For The Shorties

Summer Book Quarterly

by Patrick Rapa

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Published: Jun 27, 2007

Rumors of the death of the short story being greatly exaggerated have been greatly exaggerated. Which is not to say the art form is actually dying necessarily, but defensiveness abounds.

Why? Well, there are currently no short-story collections on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Or in Amazon.com's 100 best sellers. Or Amazon.co.uk for that matter.

Two years ago, Atlantic Monthly relegated its fiction to a single annual. McSweeney's magazine, arguably the hippest and most consistent champion of short fiction over the past decade, has recently started auctioning off signed copies of this and that to pay the bills. And writers are always saying their agents or publishers complain that collections don't sell.

Can you blame literary journals and their online counterparts for piping up once in a while to lament the slow death of the short story, or, more often, to defiantly insist that it's still vibrant and vital?

I mean, it is, isn't it? Despite all the thorns, there've been a few roses here and there. For one thing, publishers are still putting out collections. American Scholar recently added short stories to its roster. Impressive upstarts like n+1 are getting into it too, as are a gaggle of web-based mags. And The Paris Review keeps on keeping on, same with the Best American and O. Henry Prize series, the latest of which is reviewed in this issue.

Which brings us to why we decided to put short stories under the spotlight (well, maybe it's more of a heatlamp) in our Summer Book Quarterly: We like them. We read them. We print them in our annual Fiction Contest issue. We heart short stories times ten.

Of course, we've still got plenty of novels and non-fiction books in this all-review revue. But we're starting with the shorties. You can't stop the shorties.

(pat@citypaper.net)

Short Stories No One Belongs Here More Than You Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories Bound for the Screen A Thousand Deaths Russian Lover and Other Stories The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 Throw Like A Girl Male of the Species Bed (short stories) and Eeeee Eee Eeee(novel)

Fiction A Thousand Splendid Suns New England White One for Sorrow Two For Joy The Interloper Dedication The Raw Shark Texts The Girl with the Golden Shoes On Chesil Beach Don DeLillo's Falling Man

Non-Fiction Macedonia Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style Goth: Undead Subculture The Manual: A True Bad Boy Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River The View from the Upper Deck: The Funniest Collection of Sports Satire Ever Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South The Reagan Diaries

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