Michael J. Collins
Over the last few decades, the short story has been the subject of a fierce medical dispute. Observers have gathered to ask, like Ishmael of the Leviathan in Moby-Dick; “Will He Perish?” Certainly, twenty-first century readers looking for short fiction in the UK and USA are less likely to find it in any substantial quantities in the larger bookshop chains or within the pages of mainstream printed periodicals than formerly. As Ruth Franklin has noted of the American short story in a recent article for Prospect magazine: “ten years ago…[it] was in serious decline… one by one, magazines that published fiction decided to stop or cut back: GQ, Esquire, even the Atlantic” (Franklin 86). Critics have been quick to pronounce upon its incipient mortality, offering diagnoses that have pointed to a hazardous cocktail of factors. Among the reasons listed, market pressures against outlets stocking short story collections, the decline of printed mass-market periodicals, lack of media interest in major short story prizes, global political anxiety leading to calls for more copy to be given over to journalistic content, and a popular perception that it constitutes merely a juvenile finger exercise for the more rigorous work of the novel have found strong advocates, especially among editors, publishers and book retailers.
Like the dead parrot in the Monty Python Sketch? Despite proclamations of the its demise the genre of the short story has been revived in recent years [Image by Andrew Becraft under a CC-BY-NC-SA license]
Like the dead parrot in the famous Monty Python sketch, others have been just as emphatic in testifying to its continued vitality. For these critics, the rise of e-readers and digital-download platforms like Kindle Singles, as well as new forms of short fiction emerging out of digital culture (twitter fiction, flash fiction, the short short story) have been a bolt of revivifying electricity into the genre’s ailing frame. Whether or not these claims are true, they have more than a whiff of the kind of technological utopianism that the novelist and short story writer Ewan Morrison has recently called “dot-communism” (Morrison qtd Higgins, n. pag.); a term that sarcastically implies a link between new left-wing idealism about the collectivist possibilities of internet fiction and the capitalist frenzy over technology that created the disastrous late nineteen-nineties dot-com bubble.
In this article I am less interested in making claims about the short story’s constitutional health as I am in looking at how the form is operating within the contemporary literary marketplace. Viewed from the perspective of the larger hard-copy book retailers the short story would appear to be declining, but this should not be read as a sign of the end of the form as a whole. In fact, such a claim is absurd. Literary genres do not die like an organism would, because they were never coherent or whole enough to stand independently in the first place. Forms are porous and affected by changing social conditions. They transmogrify constantly as they share with one another through complex networks of exchange. To borrow Deleuze and Guattarri’s famous metaphor, they are a “literary machine [that] can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work” (Deleuze and Guattari 5). Crucially though, they can just as easily be plugged into other “machines” to serve different purposes.
When developing a generic approach to the short story it is important to take account of this adaptive quality. Indeed, through all the many variations taken by the form across the ages, “generic discontinuity” (Jameson 144) has been one its more persistent features. Variously described as a descendant of oral storytelling, poetry, theatre, the novel, as Western and Eastern, modernist and romantic, or as very new or very old, what has consistently upset hardline formalists is the short story’s systematic instability. As Kasia Boddy has recently argued, the short story is a chameleonic form that is especially conditioned by its paratexts: “where we read the story shapes the expectations we bring to our reading of it, and thus the effect it has on us” (Boddy 117). To read a short story on an e-reader, for example, does not offer one the same experience as purchasing it as part of a hard-copy anthology, or encountering it in a general-interest magazine. Indeed, as I will argue in the rest of this essay, the form is peculiarly sensitive to social change and can be used as a barometer of how reading practices are affected by what Raymond Williams called the emergent, dominant, and residual forms of capitalist production.
A chamelonic form: the short story is peculiarly sensitive to social change in reading and production practices [Image by Nathan Rupert under a CC-BY-NC-ND license]
In order to explore how the short story is adapting to these changing conditions I will consider the form in light of recent critical work in the burgeoning area of “print culture”, an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry comprising literary criticism, cultural studies, social and material history and communication studies. “Print culture”, or sometimes “the history of the book” is concerned with how one’s interpretation of a text is motivated by the technological aspects of reading. Going further than Gerard Genette’s interest in paratext, or “the liminal devices that control how a reader perceives the text… front and back covers, jacket blurbs, indexes, footnotes, tables of contents, etc” (Finkelstein and McCleery 22), print culture considers how the work of a text is shaped by wider social forces, including industrial processes of distribution and networks of affective exchange. In other words, print culture considers what books look like, where they are bought, and how they make us feel as an influence on the character of the text. Also included in this is how the dominance of certain kinds of reading technology has affected critical accounts of its literary history. I will now outline some examples of how the form is operating within the context of the two different types of printed artifact that have been traditional vehicles for its consumption: “the book” and “the seasonal periodical or annual”.
“The Book”
For the sake of pragmatism, in referring to “The Book” I have chosen to focus here on a comparatively stable and unified form of bound, printed material traded on the marketplace through general retailers as a commodity (the woody-papery thing rather than the mere text as it appears on an e-reader). The text of “the book” is largely preserved as a fixed entity by means of literary copyright laws, which define the work as the combined property of the author and publisher. Among books, the most popular form for the transmission of literary fiction in the twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries has been the octavo, a book that is around eight or nine inches high vertically and four or five inches horizontally. Among octavos, the biggest-selling sub-category is the usually referred to as the “mass-market paperback”. In order to access this market, short stories have usually either been collected as the work of a single author or in anthologies of “the best short stories”, in which the work of new or lesser-known authors commonly appears alongside more established names.
If market sales are anything to go by, it is true to say that the short story collection seldom fares as well as “the novel”. Indeed, “the novel” as a form has benefitted significantly in the twentieth century from modern techniques of mass production and circulation as well as the standardization of the octavo as the dominant reading technology. Most e-readers designed for the consumption of the novel mimic the size and dimensions of the octavo book, which can be held in one’s hands for a substantial period of time without discomfort. This technological fact allows for the possibility of an immersive, focused type of close reading that has benefitted the long-form novel with its sub-plots, recurring motifs and extended temporal frame. Unlike an unbound newspaper or pamphlet (which is cheap enough to be divided up between readers and sections handed around) or a massive folio (only readable when placed upon a large surface) an octavo is the preserve of the single, solitary user, and transforms literary consumption into an act that can create the conditions necessary for a privatized bourgeois contemplation and reflection.[1]
The octavo book has benefitted from modern techniques of mass production and circulation [Image by Diego DeNichola under a CC-BY-ND license]
Additionally, as China Miéville has recently argued, in Britain there has been a certain stabilization of the genre of the “literary fiction” novel, which owes much to a technocratic alliance between the press, the publishers and the prize-giving bodies. This stable approach to genre and form is codified in the entry criteria for the Man Booker prize, which stipulates that only a “full-length novel … is eligible” and that “such a book must be a unified and substantial body of work”. Combining this demand for thematic unity with the physical form of the octavo (shaped as it is for the private consumption of a bourgeois subject) allows us to develop a picture of the ideal reader of literary fiction as a middle-class, educated individual with liberal humanist values. Since the Booker also often serves as a measure of literary or artistic value within the context of the popular literary marketplace, this official exclusion of any prose form that does not easily meet requirements of subsequent mass-market sales is loaded with troubling assumptions about writers and readers.
If we use prizes like the Booker as measures of canonicity, then the idea that a book of literary fiction must be “unified and substantial” in order to be saleable works against the short story form, which when published in mass-market paperback octavos has commonly been forced to take on the shape of “the short story sequence”; that is, works that are linked by similarities of content, perspective or unifying theme. What has often motivated mass-market octavo buyers (and consequently retailers’ decisions about what to stock) is the desire for consistency: a stable understanding of authorial and textual coherence that is made possible through literary copyright laws and aesthetic or genre conventions.
In the middle of the twentieth century the short story writer and critic Frank O’Connor developed a theory of the short story that reflected the emergence of “the book” as the dominant technology for the consumption of fiction. O’Connor stated of the short story that “it began, and continues to function, as a private art intended to satisfy the standards of the individual, solitary, critical reader (O'Connor 14). At the very moment in which O’Connor was writing, as Kasia Boddy has shown, the short story was beginning to be taught in universities according to the edicts of the New Criticism, which placed emphasis on consistency and coherence of a literary text as a measure of its quality. To this claim I would add that from a market perspective, the nascence of the New Criticism coincided with a standardization of the technology of the book in most markets in the shape of the comparatively cheap octavo paperback. I adduce that the dimensions of this form of book in some ways made possible the kinds of pedagogical practice and critical close reading espoused by figures such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, F.R. Leavis and O’Connor.[2]
A novel or a short story collection? Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad demonstrates the continuing influence of the octavo [Image by Matthew Allard under a CC-BY-NC-SA license]
The persistence of the octavo has implications for the way that the short story is consumed and critically understood. Recently though, authors have begun to innovate new forms of writing that work with technical and financial requirements of the mass-market octavo form, whilst also finding interesting uses for the short story. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from The Goon Squad (2010) is an especially fine example. Egan’s book is at once a novel and a short story collection that can be read cover to cover in its entirety (as one would expect to read a novel) or as autonomous sections. The form of the work is intelligently connected with its broader themes and aesthetics, which are concerned with how memory can become fractured by time and drug abuse. The success of this novel (huge sales, A Pulitzer Prize and National Critics’ Circle Award) potentially points to a future convergence of the short story and the novel that can only benefit the short story in its continued attempt to gain access the hallowed double whammy of critical esteem and market success.
The Seasonal Periodical or Annual
Commentators on the contemporary literary landscape have often used the success of the American publication Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern to prophesy the reemergence of the short story as a distinct genre within independent, high quality, engraved and illustrated periodicals with small, seasonal print runs (see, for instance, Jon McGregor’s interview for Booktrust about writing short stories). These beautiful little mélanges of essays, pictures, stories and poems can be usefully understood as the heirs to the legacy of the Victorian literary annuals and “gift books”, which recent book historians such as Meredith McGill have shown were central to the early development of the short story in the work of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe.
Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern: the late 20th- / early 21-st-century inheritor of Victorian literary annuals and "gift books" [Image used under fair dealings provisions]
As well as being an early vehicle for the short story form, these gift books played a significant role in Victorian and early-American courtship practices. Gift-books were designed to be exchanged ritually between two parties as “tokens of affection” (34) that would either cement or “conjure female affective response[s]” (34) as a precursor to a marriage proposal or sexual activity. Their opulence and richness, as well as the diversity of their content, conferred upon them what Walter Benjamin referred to as the “aura” (Benjamin 215) peculiar to a sacred, ritual objects, allowing those that gave and received them to at least imagine that their acts of exchange were not contaminated by their relationship to the “basic conditions underlying capitalist production” (211), that is, that the (presumably male) suitor had not made but bought the book that he was presenting to his beloved. My point here is not that McSweeney’s is designed to help one navigate the tricky world of contemporary courtship.[3] Rather, it is that its abundance, exuberance and variety function to allow the reader to imagine that its content is the preserve of a special, aesthetic realm beyond that of the mass-market paperback. Furthermore, its quarterly publication and the unique design of each issue mark its appearance as an event with special emotional resonances. Like the Victorian gift book, the periodical therefore functions at the intersection between affective and economic circuits of exchange. The periodical is “cult” in the most literal sense of being a sacred object designed to inspire devotion among fans. This emotional effect is made possible by the printed nature of the artifact, whose materiality registers a very clear and direct challenge to the more ephemeral forms of digital publishing.
The affective quality of the publication has inevitable implications for the ways in which the texts contained within it might be read and understood. Ruth Franklin has argued that a new form of short story has emerged in McSweeney’s that is distinctly different from the kind developed by such luminaries as Frank O’Connor. Instead of logical coherence, Franklin argues, a McSweeney’s story is recognizable by its “lugubrious fictional haze in which ideas and images see[m] to float free, uninhibited by structure” (86). I would argue that the form of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is a perfect carriage for this kind of expressiveness, since the periodical itself is a material testament to unabashed enthusiasm and emotional excess. However, by contrast to the more measured and stabilized work done by book reading, interpreting a McSweeney’s story as it appears in the quarterly requires one to abandon the illusion of objective close reading. To truly understand the work of a journal such as McSweeney’s demands one must to consider their emotional investment in it; self-reflexivity is required.
This article has briefly outlined just a couple of ways in which a print culture approach may be brought to bear on readings of the short story form, but it is designed with a view in mind to its own incompleteness. I invite any responses Alluvium readers may have considering both new avenues for print culture studies and the changing face of publishing in general.
CITATION: Michael J. Collins, "The Short Story: A Print Culture Reading," Alluvium, Vol. 1, No. 7 (2012): n. pag. Web. 9 December 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v1.7.04.
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’] http://www.alluvium-journal.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Michael-James-Collins.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Dr Michael J. Collins is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Kent. He is a regular reviewer for the Year’s Work in English Studies and serves on the Executive Committee of The British Association for American Studies. [/author_info] [/author]
Notes:
[1] Fascinating work is currently being done in this area, especially in my own field of nineteenth-century literature. Book historians have been interested in particular in the way that technologies of print have been implicated in the transmission of certain idea such as nationalism and romanticism, which, in their post-Enlightenment phase, often relied heavily upon reader’s conceptions of individual self-determination.
[2] Two chapters of O’Connor’s work appeared first in The Kenyon Review, a journal that was a major outlet for conservative New Criticism in the middle decades of the twentieth century, especially during John Crowe Ransom’s tenure as editor.
[3] As an aside, I did in fact marry the first person that bought me a copy of McSweeney’s, although I assure readers that this was purely a coincidence.
Works Cited:
Anon. “Jon McGregor: Making Short Work”. Booktrust. Web, n. pag. [accessed 31 October 2012]: http://www.booktrust.org.uk/books-and-reading/interviews/95.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, trans Harry Zohn (Chatham, Kent: Pimlico, 1999).
Boddy, Kasia. The American Short Story since 1950 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
Crown, Sarah. “What the Booker Prize Really Excludes.” The Guardian, 17 October, 2012 [accessed 31 October 2012]:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/oct/17/scienceficton-china-mieville.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London and New York: Continuum, 2004).
Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleery. An Introduction to Book History (New York and London: Routledge, 2005).
Franklin, Ruth. “What a difference a decade makes.” Prospect Magazine, 14 December 2011 [accessed 31 October 2012]: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/american-short-story-21st-century-new-yorker-mcsweeneys/.
Higgins, Charlotte. "China Miéville: Writers should welcome a future where readers remix our books." The Guardian, 21 August 2012 [accessed 31 October 2012]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/21/china-mieville-novels-books-anti-piracy.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981).
McGill, Meredith L. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick or The Whale (London: Penguin Classics, 1992).
O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (Hoboken, NJ: Melville Publishing House, 2004).
Pilkington, Mercy. “Digital Publishing Reviving Short Stories.” Goodereader.com. Web, n. pag. [accessed 30 Oct. 2012]: http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic readers/digital-publishing-reviving-short-stories/.
Excellent article. An anecdote: a friend recently picked up my copy of Proulx's Close Range, and, assuming it was a novel, was determined to find coherence in the stories. She was having some success until I pointed out they were 'separate' (no doubt ruining part of her pleasure). This is a good example of a semi-coherent collection, and one that had both commercial and critical success. (Anecdote 2: students assume it's a novel called Brokeback Mountain from the film tie-in cover, and get increasingly baffled by there being no gay cowboys (or bisexual shepherds) until very late on….)
Lewis – Yes. I imagine that was very upsetting for them! The interview on BookTrust with John McGregor I mention talks about short story cycles. It seems to be the way things are going in publishing generally. People seem to like coherence and I understand why. Evolutionarily, we are pattern recognising machines. We seem to force patterns even when there aren't any. This seems to lead inexorably to human errors like gambling addition and banking crises. One of the short story's best features is that it helps us conceive of randomness as a possiblity. One of the best novels of the century, Roberto Bolano's 2666, is really a sort of novella sequence, another development in the form.
It's interesting Mike that you mention pattern-recognition with regards not only to the short story form but also to gambling and banking crises. Hari Kunzru's 2011 novel Gods Without Men is an intriguing example of a novel that plays with the interrelated short story form in a similar way to David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. What I find particularly significant is that in his search for a fresh aesthetic form (what he calls a "new networked artform"), Kunzru has received negative criticism for failing to write a more coherent novel.
But, to return to the banking crisis, the novel also presents a probabalistic financial modelling system known as "Walter" which ruins the Honduran economy and relates in interesting ways to the novel's preoccupation with Jewish Kabbalistic tropes (I gave a paper on this which, oddly enough, was on the same panel as an excellent paper by Lewis (!): Prezi on this is here: http://www.drcarolineedwards.com/2012/05/01/hari-kunzru/).
Have to say I thoroughly enjoyed copy-editing this article and I think there is much more work to be done both on the short story form (and its print culture readings) as well as contemporary novelistic strategies which network between multiple spaces, pastiched styles, and temporalities as offering something between a collection of short stories (which, if memory serves, Ghostwritten originally was for David Mitchell) and a novel.
Good lord Cai, did our work just spontaneously converge? Sweet serendipity. Thanks by the way.
Fascinating stuff. While I didn't think Gods Without Men quite worked, it's great that authors are sticking their necks out in terms of form and genre to keep the form of prose narrative alive. Mike – could you expand on what you mean by the short story's ability to help us conceive of randomness as a possibility? I agree that this is an important aim and role of lit, but I'm not sure why the shorter form does it better than the longer? I'm thinking of Roth's Sabbath's Theater and others in which he attacks head-on the human compulsion to impose order onto chaos…
Lewis, An interest in probability and randomness has been there since the beginning of the short story form in the newspapers and magazines of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The most famous examples would be works by Addison ("The Spectator Essays), Poe (Dupin tales, Man of the Crowd), Dickens (A Christmas Carol is about calculating probabilities of outcome), Melville (Bartleby concerns randomness and chance), Pushkin (The Queen of Spades), Lermontov (A Hero of Our Time – the first example of the "short story/novel cycle thing), and some of Gogol's works are about card-playing. The persistence of this theme makes the most sense when the form is read in the context of the new print media of newspapers, which as Walter Benjamin says in The Arcades Project and Some Motifs in Baudelaire were an attempt to demonstrate how the experience of the randomness of life might be felt as a pleasure, rather than as a radical threat to bourgeois order. If you were interested in the Anglo-American context for this I would recommend Dana Brand's book The Spectator and the City and Maurice Lee's fantastic new book Uncertain Chances, which has a great section on Poe's short work and the law of large numbers. As to the bio-evolutionary element of this, that is my own idea – fusing Darwinian theory to short story analysis. See my previous piece for Alluvium on Literary Darwinism. I might follow this up in longer form.
It would have been a useful addition to this admirably scholarly paper had the author looked at the significant publication by TTAPress of short(ish) science fiction, fantasy, horror and crime writing. It may, perhaps, be that the short forms are most lively in the "genre" area – although a quick survey of the TTA literature would should wide-ranging adventures in style and ideas which easily transcend the simple genre label. I would argue that some of the most imaginative writing currently available is in these pages. This is a unique and long-standing publishing venture in the UK with a distinguished list of authors, and an admirable (in my view) willingness to encourage new writing.
I strongly suggest an examination of the literature available here: http://www.ttapress.com
Thanks Jim. I will have a look. Are you researching in this area? Genre fiction doesn't usually come into my purview, but I know the Alluvium editors are very "into" sci-fi. You might consider posing a piece for them.
Michael – I'm not an academic, except in a rather loose sense. I'm a writer who teaches on the Hull University Part Time Creative Writing degree course, and I have written several novelettes for Interzone, including one for the latest issue. I am always impressed (scared?) by the imaginative breadth and depth of many stories I read there. This is not a pulp-fiction magazine. Apart from very high writing standards it's also a beautiful production, with original work by graphic artists.
The editors – Andrew Cox and Andrew Hedgecock – have been very supportive of new writers. Over the last few days they have announced a new project named "Flux," which will publish stories which they regard as excellent but which do not fit easily into the broad categories of SF, Fantasy, Horror or Crime. They are going to give this away free of charge to subscribers – showing a valuation of quality over income likely to shame most imprints.
I have a slightly provocative view of the phrase "genre fiction." I would argue that huge rafts of contemporary "non-genre fiction" themselves constitute a genre, possibly to be named "Contemporary Angst" – largely characterised by psychological realism. When these stray outside realism into the territory which Interzone would publish they are re-packaged critically as Magic Realism or Fantastique so that the pristine boots of the literati are not sullied with the mud of Genre.
From writers I know alone, more and more short fiction is appearing on the Amazon Kindle store. This would be an interesting research area. I suspect we have been accustomed to thinking that a book should weigh at least half a kilo to be worth bothering with. These rules don't apply on e-books. I've had long discussions with a physicist friend about whether a digital book containing information weighs more in flash-ram than blank space – the contemporary equivalent of angels on pin-heads – and our tentative conclusion is that there may be vanishingly small entropic consequences.
The rapid expansions of the reading public in the Victorian period and the 60s were driven, it seems to me, not by abstractions but by the technology of delivery – mass printing and Penguins. So, in this download age, length may cease to be an issue. As to the aesthetic values – those will remain, as ever, subject to debate.
I'd like to pick up on Jim's technology point, if I may. It seems to me that there may be potential to draw parallels between developing modes and methods of (all) literature consumption and the recent seismic shifts seen in the worlds of music and movies.
Films were once seen only in cinemas, in the days when we went to see what was offered – a choice limited by the number of picture houses in our home town. After a succession of 'home movie' revolutions – TV, VCR, VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, PC, tablet, mobile phone – consumers can now watch what they want when they want. The consumer is king. Music has been through a similar revolution; books have reached the event horizon.
The trade-off for all this choice has been a reduction in the quality of the experience – despite the irony that the quality of the potential experience has been improved hugely by advances in digital technology. A compressed mp3 played through 5mm speakers is not going to offer the same dynamic range that even my hi-fi reached in 1974; watching 'The Hobbit' on a 2"x4" screen is not the same as seeing it at the Odeon, Leicester Square. I wonder if those who do these things are interested less in the experience and more in consumption. Wooed by a stack-'em-high-sell-'em-cheap ethos that reduces the value of everything, we buy, devour and move on – hungry for more.
How does literature respond to such a seemingly perverse world in which the quality of the experience offered is often at such odds with the experience chosen? Does it dig in, improve the quality of paper stock and emphasise the (expensive) joy of the book-reading experience; or does it grab what it can while it can from the impatient digital consumer who may read only half of the novel that she has paid only a third of the print price for?
Perhaps the short story is best placed to capitalise on this emergent, transient consumer. Perhaps the way forward for the short story writer is not to write collections which ape novels in order to get printed, but to concentrate on those elements that have the potential to make the short story THE modern literary form.
Thanks Dean. I agree that the short story is a unique form that has much to offer the modern literary world. One of the reasons for its perceived decline, I believe, is that there has been a retreat in modern academia from a consideration of literary form into ideas of how literature is a part of a "culture" in a wider sense. In fact, I might as well take this opportunity to plug of my own research! I am currently writing a book that looks at the short story less as a form that "apes" the novel, but as one that is best considered as the textual analogue of performance and theatre. I am looking at the nineteenth century origins of the short story (in an American context) through this lens to attempt to develop a new generic theory of the short story that emphasises how the form is often structured around "expressive moments" and motivated by a desire to explore the power of gesture and non-verbal communication. I have an article on Melville coming out in the Journal of American Studies exploring this idea in the next month or so.
There have been a few press remarks lately indicating a resurgence of the short story. William Boyd also mentions it here: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/william-boyd-short-history-of-the-short-story
As Boyd notes, one explanation is the emphasis on the short story in Creative Writing courses. I don't think this has much to do with the triumph of the short over the long – rather more to do with the fact that students are not likely to complete a novel in a week or two.
A point which has not been made is that the average length of novels has been steadily increasing. It's hard to find a 90,000 word novel these days – I suspect that the culture is more inclined to weigh a book before purchase and work out the pound to kilo ratio. It may be that the short to medium-length novel is the real victim here. I'm currently reading Peter Hamilton's "The Great North Road" on my truly wonderful Kindle Paperwhite. The e-reader ways less than 8 ounces. The hardback edition of the Hamilton book is 1100 pages (probably 500 too many!). Printed books are a relatively recent technology, and it seems to me that their prospects for survival are about the same as that of Medieval illuminated manuscripts.
Obviously ways=weighs
Jim – Thanks for the Boyd article. I hadn't seen it before. Prospect have been very supportive of short fiction among the general interest or social affairs magazines. They endeavour to emulate The New Yorker in this I think.
I found this about 8 pages back on google, and I have to say there's a lot of strange assumptions at work. Why is it relevant to compare the short story to the novel in terms of publication form and popular reception? Poetry doesn't sell either, in the way the novel does, but neither do people make the erroneous assumption that it should – they're different products with different audiences in different forms. The running logic here is that the short story bares some inherent relationship to the novel, or at least is being compared to the same reading and production practices as the novel. Neither are true.