Short Stories Have a Popularity Problem

On first kisses and suitcases

I find it mysterious that book clubs don’t often read short stories. Neither do readers in general. Honestly, for the most part, neither do I.

I picked up some back issues of One Story this past week and enjoyed every one I read, and when Andrea Barrett or George Saunders or Claire Keegan comes out with a new collection, count me in! I often buy the anthology The Best American Short Stories at the end of the year to see what the guest editor deems to be the 20 best stories published in the previous year. But I rarely read the whole collection, and I’ve let my most recent literary magazine subscriptions lapse. I’m just not that motivated, I guess, to read short stories.

In comparison to full-length books, short stories take not just a back seat, but a seat in what we used to call the “way back,” where parents piled the kids and the dogs in the station wagons of the ’70s. In short, short stories have a popularity problem. But they shouldn’t. They’re short! The good ones are more finely crafted than novels. And much of the time, you don’t even have to pay for them.

I can’t say for certain why other readers don’t take to short stories, but I can tell you why I—myself a writer of short stories—don’t read them as much as you might expect:

Emotional investment. It’s really hard to flesh out characters enough for readers to become emotionally invested in them within 10 to 20 manuscript pages. Really hard. A novel reels us in by the end of the first or second chapter, but usually we have to stick around longer to really care about its characters. It’s the rare short story that can offer the kind of emotional connection readers crave in such a compressed space.

Plot twists/mysteries. These, too, take time and pages to develop. Part of what makes suspense so delicious is that, in a novel, it carries over for at least hours, if not days or even weeks, as you read.

World-building. That experience of feeling as if you’re inhabiting a new and different world? That takes time, too.

Those first three are all things we look for in novels and don’t usually find in short stories. But, wait—there’s more…

First kisses and suitcases. In a novel, the writer can get away with a few sloppy sentences, a plot slip, a missed opportunity. The reader will forgive. I can’t find the quote, but some writer described a novel as being like an overstuffed suitcase, with sleeves and socks bursting over its edges. An awful lot is packed in there, and even the most experienced novelist will be hard-pressed to contain it. On some level, we don’t even want it to be neatly contained. On the other hand, a short story is (to mix metaphors) more like a first kiss. It’s short (because at what point does it cease to be a first kiss?) and you’re not quite sure what you’re going to get. It might be amazing, but it also might be just awful. (I can’t resist sharing this somewhat outrageous pre-pandemic video.) To unmix metaphors, a flawed novel—that is to say, 99.99% of novels—is more like a long-term relationship you make an investment in to see it through. But a flawed story just makes you wish you hadn’t done it. (Note: I could have unmixed my metaphors when I was editing, but I really liked the suitcase image, and also, please read “first kisses and suitcases” out loud. Hear that rhythm and alliteration and slanted rhyme? I liked the sound of it. And then the idea of a first kiss somehow leading to a suitcase—wow, there are so many potential stories in that. This is a peek into the cursed mind of a writer. I formally acknowledge that this paragraph itself is overstuffed. Hopefully you, too, will forgive.)

So, where were we? A few more problems:

So many stories. It can be difficult to find the good short stories because there are a gazillion of them out there. Every single writer of fiction in any genre has probably written dozens because they’re the staple of writing workshops. And how are you to find the good stories without reading them? (I mean, here the kissing metaphor probably breaks down.)

So few recommendations. Reading recommendations from friends and bookstores and blogs are almost always for full-length books. Occasionally, someone will recommend a collection of short stories, but even that is rare. Short stories will not fall into your lap. This is a pretty lame excuse, of course, if you want to read more short stories. See some of my favorite sources below.

Fatigue. When you’re reading a novel, you know you can settle in for awhile, maybe a great while if you pick something like Infinite Jest. But short stories are mostly good for one sitting only. Then you have to find the next one. It’s kind of exhausting.

Because I’ve spent this whole column telling you why people—including me—don’t read much short fiction, you may be even more disinclined now to read it yourself. So, as in yoga class, we need a counter pose. Let’s do a brief twist in the other direction, shall we?

Why read short stories? C’mon, now. You can see how poor most of the excuses for not reading them are. But, partly for my own benefit, I’ll elaborate. Short stories are short! And once you learn to stop asking them to be miniature novels (see points 1, 2, and 3 above), you can enjoy them for all of the qualities the good ones deliver: beautifully crafted sentences from start to finish, a finely calibrated focus on some aspect of human nature, subtly rendered characters set free from the demands of a big plot, an hour or less of reading that ends with “ahhh” or “wow.”

As for consistently good sources, nothing is foolproof, but to wrap up, below are a few of my favorite literary journals, in print and online, some paid and some free, in no particular order, for you to try out. Want to read more short stories? Make a personal commitment to subscribe to at least one of them and put in a little extra effort to find what you love. Or buy one of the books at the end of the list. And, please, suggest your own favorite short stories or sources in the comments below!

Electric Literature

Missouri Review

Granta

Back issues of Tin House (damn, I miss Tin House)

And, as noted above and earlier this week, One Story

Or, from the bookstore: Andrea Barrett’s Servants of the Map, George Saunders’s Tenth of December, Claire Keegan’s Foster, The Best American Short Stories

And if you’re looking for some suggestions on how to read short stories with your book club, check out my post “Short Month, Long Form.”

Kissing couple: © Can Stock Photo / PeopleImages

Yoga photo: Unsplash/Logan Weaver