By Steve Harmic, Penn State DuBois
DUBOIS – A short story written by Penn State DuBois Distinguished Professor of English Richard Kopley has been chosen for inclusion in this year’s edition of an exclusive international anthology of fiction literature compiled and printed in England.
The Lightship Anthology 2 (Lightship Publishing) is the second collection of short stories, poems, and flash fiction written by authors from around the globe. It is meant to discover the best new literary voices writing in English. Kopley’s work is one of 10 selected for inclusion in the anthology’s short story category, out of a total of 552 submissions.
Kopley’s story, “The Hideous and Intolerable Bookshop,” was inspired by Manhattan’s Book Row, a now vanished part of a New York City neighborhood that was once home to an extensive assemblage of eclectic bookshops. Kopley’s fantasy of visiting the site of the extinct Book Row to discover a little-known shop still operating prompted him to write the story. Told in the first person, the story features a hero who finds both familiar comfort and unexpected mystery once he enters the forgotten store.
Kopley is no stranger to seeing his work in print. His academic work, such as research into literary legends like Edgar Allan Poe has been published extensively. In that vein, he published his analytical volume Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries (Palgrave Macmillan) in 2008, in which he examines the structure, sources, and autobiographical significance of Poe’s detective stories, which many say inspired the entire detective genre in modern literature.
Notably, Kopley is about to break into the children’s fiction realm with the soon-to-be-published “The Remarkable David Wordsworth,” and he hopes to keep his momentum going in the fiction genre.
“I’m very happy to have my story published in Lightship Anthology 2,” Kopley said.
“The book is very new, but my dream of becoming a fiction writer is very old. So I’m especially pleased. I hope to publish a collection of short stories someday.”
Kopley recently returned from a literary awards ceremony in Hull, England where he was recognized for his work and its inclusion in the anthology.