Apparently best-selling writer Stephen King thinks short stories are alive, but barely, while short story writer Jack Livings in Newsweek is a bit more optimistic, though given the evidence and arguments he presents, I’m not sure why.
Among Livings’ faint-praise responses to King’s short story death-knell:
“There’s evidence that the size of the audience for literary short fiction today isn’t much smaller than it’s ever been.”
“The literary form is today no more or less mainstream that it ever was, and there probably are no more, no fewer, badly written literary short stories than there have ever been. And haven’t literary magazines always been on the bottom shelf at chain bookstores — if they were available at all?”
“There’s no doubt that short fiction has disappeared from the zeitgeist. Today, stories are communicated to wide audiences only if they’re made into movies. Any publisher will attest that short story collections don’t sell well.”
Livings also quotes William Gibson in “a recent New York Times Magazine interview,” about the comforting predictability of genre literature: “‘in genre, you’re sort of buying a guarantee that you are going to have essentially the same experience again and again.’ That’s the idea behind sitcoms. If a reader wants an experience that transcends entertainment, he or she looks to literary fiction, where we hope that, serious or funny, the stories will surprise us — not superficially (the mother was the murderer!) but by presenting the unpredictable human condition, fleas and all.”
Huh. I’m a fan of crime fiction (in novel form) precisely because it presents “the unpredictable human condition, fleas and all.” (Can’t say the same about most scripted TV though.)
See also: A brief survey of the short story: part one, at the Guardian’s books blog, by Chris Power. This entry focuses on Anton Chekhov.
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