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How to account for the stunning success of books that are--alas--little more than greeting cards teased out to 300 pages? "Our stories are so little, so bite-sized, that they don't intimidate people," says Hansen. "People can read them in the bathroom. They reignite the spirit." Most of those readers reigniting themselves in the bathroom are women, who, according to sales research, purchase 85% to 90% of the Chicken Soup books. But deep thinkers would be wrong to see in the series' success yet another symptom of that much analyzed trend, the feminization of American culture. Both Hansen, 50, and Canfield, 53, perfected their storytelling art on the country's vast motivational-speaking circuit, before audiences of supposedly hardened businessmen, who nowadays are taught to share feelings, break down emotional barriers and awaken their Inner Capitalists. Chicken Soup is less the product of the feminization of American culture than of the infantilization of corporate America.
"Chicken Soup for the Soul came about because someone in a seminar said to me one day, 'You know that story about that dog that you told? Is that in a book somewhere?'" Canfield recalls. "After hearing this month after month, I finally went, 'Someone's trying to tell me to put these stories in a book.' It became a divine obsession."
Canfield had earlier met Hansen at--where else?--a holistic-health conference in California, and they decided to pool their stories for what became the original Chicken Soup. Today they receive unsolicited submissions at the rate of a hundred a day. These are culled by a group of staff readers, and then Canfield and Hansen, along with a team of co-authors, make the final cut down to the mystical 101.
Give credit where it's due: Canfield and Hansen's brain candy suits the temper of the times. "We put together a book of stories that gives you an uplifting story without any moralizing at the end," says Canfield. "The books are based on spiritual principles but not religious [ones]." Uplift without morals, spirituality without religion--it's the perfect faith for the postmodern '90s. And chicken soup is as good a name for it as any.
--Reported by Deborah Edler Brown/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs/New York