Wither the short story? (The resistance starts
now)
In the past year, a number of articles
have appeared suggesting the short story is in decline. This page will
link to articles across the web to try to track commentary on this
subject. If you see something that you think should be here, let us
know.
[NY
Times, April 6, 2005]
The Atlantic Monthly Cuts Back on Fiction
The Atlantic Monthly
magazine, which in its nearly 150-year history was among the first
to publish short works of fiction by Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain,
Henry James and Sue Miller, is eliminating the regular publication
of fiction from its pages. ... The change
is part of a multi-year trend of general-interest magazines
publishing fewer works of fiction.
[Lynn
Coady in TDR, Nov. 2004]
I agree the publishing climate is
deeply hostile to the short story right now, and even though I am always
encountering people who tell me they love short fiction, my friends in
the publishing industry tell me collections just "don't sell".
I don't know what to say about this except to point out that Alice
Munro's latest collection is a best seller and poised to win at least
one of our major literary prizes this year [editor's note: Munro won
the Giller; didn't win the GG].
[Canada
Council, Oct. 26, 2004]
From the list of titles submitted for
2004 Governor General's Award . . .
- Number of fiction titles: 183
- Number of poetry titles: 138
How many of the fiction titles are
short story collections? Less than 138, surely.
[NY
Times, Oct. 23, 2004]
''I've tried to write novels,'' Alice Munro says, sounding slightly annoyed with her own intractable methods. ''They turn into strange, hybrid stories.'' And then, an almost imperceptible note of defiance enters the conversation, as though she were having an argument with the powers that be, whoever they be, with all those who would tell her how to behave or how to write: ''I haven't read a novel that I didn't think couldn't have been a better story."
[Research
into the current state of the short story (UK)]
Arts
Council England and the Scottish
Arts Council have co-funded a research project to establish the
current state of the short story in the UK.
[from Greg
Hollingshead's website]
Interview April 2004 by Kelly Jane
Torrance.
K.T: There seem to be fewer and fewer
venues to publish short stories. Women's magazines, for example, used
to publish stories, and most of them don't any more. Venues like the Saturday
Evening Post no longer exist. Why is this the case? Are people
just less interested in reading short fiction?
G.H.: I think this has been the case
for over fifty years, and the reason is TV. Mass-magazine-market short
fiction was, whether literary or “commercial,” pretty
journalistic, in the sense that it was published for its pertinence to
the current lifestyles—or wished-for lifestyles—of the
middle-class readership of the day. In that sense, it was doing the
same thing the nonfiction articles were doing.
[from BookNinja,
Nov. 2003]
"The current
publishing environment is hostile towards the short story. Writer
after writer will tell you that publisher after publisher have taken
to rejecting short story collections outright because of the form.
“We just can’t sell short story collections” has become the
ubiquitous line in every rejection letter" (Jonathan
Bennett).
[from Doublethink,
May 2004]
"Looking for proof of life in
that American institution, the short story, can seem like a fool's
errand. Few magazines publish short stories. Few Americans read
them—you won't find any collections in the New York Times bestseller
lists. Even those in the short story business don't seem to want to
talk about the short story" (Kelly Jane Torrance).
[from NY
Times, August 25, 2004]
"A couple of generations' worth of people - a vast and
somewhat underemployed army - ... have been trained to
write competent but profoundly uninspired short fiction
that is unread except by other writers of short fiction and
by the people who hire them to instruct yet more people in
this arcane little craft" (Charles McGrath).
[from Amazon.com, 2000]
Amazon.com: In your
introduction [to The Best American Short Stories of the Century], you also seem a
little pessimistic about the future of the short story. "My firm impression,"
you write, "is that in my lifetime the importance of short fiction as a
news-bearing medium--bringing Americans news of how they live, and why--has
diminished." What do you think has most conspicuously filled that place?
Television? Movies? The Internet?
John Updike: Well, all of the above. I do think
short stories used to tell people how other people lived, and in a surprising
and edifying way. Now many readers turn toward celebrity anecdotes for
narrative. In a way, you could argue that the National Enquirer is the
real successor to Story magazine. But in a story, at least, you have to
make the acquaintance of the characters, and that requires some imaginative
work--so it's easier to satisfy your human curiosity with the vehicle of the
celebrity scandal.
[from The
Age (Australia), August 24, 2004]
"There are certain standard topics at any writers’ festival and the future of the short story is one of them. This year Frank Moorhouse, Wayne Macauley, John Murray and Eva Sallis give the topic a good airing. Short stories obviously remain very popular, judging by the number of bums on seats, but, as Moorhouse says, there are no ready answers to the crisis facing the form. There is a lack of outlets, he says, quoting Dr Johnson saying the marketplace is liberating for writers. “But is it liberating for the short story?” he wonders. Murray, whose stories are published to acclaim in the US, has a point when he says that in the US stories are a way for publishers to find new talent and voices. Sallis puts it another way. A short story is a bit like tantric sex in five
minutes" (Jason Steger).
[The
Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story, 1998]
Today's short story writers are
testing the boundaries of short fiction through minimalist works;
extended short story cycles; narrative nonfiction forms, such as
histories, memoirs, and essays; and even stories created interactively
with readers on the computer. Short story critics, in turn, are
viewing the short story from the perspective of genre, history,
cultural studies, and even cognitive science.
[Momaya
Press, March 11, 2004]
A recent survey, conducted by the Mslexia
journal, found that over two-thirds of the 1,238 writers who took part
in the survey are producing short stories, making it by far the most
popular genre - way ahead of poetry, novels, and journalism.
[Kurt
and Me, 1999]
"In 1959, Sirens of Titan
was published, but the future of the short story began looking grim.
The market dried up as magazines disappeared and the public at large
began looking more and more to novels. Vonnegut decided that he had
better switch to writing novels if he wanted to keep himself afloat.
His experiences of the past few years helped mold his writing, and he
followed up Canary in a Cat House (1961), a collection of his
short stories, with Mother Night (1962)" (Shawn Rider.)
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