Storied East Village literary haunt KGB Bar is shopping a new paperback fiction anthology to publishers this week, called The Greatest Stories Ever Read, according to literary agent Peter Steinberg, who is representing the book to publishers. The anthology, billed as "a greatest hits collection" of writing that has been read at KGB over the course of its 15-year history, will feature short works by Jonathan Lethem, George Saunders, Jonathan Ames, Norman Rush, Sam Lipsyte, and Daniel Handler. Francine Prose and Chuck Palahniuk have also agreed to contribute to the book once a contract has been signed.
The stories will be accompanied by brief testimonials from the authors about their experience reading at KGB, according to Mr. Steinberg.
The Greatest Stories Ever Read—edited by Suzanne Dottino, the organizer of the KGB Bar’s Sunday Night Fiction Series—will be KGB’s fifth anthology to date. (The last one, On the Rocks, came out in 2002.)
The anthology is the second book Mr. Steinberg will have shopped to publishers since he split from the Regal Literary agency this fall and started his own eponymous shop. The first was novelist Keith Donohue’s Angels of Destruction, which Mr. Steinberg sold to Crown as part of a two-book deal worth about $1.3 million dollars.
Here’s the full list of stories currently slated to be included in the new anthology:
Jonathan Lethem – Men and Cartoons
Norman Rush – Whites
Daniel Alarcon – Republica and Grau
Sam Lipyste – HomeLand
Alicia Erian – The Prison Wife
John Haskell – I Am Not Jackson Pollack
Tom Bissell – God Lives in St. Petersburg
George Saunders – CommComm
Amanda Fillipacchi – Love Creeps
Suki Kim – The Interpreter
Paul LaFarge – Phlogistan
Jonathan Ames – The Extra Man
