Bill Scheurer is a man on a mission. Make that missions. The Lindenhurst attorney and entrepreneur wants to stop war, convince the orthodox of all religions to embrace one another–and resurrect the short story. To those ends, in the last year or so he’s run for Congress, written a theological tome, and launched a publishing company, Hourglass Books, which will put out nothing but short-story anthologies. The first of them, Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters, is out this week and will have a reading Saturday at the Printers Row Book Fair. The collection of 19 mostly previously published tales, edited by Gina Frangello, is the opening salvo in Scheurer’s campaign to return short fiction to the status it had before the days of TV
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sitcoms and blogs. “There was a time in this country decades ago when it was a very popular art form in terms of general readership,” he says. “Today most of these gems are buried in journals that very few people read; they’re seen by almost no one outside of the literary community.” He wants Hourglass to be a force in “reversing that trend, bringing the short story back to a general audience.”
Scheurer ran as a “peace candidate” in the March congressional primary in Phil Crane’s conservative Eighth District and pulled 23 percent of the Democratic vote–enough to encourage him to do it again. He’s also attempting to establish a federal agency of peace (see www.PeaceReferendum.org), to be financed with a budget of 1 percent of what the nation spends on defense. Hourglass Books is just one morsel on his plate, and he calls it a simple cottage business, run with the help of his wife, artist Randi Layne Scheurer.
