In an interview with Steven Millhauser at the LA Review of Books, Kevin Koczwara asks, “Is there something that you love about the short story form? Today, it seems, short stories are out of style for one reason or another. Maybe they never were in vogue—I am thinking of how John Cheever wrote so many and his collections were often panned when they came out.”
I found this question surprising. Are short stories out of vogue? Did Cheever really suffer negative reviews for his collections? (Yes, some. Often, it took some years for critics to catch up to what he was doing and the ways in which he was not a formulaic New Yorker writer. But it was also a different reviewing environment — there was less hyperbole, and so older reviews can read quite negative to readers today, more accustomed to breathless praise.)
Millhauser answers:
Is the short story really out of style? I’ve never been alert to literary trends. What I love about the short story is precisely its shortness. The details can be held in the mind of a reader, so that every moment plays its part in the unfolding pattern. The shadow of the opening sentence lengthens slowly until, at last, it moves across the final sentence. An adjective repeated later in the story grows richer and deeper as it summons the first. Are such things now out of style? If so, I’m happy to embrace out-of-style-ness.
I love the sense of pattern and echo in the answer there. It’s very much in line with Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition”, which continue to influence the idea of what a short story is and can be: something that can be read in a single sitting, that has unity of effect, and thus can be held complete in the mind in a way novels, for instance, cannot. There are, of course, great pleasures to be had in resonances across a long narrative (whether novel or tv series — I love this in Twin Peaks: The Return, for instance, or Dark. Neither could achieve their effect at short length). But short stories are closer to poems in the ways that a reader can perceive and meditate on every detail together.
I want to return to the question of whether short stories are out of style, out of vogue. On one hand, this is incontrovertibly true. Only a few story collections sell really well in any year, and it’s almost impossible for a short story collection to beat novels on the bestseller lists unless it’s by Stephen King. (King really has been a lifelong champion of the short story and novella, despite also writing doorstopper novels.) The hegemony of novels in the literary landscape is deep and longstanding. In the second half of the 19th century, novels usurped poetry as king of the English-language lit’ry realm, and they’ve only consolidated their dominance since then. For a fun (depressing) exercise, compare the depth and knowledge of the Wikipedia page for “short story” vs. the page for “novel”: the latter is pretty robust, fairly well-informed, not at all bad for an Wikipedia article … whereas the former looks like it was written by ambitious middle school kids.
Even in some of the brief times (such as the 1920s) when short stories were common in major magazines, thus getting huge distribution and offering a level of payment most writers today don’t even get for novels … even then, in most cases novels dominated and writers who primarily wrote short stories did not have the visibility or reputation of novelists. In comparison to novels, then, short stories have always been out of vogue.
There is a sense, though, that stories ought to be more in vogue. Attention spans have collapsed, people’s lives are fragmented, shouldn’t short stories take off and eclipse novels? How does anybody still have the ability to read a novel?
I don’t have an answer to that — I wish I did! I wish short stories were more popular and remunerative! — but I can relate a few experiences I’ve had with readers of my own stories, experiences that link to some of what Steven Millhauser says.
First, short stories are more in vogue in certain genres than others. Though Steven Millhauser writes fantastical tales, he’s solidly within the Serious Literature* genre, the genre for which there are countless literary journals publishing them, and some of those journals — more than you might expect — reach a good number of people. Some of the more prominent lit journals have readerships in the five figures, which is more than most literary novels, even literary novels from big publishers. The Serious Literature genre also has some of the biggest magazines in the world publishing the occasional (or regular) short story: The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New Yorker, the latter two of which have published stories by Steven Millhauser. Then there’s the Best American Short Stories series of anthologies, which sell pretty well, though I don’t know if they sell better, worse, or about the same as they did 10 or 20 years ago.
In genre fiction, there are still plenty of markets devoted primarily to short fiction, though various technological and social changes have challenged their ability to survive. Still, there’s a sense of value to short fiction in the genre world I know best (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) that I don’t quite feel as much in the genre of Serious Fiction — there are still quite a few awards for short fiction, and short fiction gets reviewed by Locus and various online writers. In my experience, short fiction feels like it has a good chance of getting publicly noticed in the SF genre ecosystem in a way it does not in the Serious Lit world, simply because there are more ways for a story to be noticed. This may or may not be about readership. I’ve had stories that got good reviews in Locus and elsewhere that nobody seems to have ever remembered; whereas my story “Blood”, published in one of the bigger lit journals, didn’t get much public notice on publication but brought me more fan mail than anything I’ve ever published (including books) and got its film rights bought before it was ever reprinted.
I wonder, then, if the sense of short stories being “out of vogue” is more that people aren’t really talking about them as much in the Serious Literature circles as they used to. I don’t get a sense that anybody’s writing fewer stories, nor a sense that the audience for short stories is drastically smaller than it was. (I’m not sure how that audience could even be quantified.) But it’s true that it doesn’t feel — and yes, it’s totally subjective — that people are generally talking about stories as much as they did 10 or 15 years ago. (Or 6 years ago, when “Cat Person” briefly became the most famous short story in the world.) Even in the genres where short fiction does routinely get discussed, it somehow feels a bit … less.
All of this may have little to nothing to do with short fiction and a lot to do with the continuing fragmentation of culture and society. I used to learn about new stories and see discussion of stories a lot on Twitter, for instance. Less so now.
One of the biggest hurdles facing short stories is that they are too closely associated with school. I say that as a teacher and someone who benefited immensely from learning about all sorts of short stories at every level of schooling. But there’s a terrible problem for stories if they are seen as a “school thing”. The most surprising comment I got when I published my first collection was from a friend who reads some novels and narrative nonfiction but said she hadn’t read a short story since she was in school long ago, and she seemed wary of short stories because she associated them with school exercises. Stories to her seemed like something you approach with a sense of duty. They are things that get assigned to you, not things you pick up to read for personal pleasure or satisfaction. They are the sorts of texts you probably need a teacher to lead you through. I hope her experience with my stories was not like that. Still, even with some highly accessible stories, it’s hard to know how to bring them into your consciousness, how to let them grow in you, if you don’t get much practice at it.
There is a difficulty to short stories — their compression can sometimes make them closer to poetry than to novels — but if they are primarily thought of as instructional tools or as exercises for aspiring writers then of course they will not get much audience. One of the things I appreciate so much about the world of science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature fans is the culture they’ve built around short fiction. It seems easier within SF for people to be appreciated as (or primarily as) short story writers. They may not make much money at it, but there can be a sense that a good short story writer is a good writer in a way that I don’t really sense in Serious Fiction, where, with rare exceptions, the writer of short stories is expected to be someone on their way to writing a novel. That expectation also exists in SF, for sure, and this whole idea may be more about my own perceptions than about anything real, but there is a sense that Alice Munro is a pretty rare case, whereas any serious reader of SF can likely rattle off a list of writers who either have never published a novel or who are far better known for their short stories (or whose novels are built from stories — Ray Bradbury is a sterling example for that).
There’s an interesting gender factor here, too. When I thought of 20th/21st century North American Serious Lit writers who have only ever published short stories, I thought of women: Munro (yes, Lives of Girls and Women was marketed as a novel, but it’s a novel-in-stories), Grace Paley, Deborah Eisenberg. It’s much harder to think of male Serious Lit writers in North America who have established a reputation only from stories. Raymond Carverof course. John Keene comes to mind. (Deservedly — Counternarrativesis my favorite collection from an English-language writer of the last 25 years. It is a miracle of literature and I feel lucky to have been alive when it was published.) Not many others. Even Donald Barthelme, certainly best known for his stories, published a few novels.
Tillie Olsen (famous for a handful of stories, plus being a figure of the oppressed person who can’t write because of their oppression; no novel) would arguethat of course women write short stories, that’s what they have time for in patriarchy, where they must fit writing in amidst the unpaid labor of house and home. Grace Paley made exactly that argument for her own career, and I think Carol Emshwiller somewhere explained similarly that she didn’t start writing novels until the kids were grown up.
With Serious Lit, especially in the US, there’s been a frustrating conflation of The Big Novel with Seriousness, and both with maleness. It’s often seemed that the way to be taken seriously as a Real Writer from the 1960s onward was to be a white guy who wrote a really long novel, at least 500 pages. Anything less was effete, unambitious, female. It was the literary equivalent of manspreading. Serious writers were men with an infinite jest between their legs.
I think (hope!) that attitude has been put in the grave it should have been dumped in the moment it first appeared. Not only did it warp people’s perceptions of what literature can do, it also obscured the fact that some really good long novels were written by women. I keep hoping somebody will write a book, or at least an article, comparing Carolyn Chute’s Merry Men, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, and Gayl Jones’s Mosquito— fierce, wild, weird, vast novels that do so much that Big Serious Novels by men of the same era continue to get praised for (and the women’s novels often do it better).
This gender divide isn’t the same in SF. It’s easy to think of men whose reputations were made by stories — everybody from H.P. Lovecraft to Harlan Ellison to Ted Chiang. One of the only (maybe the only?) living genre fiction writers to have a book in the Penguin Classics series is Thomas Ligotti, who has never published a novel. Certainly, there are all sorts of interesting things to say about gender and the writing of genre fiction, but short fiction being derogated as somehow not masculine enough as a form isn’t an undercurrent I’ve ever detected, certainly not to the extent that this seemed to be the case in certain circles of Serious Literature.
Horror fiction is an interesting case, a genre where short fiction is especially important because so much of what readers value in the genre is at its best in the shorter form. It’s no surprise that Edgar Allan Poe is best remembered both as a horror writer and as the philosopher of the unity of effect. Does any genre of fiction benefit quite so much from unity of effect as horror does? There’s a purity to the horror short story that gets lost with horror novels, many of which have to bring in other genres and modes to justify their length — a lot of Stephen King’s novels, for instance, add horror to a thriller structure or to science fiction or to a domestic novel. A purely horror novel can be a beautiful thing, but they are rarely a bundle of fun to read — Kathe Koja’s The Cipher comes to mind, probably my favorite horror novel, but that book is a corruscating existential experience, not exactly a light read. Steve Shaviro has describedit well: “The protagonist and first-person narrator Nicholas, his on-and-off girlfriend Nakota, and their circle of friends come face-to-face with something they cannot explain and whose malevolent influence they seem unable to resist. Everyone’s worst qualities come to light. There’s no escaping the horror but only an accelerating movement toward obliteration — or perhaps toward something even worse.” (That’s my idea of a great book, but, as they say, your mileage may vary…)
Many of the best conversations I’ve had about short fiction have not been at academic conferences like those of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), both of which I’ve enjoyed attending, and both of which do pay some attention to short fiction here and there (AWP more than MLA because lots of people write stories in workshops, something that contributes to the idea of stories as pedagogical exercises). Instead, many of the best, most informed, most thoughtful conversations I’ve had about short fiction’s aesthetics, history, and future have been at genre conventions, particularly Readerconand Necronomicon, because those are places where stories are valued for themselves.
At this point, most of the short fiction I write is horror fiction. Partly, this is because I just can’t escape the feeling that existence in general is a horror story, but also it’s because I feel far more community among horror and SF writers than I do among writers of Serious Literature short stories. There probably are communities of short story writers outside genre fiction, communities built from MFA programs and such, but I don’t have access to those.
Since my only point here really is to celebrate the richness of the short story as a form unto itself and not a class exercise or a stepping stone to a novel, I’ll end this ramble with some recommendations of recent stories I’ve read and enjoyed:
· “The Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad #4)” by Caitlín R. Kiernan (available in The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan, one of my favorite collections of this century) — I read this years ago (when the collection The Ammonite Violincame out) but hadn’t revisited it in a long time. It seems to me to be a perfect story. It’s relatively simple in its plot and details, it’s compelling to read, but the resonances are rich and the implications complex.
· “The Righteousness of Conical Men” by Michael Cisco: I read this in Michael’s recent collection Visiting Maze, but that’s a limited edition from Centipede Press and now sold out, so you’re more likely to be able to find it in its original place of publication, Joe Pulver’s anthology The Madness of Dr. Caligari. This is a Cisco story, and as such it’s even weirder and more Expressionist than the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari movie. It’s humorous, confounding, and ultimately moving. Cisco draws from a variety of traditions and influences, but he is a truly unique writer. It’s a shame that Visiting Maze exists only in a few hundred expensive copies, because it would be nice for this really extraordinary collection to be accessible to more people. All of Cisco’s work is worth seeking out.
· “Dreams”by Anton Chekhov (trans. Constance Garnett) is a story I’ve kept as a companion ever since my first year of college in 1994 when I was in a Chekhov seminar at NYU and wrote a theatrical adaptation of this story. Doing that adaptation taught me a lot about what a story can do that a play can’t (and perhaps vice versa), as my adaptation felt quite flat in comparison to the story. It remains one of the most heartrending stories I know, and gets only more heartrending as I get older. Chekhov is my god. Aside from Shakespeare, there’s nobody who even really comes close to him for me. If ever anyone wondered how short fiction could be as literarily important as novels, the response is a single name: Chekhov.
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*I expect it’s obvious, but I capitalize Serious Literature to put some grains of salt in both words. Quotation marks might be more accurate, but they didn’t feel right because they don’t emphasize how much I’m talking about an actual genre here, not literature generally speaking, even if you use the word literature to be evaluative rather than, as I prefer, descriptive. One of the things Dan Sinykin’s new book Big Fiction does well is really show just how the genre I’m calling Serious Literature came to be. My capitalization should be taken as both a signal of a fundamentally materialist approach to the topic — genres are things that get made by the behaviors of writers, publishers, marketers, booksellers, and readers; they don’t exist in some ideal space beyond the material — and an indication that my tongue is at least a little bit in my cheek.
