Short fiction, or bust

Short everything …

Other Sashas

(Or: A manifesto on the short story as form, despite my own misgivings)

There’s been a lot of hullaballoo around the interwebz about the state of the short story. Curiously and gratifyingly, the two more famous ones—the New York Times’ rah-rah for the form that set my Twitter feed abuzz a week ago, and Laura Miller’s (recent) scathingly condescending retort—don’t offer anything about short fiction’s death, or non-death. Both are about the form’s popularity among a reading public that, by habit and/or taste, tends to overlook it. (I guess this is a good thing, as we hear enough of that kind of twaddle about the novel—undoubtedly, it seems, the short story’s much cooler older brother. It’s twaddle that, I think, just distracts us from actual reading.)

So, fine, yay, the short story’s not dead. Then again, it’s never been dead. It’s been neglected, it’s been laughed at, it’s…

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