What makes a great short story collection? In Debutiful’s latest Q&A series, Inside the Collection, short story writers will take readers through their writing, editing, and sequencing of their debut short story collection.
In Objects of Desire, Adam O’Fallon Price delivers an unflinchingly honest and darkly funny collection exploring the restless longings, complicated relationships, and unfulfilled desires that shape our lives. From a resentful brother confronting the responsibility of donating bone marrow to his dying sibling to a struggling artist whose search for his missing dog leads him into danger and a college soccer player wrestling with childhood trauma and resentment toward her mother, these stories follow characters whose desires push them toward unexpected and often irreversible consequences. Winner of the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, selected by Alexandra Kleeman, Objects of Desire examines the distance between what we want and what we need, and the ways our own impulses can lead us astray. Price is also the author of two novels, The Grand Tour and The Hotel Neversink, the latter of which won the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. His fiction has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Carrboro, North Carolina, and teaches fiction writing at the University of North Carolina.
In our latest Inside the Collection Q&A, Price takes readers inside his debut short story collection, Objects of Desire.
I love short stories and wish publishers took more chances with them instead of asking, “Sounds great… but do you have a novel?” I want to start off by asking, Why short stories?
When I went to Cornell to do an MFA, in 2011, I primarily considered myself a short story writer. Short stories were my first fiction-writing love, and to the extent that I’d thought at all about the kind of writer I’d become, I thought I’d be a short story writer. As I think happens to a lot of people, grad school pretty much immediately disabused me of this idea. I was informed—correctly—that agents and publishers were looking for novels, that publishers didn’t care about story collections, and so although I continued writing short stories and workshopping them, I also began working on a novel as a matter of seeming necessity.
My MFA thesis became my first novel, The Grand Tour, which came out on Doubleday in 2016. And my second novel, The Hotel Neversink, was published by Tin House Books in 2019, and won the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. But throughout it all, I continued writing and publishing short stories, which remains the form I love the most and feel I’m best at.
Can you walk readers through the timeline of this collection? What was the earliest? The most recent?
The earliest is “Sandstorm,” the first story in the collection, which was published in The Paris Review in 2011. It’s also the story that convinced my agent to take me on as a client, so it has a special place in my personal publishing history. The most recent is “Stone Lions,” which was unpublished until very recently (it’s appearing in the October issue of The Writers’ Chronicle). The collection spans about fifteen years of stories.
When did you know you had a collection? And why these stories?
I’ve known I had a collection for quite a while—in terms of simply having enough good, mostly published pieces, I probably felt ready to publish one as early as 2020. As previously discussed, there’s the small sticking point of most publishers not wanting them. But it wasn’t until 2025 that I formally put the collection together and began trying to get it published.
I primarily chose the stories in Objects of Desire on the basis of quality. I think they are some of my best. That said, I wanted to create a collection that felt cohesive and coherent. I have others that I also think are strong, but they maybe didn’t quite fit in in terms of theme and tone. These stories, I think, have a similar yearning at their core, characters whose minds and hearts are odds with each other and who can’t get out of their own way.
What was the “easiest” story in the collection to write? What made it work?
“A Natural Man,” my second Paris Review story, flowed very easily from a self-imposed writing prompt/experiment: try to write a story in which the sole narrative logic is that one thing causes the next thing—in other words, like a series of dominos falling. I had the initial image of the guy whose car has broken down beside a cornfield, and it all just flowed really easily from there.
What was the “hardest” story in the collection to write? What made it so difficult to land?
The hardest, in a weird sense, was the shortest, the flash piece in the middle that gives the collection its title, “Objects of Desire.” It had previously been a twenty-five-page monster, and I could not figure out how to end it or make it work. Finally, I stumbled across a flash contest asking for a story of exactly 150 words, to be judged by Ann Beattie. It suddenly occurred to me that the only thing I liked in that story was a scene in which the hero, after a drunken rampage, lets a bird he’s stolen fly away. I cut out the other twenty-four pages, did some trimming and adjustments, sent it in, and won. Everything after that eureka! moment was very easy, but it was a tremendous amount of extraneous work to get to the thing that mattered (which was a great lesson for me about how revision sometimes works).
I’m fascinated by the sequencing of story collections. Why and how did you land on this sequence?
The main structural logic behind the collection is the aforementioned flash piece in the middle. I really liked the idea of having this tiny piece as a kind of fulcrum with the two halves on either side. Now that I think about it, this structure probably derives from music—I’m also a musician, I’ve made many albums in my life, and I habitually think of sequencing in terms of sides. So if this were a record, I think you have Side A, which tends to be brighter, with some of the maybe “bigger” or more accessible pieces, then the flash piece which signals the break between sides, and then Side B: darker, a little weirder, with the big goodbye piece at the end—“Schenectady,” the closer, is my favorite story I’ve ever written.
Is there any story that didn’t make the cut that readers can read somewhere online?
Most of the other published stories that didn’t make the collection ran in print format. That said (and I might be forgetting a couple, if anyone is interested, they can poke around), “The Volcano” is at Joyland, one of my favorite free online literary journals. If people like that one, they’d almost certainly like the stories in this collection.