Interview by Ed McManis
A Cool Interview with a Coolest Publisher
On January 7, 2021, the day after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Mark Wish, along with his wife, Elizabeth, disturbed by what they’d seen on TV the previous evening, hoped to create a response, a reaction, a way to find common ground with Americans—all Americans. The product of their desire and vision? Coolest American Stories. And the first volume of this annual anthology of short stories, Coolest American Stories 2022, was wildly successful. It’s just gone to its fifth printing.
Following it were Coolest 2023 and 2024 (which featured stories by Morgan Talty and Cynthia Weiner, respectively), both competing well with those years’ Best American Short Stories and O. Henry anthologies, outdoing them with a higher percentage of 5-star reviews on Amazon from readers worldwide. Coolest 2025 was published recently, and is faring rather well, too.
Wish, 66, is a seasoned veteran of the writing world with a keen understanding of the business. He’s worked as a writer and an editor of two respected literary journals, UC-Davis’s California Quarterly, where he “discovered” future bestselling and award-winning authors Lou Berney and Tim Johnston, and New York Stories, where he line-edited and published “The Fix,” Percival Everett’s then previously unpublished short story that went on to be anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2000, thus helping launch Everett’s rise toward stardom. For decades now, Wish has mixed it up with agents and other editors, and of late has worn his least favorite hat: marketer.
A Pushcart Prize winner in 1999, Wish is the author of four published novels, and more than 125 of his short stories have appeared in print venues such as Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, TriQuarterly, The Antioch Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, The Sun, and Best American Short Stories 2008. His latest novel, Necessary Deeds (Regal House 2024), was nominated for a National Book Award and won the 2024 International Book Award for Mystery and Suspense. He and Elizabeth, a director of book design at Random House and a burgeoning novelist, live on Song Lake in upstate New York. They have two cats, Ray-Ray and Lenny.
(This interview initially by email, mid-December 2024, was completed with a follow-up phone call the first week of January 2025.)
Ed: How did Coolest American Stories get started? Did you have a specific theme/idea in mind?
Mark: American anger and discord started Coolest American Stories. The morning after the Jan 6 insurrection, E and I couldn’t sleep, so we took a walk, and we were silent for a long while until I said it as soon as I thought it: “What if we publish an anthology of stories that are so interesting that all Americans, even people as angry as those guys who stormed the Capitol, would enjoy them and maybe even talk about them happily instead of getting into all this violent bullshit?” And E, without hesitation, said, “Okay.”
Ed: How was Coolest’s first volume received?
Mark: Ben Foutain blurbed the first volume with high praise, as did several other respected authors. In fact, just after E and I established the Twitter account for Coolest (@JustCoolStories) and tweeted out our goal to try to unite America at least somewhat by publishing stories even non-academics could find interesting, Heidi Pitlor of Best American Short Stories tweeted to say Coolest was a great idea and she couldn’t wait to read it. She did delete that tweet days later, and then sort of distanced herself from me socially—perhaps, I theorized back then, because of pressure from the bottom-line people at the NYC house that was publishing Best American then. (Back in 2015, we’d been friends enough that she was the “in conversation” person with me at the NYC launch of my novel Watch Me Go, which was based on a story she and Rushdie chose for Best American Short Stories.) My point here is that, even before Coolest’s first volume dropped, E and I knew it would be noticed though perhaps also subject to attack. But we pressed on because I was still tired of all the political rancor Americans were hurling around. Additionally, S.A. Cosby soon sent us a previously unpublished story (“Pantera Rex”). Naturally we ran that story in our first volume, Coolest 2022, and even before that volume’s pub date, Amazon was telling Itasca, our printer and distributor at the time, that we needed to do a second printing—apparently because the pre-pub buzz was that significant. In any case, Coolest 2022 went to four printings and is about to go to a fifth.
Ed: You followed with Coolest 2023 and 2024. What was the response?
Mark: Coolest’s 2023 and 2024 volumes also fared well with respect to sales and positive feedback from readers, but backlash continued to flare up now and then, usually from writers or wannabe writers. Flash writers were ticked off because we didn’t publish flash; an up-and-coming author was pissed because we solicited their work and they thought we did so because they were a person of color. (Though, I dunno, how does diversity happen in publishing unless publishers ask people of color for their work?) Additionally, self-published and barely published submitters went to social media (especially Twitter) to criticize our personal responses to their declined manuscripts; for a number of younger, beginning writers, it became the “in” thing to post memes and jokes about my candor—I wrote most of Coolest’s rejection notes—regarding why we declined a particular story. In these notes I’d simply come out and tell the submitter exactly why we said no—with actionable feedback about, say, plot complexity or character development, and with none of that “not right for us at this time” vagueness, which eds had used on me for decades. In other words, rather than appreciate Coolest for saving them time and money by giving them direct, honest feedback, submitters whose unpublished manuscripts clearly wouldn’t be all that engaging for most American readers, preferred to bully Coolest—and in particular me—because I was, in their group-think opinion, “mean.”
Looking back now, with our fourth annual volume having dropped, I’d say that, altogether, since day one, there’s been what E and I have come to call “the bifurcation”: Lots of people, mostly readers, tell us they love Coolest because they feel that it’s making the short story genre interesting again (after a years-long drought which, they’ve told us, had them disliking short stories in general for having grown dull)—but then a smaller group of people, mostly writers (a couple of them renowned authors who were disturbed by our refusal to publish big names regardless of content—or, in one case, by our thorough editing) despise us, some of them using social media to say so publicly, some of them badmouthing us privately to other well-known authors only to have word get back to us that they hope Coolest fails.
Ed: That seems overly harsh and a bit irrational. Conversely, what’s been most edifying about editing the collection?
Mark: Reader reviews on Amazon. Through them, readers have assured us our authors’ stories are indeed “unputdownable” for people from all walks of life, arguably unifying people at least a bit in that sense. The percentage of 5-stars readers give us on Amazon is strikingly higher than the percentage they give to the other major short story anthologies, so through these reviews, readers are saying: Yeah, you’re delivering the goods. Keep being interesting. Keep not playing the snob/privilege/hyper-intellectual card.
Ed: Besides the hate memes, what’s been most frustrating?
Mark: The fact that writers, particularly younger writers, be they widely published or not published at all, don’t seem to care about what short story readers want—the fact that these inexperienced writers want to keep writing stories that are largely the same one to the next, with relatively dull characters and very few surprising plot twists and very little—well, storytelling.
Ed: Do you see this rarity of storytelling craft as resulting from a lack of education re: the elements of fiction, or is it something else?
Mark: We’re guessing education might have something to do with it. For example, in the past ten years or so, young writers, we sense, might be hearing more—from their writing professors and teachers—about trigger warnings than they are about the beauty (and necessity!) of conflict when it comes to storytelling.
Ed: Do you see Coolest American Stories continuing?
Mark: I see it killing me probably sooner than later. (Laughs.)
Ed: So, I suspect then that E has a solid life insurance policy and can continue the good fight.
Mark: Right! (Laughs.)
Ed: How is the publication funded?
Mark: By selling copies. On that first morning of Coolest—the morning of January 7, 2021, even before the sun came up—we decided that there was only one way to assure we’d be providing readers from all walks of life stories they actually found engaging and therefore could actually enjoy—and that was to refuse to accept donations, to refuse to apply for/accept grants, to refuse to sell T-shirts and coffee mugs and the like, to refuse to be associated with a university or any other organization that would make things comfortable for us financially while perhaps subtly, along with that funding, whispering: Publish this person. Or: Don’t publish that person.
Ed: When did you start writing? What was your first published piece?
Mark: High school. I wrote one short story for an honors class I got into because my older brother had done so well in it.
Ed: Catholic school for grammar school, too, right?
Mark: St. Alexander.
Ed: Do you think your Catholic education gave you a solid foundation for literature and writing?
Mark: Yes. And I say yes with high praise for some of my teachers, who truly did know—and drove into us students who were paying attention—the elements of storytelling. To get back to that first published piece of fiction of mine I wrote in high school, I wrote a detective story from the point of view of a cop who was also the person committing the crime he was investigating. I thought my presentation of that “irony” was pretty snazzy, the contrived nature of the entire story notwithstanding. I can’t remember its title, but I do remember the name of the xeroxed school lit mag it was in: INK. And the faculty advisor of INK, I’m recalling now, was named Fr. Crowley, one of the few Jesuits at that school who did not give me the creeps. He was huge on proofreading. He made sure my story, goofy as it was with respect to point of view, ended up being perfect with respect to its grammar, punctuation, etc.—all the things some Coolest submitters and authors resent me and E and our proofreader for when we edit their manuscripts.
Ed: You’ve mentioned Flannery O’Connor as an early influence. Who else influenced your writing?
Mark: Hemingway, Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Bukowski.
Ed: You’ve published an impressive number of short stories. Do you prefer the short story to the novel?
Mark: I prefer the novel. That shitty short story I wrote for Fr. Crowley happened because I wanted to write a novel but was too busy being a kid. But as soon as I had time (after undergrad), I got one down and revised it, using the electric typewriter my “rich” girlfriend at the time was able to afford. The title of that novel was Never Enough Ketchup. I submitted it to one agent, who rejected it (without ever sending the ms back to me) over the phone, a payphone in Omaha, Nebraska, where I’d written the ms. after hitchhiking every mile of 1-80 in search of “material.” Turned out the ms. had nothing to do with what happened on that hitchhiking trip; instead, it poked fun at the frat/sorority jerks at the university I’d just graduated from, where I was a nerd whose greatest aspiration on campus was to defeat frat guys when my nerd pals and I would play hoop and softball games against them. About four years later, Revenge of the Nerds dropped, and it had Never Enough Ketchup’s exact same premise, and a stunning number of the same plot points, characters, and “fun moments.” No one’s ever believed me when I’ve told them I might have written what in effect was the treatment for Revenge of the Nerds—i.e., that it’s possible that the agent who rejected Ketchup sent my ms. to film people who were looking for new material for their next hit film. Then again, I don’t walk around spending Revenge of the Nerds money.
Ed: You also published poetry; do you still write poetry? Any favorite poets? Literary journals?
Mark: Yeah, there was a stretch of years there, after I grew tired of having agents take me on but then fail to submit my novels and my best short story collection wholeheartedly (they’d play the delay game with me), when I told myself: Fuck it. I’ll just write poetry. Which of course you submit yourself. And the first poem I sent around was accepted by Joseph Parisi at Poetry. Which would irk pretty much every poet I’d meet in person from then on, as well as some I’d never meet who partook in the Poet’s Rumor Mill, which back then was maybe even cattier than it is now. But which made me think that maybe I should keep writing and submitting poems. Which I went ahead and did for about five years, getting 300+ in print magazines. Then it became clear that neither The Atlantic nor The New Yorker nor The Paris Review would ever take seriously submissions from me, not to mention every time I’d be invited to do a reading, some poet, male, female, young, old, would sidle over to me and say something rude, so I quit writing the things.
Ed: Do you have an agent?
Mark: No. But I’ve had some biggies. Ginger Barber, may she RIP. Agents at Curtis Brown, Sterling Lord, Gernert, the Emma Sweeny Agency, blah, blah, blah. None fulfilled the promises they made to me, which, after the years pile up, causes a kid who was raised poor on the South Side of Milwaukee to wonder if maybe he simply grew up on the wrong side of the tracks when it came to getting a decent book deal. The first agent I had at Curtis Brown (I ended up having two there—long story re how that happened) sat on the unpublished manuscript of “Straightaway” (the short story of mine that went on to be published in Best American) for, I don’t know, maybe two years, with me nudging her politely the whole time (because E kept saying, “M, that story is your best by far!”) before I finally fired her (the agent), at which point she submitted “Straightaway” to Antioch—even though I’d already gone on to look for representation elsewhere. The fun part about that was how Antioch soon thereafter accepted “Straightaway,” and somehow, even though I was in touch with Antioch about it while it was being proofread, etc., that agent took the $300 or whatever the payment for it was and never sent me a cent of it.
But the agents-from-hell story that matters most to me was that, after “Straightaway,” while I was trying to write a novel with a white male protagonist, at least three (maybe four?) agents contacted me and told me I should abandon that novel and instead expand “Straightaway,” which was narrated by a young Black guy from the Bronx, into a novel—because they were sure they could auction such a novel to a major NYC house. When I told each of these agents I was already writing the other novel, they said, “No. No one wants to read about white males. Write about the Black guy Deesh from your Best American story.” So I did. I dropped everything I’d been doing for years and wrote about Deesh—though I did include in it a white male character so that Deesh and the white male character could end up lost in the woods together and hash out an understanding with each other re: their attitudes about race, privilege, poverty in America, etc. Then the agent who signed me for the book asked me to change the gender of that white male character in it to female, which I did even though I felt it made the novel as a whole feel less genuine and sort of preachy. Though as soon as I did what this agent wanted, meaning the novel now had two narrators, a Black guy and a white woman, this agent sold the manuscript to Putnam, and then Putnam asked me to change the title from Straightaway to Watch Me Go, a title I still dislike.
But here’s the kicker that makes this agent-from-hell story an indisputable nightmare: Right after Watch Me Go went to print, as I was calling in some favors by asking some creative writing profs have me read at their campuses for Watch Me Go’s book tour, someone in academia (far as I know, anyway) came up with the notion of appropriation—you know, that anything a white person wrote about people of color was immoral, crass, capitalistic, and so forth. Note, those three or four agents had pretty much insisted I abandon my novel about a white guy to write Watch Me Go by making it clear they wouldn’t represent me unless I wrote about Deesh. And, hey, I was around fifty years old when these agents made this, this—what struck me as more or less an ultimatum. And up till that point I’d earned little to no money on fiction writing, other than what I’d made when I’d book-doctored other writers’ novels for them. In other words, I’d written five or six novels of my own by then (not counting the ones I edited/ghostwrote for other authors), and this whole “You gotta write about this Black guy” dictum from those agents seemed to be the only way I’d finally get paid as much per year for my own writing as I’d made when I’d been a substitute teacher. So I did it. I did what these agents said, and then I did every damned thing, in every chapter of the resultant manuscript, that my agent told me to do, even though he was less than half my age, had no MFA, no apparent extraordinary literary smarts of any sort: my guess now is he landed a job at an agency because his parents had money and they knew people in publishing? And, so, well, just after Watch Me Go was published, I went to the first college campus on the book tour, and the English department chair who’d invited me asked me, within minutes of shaking my hand, “You know what’s gonna happen tonight, right?” And I said, “Yeah. I’m gonna read.” And he said, “I mean after that. You know you’re gonna get roasted by people in the audience for appropriation, right?” And this was the first time I’d ever heard about literary appropriation, so I told him I had no idea what he was talking about.
Then he explained it to me, explained why, now, I was the bad-guy author du jour. So I said, “But like four agents insisted I write about this black guy—if I hadn’t written this novel, I would never have gotten a deal from Putnam.” And he said, “Doesn’t matter.” And I said, “Does it matter that I grew up dirt poor in Milwaukee’s segregated Polish ghetto, eating Spam for dinner on good days, and was taunted and stereotyped my whole life for being a ‘dumb Pollak’—I mean, doesn’t that qualify me to be able to write fiction about what it’s like to be underprivileged and discriminated against?” And he said, “That’s the worst thing you could mention. You’re still white—doesn’t matter whether you’re poor Polish American or Ivy League. I think you should just apologize tonight and roll with whatever happens.”
And here’s the kicker on top of that kicker: Within days of that conversation, I learned my (white male and from far more privilege than I) agent was on Twitter calling me a “bad boy,” presumably for appropriation. I mean, the guy was covering his ass by blaming me for writing a book he’d insisted I write. And ever since then, 2015, I’ve pretty much been black-listed—99% of the fiction and poetry manuscripts I’ve submitted to lit mags, and even a non-fiction book I’d written about my brother’s extraordinary life and horrific death due to AIDS, has been rejected with form rejections, if they’ve been responded to at all.
Ed: In spite of that setback—brutal by the way—have you been able to make a living as a writer/editor?
Mark: I’ve made most of my “good” money book-doctoring—that is, editing/ghost-writing.
Ed: In your bio online, we learn you have a law degree. Was it a dream? Was law school at odds with writing?
Mark: Not my dream. Like I said, I grew up in a rather impoverished Polish-American family, and my parents decided my older brother would study his ass off to be a doctor, I’d study my ass off to be an attorney, and my younger brother would be a wealthy businessman. (Back then in that community—Milwaukee’s South Side, where all us “Pollaks” need stay due to segregation in Milwaukee—girls weren’t pushed all that much regarding careers, so I never quite knew what any adult wanted my sister to be.) My older brother, who was a genius no doubt about it, became a doctor and founded one of the first AIDS clinics in the U.S. and died soon thereafter due to complications from AIDS. My younger brother became a wealthy businessman and is still one. For my part, I did what my parents wanted, went to law school, but I was already writing fiction while I was there, and also being a smart aleck to my law profs when they’d call on me. Note: The only reason I was there, at Georgetown Law, was because a Jesuit who taught me Poli Sci where I went to undergrad (my parents were big on Jesuit education), picked up a phone one day and talked to his Jesuit pal at G-town. Whether my parents pressured him to make that call, I have no idea. I do know my parents had zilch from which to make any donations to either university, and that my student loan debt after Georgetown was godawful, but that, thanks to a rather sad irony, my deceased older brother left some life insurance policy proceeds to me that helped me get out from a good portion of that debt.
Ed: How did you and Elizabeth connect? Any children?
Mark: Elizabeth was graduating from Marquette University with a degree in journalism when my first published novel (Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman) was slated to come out, and she wanted to be a publicist, so she volunteered to do Confessions’s publicity gratis to get her foot in the door. I had gotten Confessions published on my own at a very small press because Ginger Barber, after I nudged her one too many times to submit it someplace decent, iced the manuscript. Elizabeth managed to score quite a few kickass blurbs (e.g., from The Atlantic’s C. Michael Curtis) and reviews in some fine venues, including a favorable four-column review in the Los Angeles Times that praised the book while comparing it to Huckleberry Finn, which sent it to a second printing within weeks of its launch. So, well, all of E’s intelligence, beauty, and charm notwithstanding, who wouldn’t fall in love with her then?
And regarding children, no children: We’ve always said our books and stories are our children. Elizabeth has written two novels, too, and has also designed books for celebs such as Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, George W. Bush, and Rachel Maddow. We do have two cats, Ray-Ray, and Lenny. Think Raymond Carver and Lenny Bruce.
Ed: If you could change three things about the publishing industry, what would they be?
Mark: No more I’ll-publish-you-if-you-publish-me. No more payola for reviews by major media outlets/influencers. No more discrimination/literary bullying.
Ed: Research suggests that Americans are reading fewer books. Do you see this from your vantage point? If so, what might be some reasons for the decline?
Mark: There’s so much competition from other media—podcasts, streaming, social. But one thing’s for sure: Americans are hungry for interesting storytelling, and we’re doing our damnedest to provide it.
Ed: What are you reading right now?
Mark: Nothing but social media as I promote Coolest 2025.
Ed: What books, stories, poems would you recommend?
Mark: God, I don’t know. I guess I’d say read something that makes you turn pages, makes you laugh, makes you cry. And of course, one book to start with would be any volume of Coolest American Stories. (Laughs.)
Ed: For young writers, any bits of wisdom? Do you think a college education is necessary?
Mark: College isn’t necessary and, for some writers, could actually hurt. Regarding bits of wisdom: Always, when you read and watch films, ask yourself two questions: 1) What’s the premise of this thing? 2) How did the writer make this thing as interesting as possible? And if they failed to make it interesting, what would you have done to make it interesting?
Ed: It sounds like you’ve played some hoops. True? Any other hobbies?
Mark: Still play half-court every Sunday morning at the Y in Syracuse. Last Sunday I didn’t score but we won. Three Sundays before that, I hit a game-winning three-pointer. Which felt better than getting that acceptance from Poetry.
Ed: After a tumultuous 2024, any big predictions for 2025?
Mark: No. I’ll simply say that, if there is a God, it’s time for her/him to step in and help us.
About the interviewer: Ed McManis is a writer, editor, & erstwhile Head of School. His work has appeared in more than 60 publications, including The Blue Road Reader, California Quarterly, Nimrod, Narrative, Lascaux Review, etc. His most recent chapbook is “The Zombie Family Takes a Selfie” Bottlecap Press. He, along with his wife, Linda, have published esteemed author Joanne Greenberg’s (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden) novel, Jubilee Year, and her memoir, On the Run. Little known trivia fact: he holds the outdoor free-throw record at Camp Santa Maria: 67 in a row. He’s pretty sure he could beat Mark in a game of PIG.