The Short Story Is Dead, Just Make Sure The Casket Is Nailed Good And Shut

Naomi Kanakia on why the weird wild world of fake advice columns is vastly more entertaining than prestige fiction

Dear Republic,

Naomi Kanakia has long been one of the stars of ‘LitStack.’ She seems always to be doing some deep dive on early 19th century literature in the rare breaks between reading Book Million and Two of The Mahabharata. There’s something charmingly unpretentious in her provocative argument — paired against Clancy Steadwell’s — that the tradition of the literary short story no longer applies to contemporary life.

-ROL

THE SHORT STORY IS DEAD, JUST MAKE SURE THE CASKET IS NAILED GOOD AND SHUT

I pay $120 a year to a website called Slate in order to access a series of paywalled advice columns about love, money, sex, parenting, dating, and the like.

And many of the letters to these advice columns are fake. They are fictional. They were written for entertainment, just to see if they could get published.

I suspect this for two reasons. One is that I myself have written a fake letter, which did indeed get published. Secondly, another novelist also confessed to doing the same thing. And if there's two of us, there must be more. In any given column, I expect that the more outré letters (e.g. "my fiance confessed that his niece is actually his daughter") are probably fake.

Now my question is: In what way are these letters not short stories?

Some of the letters to Slate are nonfictional — they are not fake. But they are all performances, purposefully calculated to draw some response. The fact is, I have pitched Slate a few times, and it's very hard to get published there under your own byline. But if you write a compelling letter, it's very easy to be in their pages anonymously.

This creates a natural incentive to craft letters that will get published. Slate is essentially running a continuous, unpaid short story contest. People participate in it just for fun. Just for vanity, essentially.

The same incentive can be seen in Reddit's AITA forum. This is a forum where people describe some situation in their life, and then ask if they are the asshole, are they one who's in the wrong? A successful AITA post almost always involves someone who is comically out of touch with the truth of their situation. Not only are they the asshole, but it's inconceivable that they could not understand that they are the asshole.

This forum, too, provides an easy way to go viral on the internet, and many of the stories are surely fake. Even those that are not fake are written by people who are fans of the forum, and who have often told their story in a calculated fashion in order to go viral.

Again, the same question: How is this not a short story?

Third example, there is a website called AO3, where people post fan fiction. They write short narratives that often involve characters from various properties falling in love with each other.

How are these stories not short stories?

Fourth example: Tumblr-style caption sites, where people post short erotic stories about various fetish scenarios.

These, too, are short stories.

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Now, on the internet, there also exist other websites called The Paris Review and The New Yorker. And these websites also publish things that they call short stories.

But...people largely do not read these stories.

Like, we do not have the metrics, but I bet if we could look at the Paris Review and see the readership for their stories versus their blog posts, the difference would be quite stark. Same thing with The New Yorker and their stories. I imagine their stories draw an order-of-magnitude fewer readers than their regular articles.

Now...if you judge the healthiness of short fiction as an enterprise by the metrics at The New Yorker, then it looks pretty bleak. But if you judge it by Slate — where fictional tales are a major driver of revenue — then we would have to say that short fiction is doing fine.

Which is true? Which is correct?

I think what's very true is that there's no appetite to read literary short stories. I don't want to read these stories myself. When I read The New Yorker, I always skip the stories. At the same time, I pay money to Slate, in order to read stories that are also quite frequently fictional.

What's the difference?

Obviously, with Slate’s stories, I am paying for at least the pretense that these stories are non-fiction. They have to seem just true enough. And many of them are true, but...the best ones probably aren't. The really good ones are what make the advice column as a whole worth reading, but the regular ones create some kind of aura of verisimilitude for the entire enterprise.

With fan fiction and erotic fiction, the dynamics are different. There the reader has some preexisting need that is being met by the writer. You're not coming in cold —you're not reading this story hoping to be transformed at the end. Whether the story is good or bad, you're reading it because you're interested in the scenario.

Interestingly, The New Yorker also recognizes this. They have another category of short story called "Shouts and Murmurs." And people actually read these stories. But...they're not billed as being short stories. Instead they're humorous pieces, and you read them because you know that even when they're bad, you'll probably still at least be somewhat amused.

All of these venues do not make high-art claims for themselves. Instead, they provide a simple, reliable pleasure. And that’s why they’ve survived.

As you can see, short fiction isn’t in any danger of dying. What's dying is a certain kind of prestige-driven literary short story that is usually quite boring.

And I hear people saying, okay, but...you're talking about Slate and AO3 and "Shouts and Murmurs," and I'm talking about Chekhov.

Except...Chekhov still exists, no? His work is doing fine. It's read by many people and taught in school. The question is whether it's still worthwhile, after a hundred years, to do imitations of Chekhov.

Many people would claim that it is worthwhile. Or that the best literary stories are not an imitation of Chekhov, but are somehow equally as good.

I have my doubts. In my case, I know that I personally am not that interested in the work being put out by the prestige short fiction ecosystem. It's had a lot of chances to make me feel...something. And it has largely failed in that task.

Meanwhile, these fake advice column letters do make me feel something. They make me feel highly amused and sometimes astonished and touched. And I enjoy that feeling enough that I am willing to pay $120 a year to access that feeling more often.

Prestige fiction aims to provide some deep, awe-inspiring aesthetic experience. But when something sets out to provide that experience, and it fails...then the result is just a huge waste of time. Whereas when I read a mediocre letter in Slate, it doesn't feel like a waste of time. I am still mildly-interested.

For Slate, the reward-loop is healthy. I read a letter, and sometimes it's incredible and I read it aloud to my wife or screenshot it for my friends. And if it's not incredible, I think...hmm, wow I hope that woman figures out a way to dump her mooching boyfriend.

With literary short stories, I start reading and just feel an immediate, overpowering boredom, because I've been bored by so many of these stories before.

And that boredom has become so intense, not just for me, but for most readers, that it's become an insuperable obstacle. And even when a story is good, nobody knows, because nobody reads it, because the idea of reading the story engenders so much boredom!

What can The Paris Review do to make people approach its stories with less boredom? I have no idea, honestly. It's not their fault. I think there are simply too many of these stories. There are so many creative-writing grad students and so many professors, and they're paid to teach people how to write these stories. And so their students produce these stories. And the teachers produce these stories. And universities, for some reason, subsidize journals to publish these stories. Why? To what end? The University of Missouri is paying someone to edit The Missouri Review, which is filled up with stories that nobody wants to read even when they're in The New Yorker.

Yes, the government, for some insane reason, subsidizes the production of literary short stories. The government not only employs the professors who write these stories, but it also often supports the periodicals where these stories get published.

It is so comical that people look at the pathetic state of this officially-sanctioned art-form and conclude that readers are not interested in literature anymore. Or that we don't want to feel things. Or that we don't want to touch greatness.

We want all those things; we just don't expect to get any of that by reading some short story whose production was, ultimately, funded by the government.

I have no doubt that some literary short story writers are good. I am sure that some officially-approved novelists in the Soviet Writers’ Union were good too. But when the whole ecosystem is divorced from what people actually need and want, then it's impossible for anything good to truly succeed. Nothing honest can come from a dishonest business.

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Now, is it anyone’s fault that they participate in this ecosystem? No. Everyone has to earn a living. I myself collected forty-four thousand dollars from a funded MFA program, where I produced short stories just like the ones I am decrying. Prestigious short story publications are also the route to further grants, residencies, book deals, and job offers. And then, if you publish enough to actually get a job as a professor, you’ve got to teach people how to write these stories.

There are much worse occupations. It’s quite harmless, the whole thing, and shouldn’t come in for any special opprobrium. But if you’re trapped in this system, where you’re forced to produce and encourage the production of these stories, how can you do it in a way that does the least harm? I don’t know, honestly. The whole system relies on the fiction that these short stories are worthwhile and are worth producing. But, in reality, they offer much less benefit to the world, much less pleasure and amusement, than a fake advice column letter to Slate. And even a good short story can’t possibly succeed, because nobody expects these stories to be good anymore.

But if we were to admit that, then the whole system would collapse.

At the very least, one should try to write a novel instead: the literary novel is also usually quite dull, but it hasn’t completely exhausted its credit with the population of readers, and, as such, it’s at least somewhat possible for a decent novelist to get noticed. On the other hand, if every short story writer started producing literary novels, then that field too would get exhausted.

But if you’re ever tempted to feel despair about your life’s work, you might at least consider writing a short note to Slate about how your mother is actually your sister. I’ll happily pay for the privilege of reading that short story of yours. And, after all, even Chekhov got his start writing ‘short humorous pieces’ — he’d published almost three hundred before reaching thirty years old.

Naomi Kanakia

is the author of four novels and of a non-fiction book about the classics. What's So Great About The Great Books? should hopefully be out in 2026 from Princeton University Press. She also writes a (somewhat) popular literary newsletter called

Woman of Letters

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