The Truth about Short Stories

I was at a farewell party for an author-friend of mine, a short story writer who's leaving New York. While talking with his editor, the subject of short stories came up. "I love short stories," she said. "Everyone I know reads short stories. Why don't short stories sell?"

It's a refrain I've heard repeated all too often, not just recently, but ever since I came to New York and began meeting people who worked in publishing. Short stories don't sell. If you're going to try to write fiction, which is a silly idea to start with, at least try to write a novel. No one wants to read stories.

And in the meantime, some of the most notable books that have come out in the same period of time include Junot Diaz's Drown, Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, Adam Haslett's You are not a Stranger Here, Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, several books by Alice Munro. The list goes on.

But short stories don't sell.

It's possible that the above are the exception to the rule. But I don't think so. I think the trouble publishers are having selling short stories is the same trouble they're having selling any type of fiction. Novels, novellas, story collections, no matter what the form, fiction itself isn't selling, with a few notable exceptions like Harry Potter or a few pop fiction sensations that you see at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Anyone who has looked at the numbers of copies sold by even some of our most prestigious authors knows that fiction is in a crisis in terms of sales.

As a friend of mine put it, "Fiction is the new poetry."

Why is this happening? The usual villains come to mind: the Internet and cell phones and DVD's for using up people's time that they might be spending in quiet reflection, the necessary state for reading. But I think there's more to it than that. We're living at a time when for some reason people do not want to stop and think and look and listen. Maybe it's the way we've been educated or coddled as consumers, but people are afraid to cut themselves off from the world and take a stance as a thoughtful observer rather than a commenting participant. Maybe that explains why even though the number of books sold keeps falling, the number of masters programs in creative writing keeps rising. We all want to be the star. But do we have what it takes to be a member of the audience?