grabher, the head of the department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck. It was clear from even the preliminary plans for the event that it would have been a major contribution to literary studies with papers from scholars in more than a score of countries, important keynote addresses, discussion sessions, and informal gatherings in one of the most celebrated cities in the world. Its cancellation is a loss that must be borne, but we will move ahead with the planning of another international convention when the health situation permits. In the meantime, we are moving ahead to sponsor our usual panels and activities at the annual ALA convention in Boston in May of 2021.We are delighted to offer the articles and notes in this second number of the first volume of SASS. Our readers will find a broad range of subjects and approaches in our essays as well as a bibliography of important books by members of the society, a list that answers the numerous requests we have received over the last year. As this issue went into production, we immediately began the process of soliciting material for the spring number of volume 2 and evaluating the steady stream of essays that have been submitted to the journal. We hope to have a complete issue in hand by the beginning of March and to move ahead to reading submissions for the autumn number. Journal editors always sleep more comfortably when they are confident of filling the required pages for the upcoming production cycle with original and insightful scholarly investigations. We invite everyone to join us in this important process.