Don’t bother. Zadie’s novels don’t exactly possess the “greatness” she demands from amateur unpublished story writers.

Zadie Smith is quite the condescending little vitrioholic shit, though, coming across as one of those writing teacher whose criticism stops at “give me more emotion,” but who MEANS “make it more like one of my stories.” She’s pleading for deprogrammed writing (which Paled My Black Heart) and offering up an excuse right out of your state college’s MFA program. That’s lame, dude.

(No offense to anyone enrolled in state-college-mfa-programs. Except there’s still probably time to drop out and unlearn everything they’re purported to teach you).

And then she eulogizes the thing as a genuine “unsponsored” literary competition, evidently without the requisite social awareness to realize: she’s the damned sponsor. We’d hope ZADIE SMITH might attract a different sort of participatory demographic than the KING OF BEERS, true, but is it any bloody different? Would eight-hundred people have entered if her name weren’t behind it? Would word have reached the far corners of the internet in their marketing and outreach? It didn’t reach my block– maybe they should have asked Jonathan Saffron-Kunkenides or whomever to cosponsor.

Cripe. I don’t usually get so out of sorts.

– Mtte.

(Oh — and because I nitpick: are you sure you “masticate upon”? Upon seems like the wrong perposition there. And I’m not sure that there’s a right preposition for there anyway. For that matter, what’s wrong with the word “chew”?)

But back to my original point: what if there truly weren’t any good stories submitted? Judging by The New Yorker (not the most recent New Yorker — I’m not up to the most recent New Yorker. I’m still on the New Yorkers from several months back. It’s like every week with those guys) there aren’t a lot of great short stories. They all seem to be the same short story again and again: vaguely autobiographical, with something bleak, and then some sort of poignant unresolved ending. My standard there is, truly, no standard at all, I realize. But I would like to think that people who say they love literature actually love literature. And I’d rather not see a prize distributed than see a prize given to an entry that was only almost good enough.

The part where Smith does seem a little too big for her britches is when she writes, “For I have thought, reading through these entries, that maybe the problem with this prize is that my name is attached to it.” Starting a sentence with the conjunction “for” generally sounds archaic and assy — and then, in Smith’s case, the rest of the sentence is a little assy. Zadie Smith isn’t the reason short stories these days suck.

It does sound like more stories were read than you’re suggesting were read. And it also sounds like Zadie Smith was never supposed to read all the stories, just those on the short list. But this wouldn’t be the first time that you and I have read the exact same thing with wildly different interpretations.