Short stories: Dead or alive?

In her foreword to the latest "Best New American Voices" anthology, author Mary Gaitskill takes on a hot issue: whether or not the short story is dead.

I would not say the short story is exactly dead, but it looks to me pallid and ill from neglect, volumes like this one to the contrary.... Like the best of the genre, all of these stories use their primitive black-and-white symbols to conjure the low, fleeting voices of angels and demons expressed in human words. Will they last? Will the short story last? I've no idea.

The debate on the health of the short story is heated in university writing programs, many of which use the short-story-oriented workshop to teach craft. Short story writers may be getting better and better — the subtitle of this volume is "Fresh Fiction From the Top Writing Programs" — but common wisdom is that there aren't many short story readers. Gaitskill notes that most of the population, even those who read novels, "don't read short stories at all."

That's too bad, if for no reason other than these 14 writers are working very hard. They are not the bratty 21-year-old seniors you might think: Most have been published in literary journals, won awards, gotten an advanced degree (at least one). Many have gone on to postgraduate writers' residencies, securing a coveted Stegner Fellowship at Stanford or a spot at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. (again, at least one). Many have clearly dedicated themselves to the pursuit of writing, and they got out of the blocks with short stories; they're kind of short story champions.

With all this effort, could the short story possibly be dead?

— Carolyn kellogg

Photo by nicolasnova via Flickr

Comments

[Barry Menikoff]

The demise of the short story is greatly exaggerated. The form is relatively "young" and dates to the last quarter of the 19th c. Stevenson and Kipling were the English language models and Maupassant the French exemplar. With the explosion of elegant (ie, Art Nouveau) and pulp magazines in the fin de siecle there was a frenzy of short story publication that ran from the 1890s through the 1920s. This was the period that consolidated the techniques of the form, the terms of its criticism, and introduced a host of how-to books for a general public that wanted to get in on the action. Everybody wanted to write like Joyce or Mansfield or O.Henry or Lawrence or, after "In Our Time," like Hemingway. And so we saw the emergence of more than one generation of writers--in the US, UK, and Ireland--that made of the form the crown jewel of prose fiction. But there was always a publishing side to the short story that told another tale: short stories didn't sell, and publishers insisted on a novel to offset the inevitable loss from the publication of a collection of stories. In fact, most publishers would not print a volume of stories before a writer's novel (exceptions of course, Joyce and Mansfield and Hemingway), but they did not alter the common belief among publishers. In the US, it was not until Cheever's great success with his "Collected Stories," ditto for Katherine Anne Porter, that publishers started to question this ingrained assumption. But Cheever and Porter were old hands, and it remained for a newcomer like Raymond Carver to break the ice and assure publishers that it was kosher to bring out an unknown's stories without a novel trailing behind. Yet the publishers were not altogether wrong: there is a strong resistance among general readers to purchase a volume of short stories rather than a novel. They like getting involved in a long story, following the travails of the characters, blah blah. The problem with the contemporary short story is that the common level of achievement is simply too good - everybody has learned in all the gin joints in all the universities how to &c. But the subject matter has narrowed considerably. Writers who are in MFA programs can hardly be faulted for not following Jack London or Hemingway or Maugham or Greene or John O' Hara or Erskine Caldwell or Scott Fitzgerald or Katherine Anne Porter or Richard Wright or Irwin Shaw in search of experience. The result however is quite noticeable - a short story that's all dressed up but with nowhere to go.

[rr]

I don't know what's happening in the rest of the world, but it seems the only people who read short stories in Canada are students who are forced to and writers who read journals to they want to submit to.

[Drew Thompsoin]

The short story is dead, and rightly so. I love to read novels and short stories, but when the stories that are being printed these days are either 1) by established authors only in the New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic (when it did publish short stories) or 2) are published in gimmicky magazines by navel-gazing literary "critics" like Eggers and N+1 because the writing itself is gimmicky.

The only reason to write short stories these days is to warm up for a novel, and hope of getting a two-book deal for the first novel and then throw together a sloppy "collection" of short stories that maybe a few critics fawn over in a couple of publications and then nobody reads, nobody buys, etc. Then what does the writer do? He or she then writes a novel. Because the short story is dead.

And good riddance.

[rr]

Why would you say good riddance if you love to read short stories? There are a lot of markets out there that aren't "gimmicky" or the New Yorker. The problem is people aren't reading them.

[Alicia]

don't underrate online journals.

[Kevin Sampsell]

I like Mary Gaitskill just fine but I'd rather read her short stories than her novels. And for her to say that those people who read novels "don't read stories at all" is just ridiculous.

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[Mark]

No one reads them because, like MFA programs themselves, they are nothing more than political machinery for aspiring novelists. And, more than anything, they are boring.

As a writer who didn't go the MFA route--I went through two undergrad programs, supposedly among the "best in the country"--it saddens me to see how deeply engrained the programs have become.

Without going on a 10,000 word harangue, fiction has essentially bored and politicized itself into irrelevancy.

[Walter Molko]

Literary short stories are taught in school to the point of deadly boredom, I, a well-read writer, have come to see.

But the thing is that writers nowadays aren't writing for the passion and are doing it as a means of making money. Those that do write for passion are confusing passion with intellectual cockiness.

Go read early horror short stories by people like Stephen King and you will see what short stories are supposed to be. One such example is Jerusalem's Lot, and another (more recent) is The Man in the Black Suit.

I don't think short stories are dead, but endangered? Yes.

Somebody has to keep them alive, and these people must be those who write with passion and a fine sense of what people love about novels. How about a series of interconnected short stories all acting as prequels to a novel?

People need to keep short stories fresh while not polluting them too much.

Sorry for the rant, but short stories are typically nice between novels and for a quick enjoyable read.