SOURCE: Goldstein, William. “Houghton Mifflin Publishing Stories by Literary Fellowship Winner.” Publishers Weekly 232, no. 25 (18 December 1987): 19-20.

In the following essay, Goldstein investigates the influence of the popular writer Danielle Steel on Canin's writing career.

In February, Houghton Mifflin will publish Emperor of the Air, stories by Ethan Canin, winner of a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. Canin, 27, is a fourth-year medical student at Harvard, and Emperor of the Air, which includes nine stories, is his first book. All the stories have been published in magazines, including the Atlantic, Esquire, Ploughshares and Redbook. In fact, every story that Canin has written since the age of 19 has been published. Two of his stories were included in Best American Short Stories collections published by Houghton Mifflin in 1985 (edited by Gale Godwin) and 1986 (edited by Raymond Carver).

Houghton Mifflin cited Canin's stories for their plot and characters—“a young boy who can't bring...