Zoetrope, where short stories are told

Caveman's Tale
'I stand there in
the kitchen, which smells like sour milk, shaking my head and trying to face up to the increasingly obvious fact that my girlfriend of ten years is having an affair, and that her lover is a Neanderthal man from the Pleistocene epoch.
They rendezvous in our moldy, water-stained basement where he takes her on the cement floor beneath a canopy of spiderwebs, grunting over her with his animal-like body, or perhaps behind her, so that when she comes back inside there are thick, dark hairs stuck all over her shirt and she smells like a cross between some musky, woodland animal gland and Herbal Essences shampoo. Furthermore, she's stopped shaving her legs. '

--from 'The Cavemen in the Hedges,' by Stacey Richter

Zoetrope, where
short stories are told

Artfully, too. Their patron: Francis Ford Coppola.

By Jeff Bercovici

     To say that the fiction magazine as an institution is past its prime is an understatement.
     Once a widely popular brand of entertainment, the short story has over the decades disappeared from all but a handful of consumer magazines, mostly men’s titles and highbrow publications.
     Last year’s demise of Story magazine was little more than a footnote to a publishing phenomenon that peaked over half a century ago, before television laid claim to America's eyeballs.
     But if you are Francis Ford Coppola, the internationally-renowned filmmaker, you have a history of making art by ignoring trends.
     Zoetrope: All-Story was founded almost five years ago under Coppola's patronage, and it has proven itself to be more than just an anachronism.
     Earlier this month, the 40,000-circulation quarterly picked up the prize for fiction at this year’s National Magazine Awards, beating out Esquire, GQ, The Atlantic and The New Yorker for the honor, bestowed by the American Society of Magazine Editors.
     Starting a fiction magazine had long been a dream for Coppola, the writer/director behind "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now."
    "He’s always loved short stories, and he loves magazines," says Zoetrope editor in chief Adrienne Brodeur. "He wanted to put something back into the system."
    It was after hearing of Coppola’s ambition that Brodeur first sought to contact him. A New York native and the daughter of former New Yorker writer Paul Brodeur, Adrienne studied public policy at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.
    She lived for several years in California before returning to the East Coast to work at the Paris Review and attend the Radcliffe publishing course.
    She sent Coppola a note expressing her interest and had all but given up hope when, months later, he replied.
    The two carried on a lengthy correspondence in which they hashed out their ideas about what makes for good short fiction.
     Both voiced a preference for traditional, well-told tales over the sort of post-modern experiments, popular in recent years, that dispense with fundamentals like plot and character.
     "I think we both really like a classic narrative arc—a story you can get lost in," says Brodeur.
     Though Brodeur says five or six stories that originated in Zoetrope are being turned into films for Coppola’s production company, the purpose of the magazine is not, she stresses, to generate material for adaptations.
     She also challenges the thinking that has written off the short story as a commercial proposition.
     "There’s sort of a perception that short stories are somehow more academic or not as enjoyable as novels. So many places just say, ‘Come back when you’ve got a novel.’"
     When Zoetrope first started, Brodeur, working out of her New York apartment, was responsible for more or less the entire magazine. She now has a full-time staff of four and ample office space that they share with Coppola’s production company.
     The path from there to here has not always been easy, she says.
     "No one knows how to start a magazine. Have you ever bought 20 tons of paper?"
     Zoetrope’s editors receive anywhere from 40 to 100 unsolicited submissions a day, of which Brodeur estimates 1 percent are outstanding, 20 percent are marginal and the rest are unusable.
     The editors also commission established and up-and-coming writers to execute ideas devised by Coppola.
     One of Zoetrope’s biggest successes came when Melissa Bank was tapped to write "The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing," which turned into a best-selling collection.
     Zoetrope submitted three stories for consideration by ASME. "The Cavemen in the Hedges," by Stacey Richter and excerpted here, is a hilarious tale of a man whose domestic life is ruined when a horde of Neanderthals invades his town through a time warp in a condemned Pizza Hut.
    "Fair Warning," by Robert Olen Butler, is about the intersecting romantic and professional life of a female auctioneer.
    "Fialta," by Rebecca Lee, traces the romantic tensions that form at a summer retreat for young architects.
     Zoetrope has no art director. Celebrity artists from different fields are invited to guest-design each issue.
     Actor and visual artist Dennis Hopper designed the current Summer 2001 issue, which features stories from John Biguenet, Julia Whitty and O. Henry, among others. Painter/director Julian Schnabel, fashion designer Anna Sui and musician David Bowie are among past guest designers.
    The magazine is published unbound in a newspaper format in high-quality newsprint.
    Brodeur says as revenue from advertising increases she would like to shift from quarterly to bimonthly publication, but she doesn’t intend to change the magazine’s appearance.
    "There are very few magazines that look different from other magazines," she says, observing that most fiction periodicals look like something you’d find at a library, not a newsstand. "You actually read this fiction magazine as opposed to storing it."

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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