The simple answer is that they're not short stories because they're literally not short stories. They may be entertaining writing, but not every piece of entertaining writing is a short story.
There are so many points here to disagree with. First, I don't think that we can claim that, in American culture, fake nonfiction is just the same as fiction. I think that that concept was put to bed pretty conclusively by the 2006 James Frey scandal. Readers (including Oprah!) were very very upset that large chunks of a memoir they had paid money for and recommended to friends were fabricated. The same level of scandal would not happen if your fake letter to Slate were exposed. But if it turned out that *all* of the letters to advice columnists at Slate were fake, and that Slate's advice columnists had deliberately penned or commissioned them to drive clicks, it would also be a (small) scandal and imo it would kind of shatter the illusion of voyeurism that underpins the whole enterprise. AITA is slightly different since no one is getting paid for that, but I would assert that that in and of itself is a meaningful distinction: there are no controls for quality, accuracy, or anything else, and part of the pleasure comes from deciding what the intent was behind a given post.
In any event, if your writing's success depends on tricking readers, what you're writing is not fiction.
As someone who teaches creative writing to both undergraduates and graduate students, I'm also weirded out by this idea that everyone involved in that enterprise is perpetuating a scam. When a student's story is boring... I tell them. I don't say it in the harshest way I possibly can, but I also do think that I owe them my honest opinion, which I unpack at length in writing. I also teach them published stories that I don't find boring. (I'm surprised to see you say that you consider all published contemporary short stories to be boring because I know you're a fan of Ted Chiang, who's one of the authors I teach in this context, and who exclusively writes short stories, and who doesn't read anything like an imitation of Chekov. You also write interesting short stories on here yourself!)
I also always allow students in every workshop to submit novel excerpts and the class I'm currently teaching to undergrads is designed to help students plan and begin to execute book length fiction projects. And I've worked one-on-one with MFA students as they complete their theses, which are frequently novels. MFA programs don't depend on short fiction to exist.
All of that said... In my heart, I think you're largely right. One of the most distressing things about current literary culture is this mind-numbing incuriosity so many writers have about what narrative media people (including themselves) actually consume for entertainment. Fiction doesn't have to be *only* entertainment, but it usually has to be entertainment first, in order to gain the relevance that makes it worthwhile to read for other reasons.
Ted Chiang's most recent short story collection was published by Knopf and glowingly reviewed in the New Yorker by Joyce Carol Oates; his most recent short story was published by the New York Times. Yes, he works in the tradition of sci-fi -- ie genre fiction -- but over the last 3+ decades genre fiction has become fully integrated into the literary mainstream. Look at Pulitzer prize winner Michael Chabon, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, MacArthur fellow Kelly Link, MacArthur fellow and Man Booker winner George Saunders, Roy E. Disney Chair in Creative Writing at Pomona College Jonathan Lethem... I could go on and on. Anyone who is mentally excluding these writers from the contemporary canon legitimized by the mainstream literary establishment is just not paying attention. (Which it's possible to do because of the irrelevance described in this post! The average person probably doesn't know who most of these writers are because they're not that famous outside of the literary world. But within it they are at the highest echelon.)
The point I was making about Naomi's own work, even though it isn't yet receiving this kind of recognition, is that she's writing short fiction, and she's writing it at least partly influenced by other (or at least one other) contemporary writers who are doing the same thing with mainstream literary success. She's not only writing fake nonfiction influenced by fake nonfiction.
There are simple pleasures, like gossipy letters, and there are more difficult pleasures that reward some investment. Some of Chekhov's stories have conventional endings, but he's famous for sudden, ambiguous endings that make you see the story in a different light. Virginia Woolf described these endings: "as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it." These endings often frustrate readers at first. They can be an acquired taste.
I agree that a lot of literary short fiction today is boring. I agree that the ecosystem is no longer working. There are many reasons. People have reduced attention spans due to smartphone addiction and screens are just no good for reading long texts. Algorithmically curated content feeds have got people addicted to shallow, pandering content. Few people are willing to invest in reading an ambiguous three thousand word story when they could just scroll.
There are also cultural reasons. Contemporary upper middle class culture really emphasizes psychological safety. There is an extreme reluctance to offend and to be offended. There is a Chekhov story that ends with a drunken wife-beating peasant having his limbs amputated due to frostbite, from which he will surely die. His doctor mocks his desire to live a little longer. Flannery O'Connor's most famous story ends with an entire family being murdered, including the children. I don't think our culture has the appetite for stuff like this anymore. We prefer mildly arousing gossip to anything with teeth.
I often see internet people argue for the elevation of light, joyous entertainment, but my feeling is that you can only experience true joy if you open yourself up to the possibility of true disappointment. Many Chekhov stories end in failure, but some have uplifting endings, most famously The Lady with the Dog.
So there's the question: should writers adapt to the new culture or cling to old culture? The answer to questions like that is usually somewhere in the middle. But generally I think writers should write the best stories they can and I have a hard time thinking that writers who have enjoyed Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Salinger, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, and Jhumpa Lahiri are going to be satisfied producing light gossip.
I also mentioned Jhumpa Lahiri, who published Interpreter of Maladies in 1999 and Alice Munro, who published Runaway in 2003. I agree that contemporary short fiction is boring, but the thing is, the good, old stories still work.
I don’t agree with this one, I read good and entertaining contemporary short fiction. Thomas Ligotti, e.g., is one of my favourites. I can mention lots of names of living authors whose short fiction I have read recently and I’ve found entertaining: Carlos Yushimito, Neil Gaiman, Paolo Bacigalupi, Mariana Enriquez, Jacinta Escudos…
If the malaise is limited to English language literary short stories that's more evidence that lack of commercial exposure is the culprit here. The way genre publishers use short stories to promote pre-orders and limited editions suggests there's a demand for them. The literary equivalent is what, giving a zine/poem to everyone who shows up to your indie book story signing on World Book Day? That feels more like a keepsake than an incentive.
I've mentioned three English-language authors and I've just mentioned authors I've read recently (in the last months). There is no malaise, just a columnist that is talking about her displease with short fiction. That she doesn't read short fiction doesn't mean short fiction is dead. It just mean she prefers to read some other things.
First, fiction is not a product, is a process. A fiction story based in actual facts is still fiction, regardless of the actuality of the facts. So if a non-fiction story is actually fake it doesn't make a difference, because fictionality is on the text, not on the facts.
Then there is this other thing, if you or a lot of people prefer non-fiction stories or gossip or even reading the instructions of a washing machine, it doesn't mean fiction short stories are dead, it just means you prefer non-fiction stories or texts. I mean, how many people did read Chekhov's stories in his times? Probably a lot less than the readers a fiction author has today, because you see, there is this problem: now we have a lot more of readers and authors than one century ago.
PS. Excuse my English, it is not my first language and this is a difficult topic.
Hm. I love reading short stories. A good short story can make me go wild. I must have at least 100 short story collections in my house. So I can’t see it ever dying. I agree with your claim that a lot of them are not memorable. There are simply a lot of bad ones. But when you get a good one—then YOWZA. No letter to Slate can ever beat it.
As long as it is possible for one to be written, then short stories cannot die.
That’s not to say that nothing can come close that is not a short story. Sometime real life tales are absolutely fantastic and have a similar effect to a great short story. I have read a couple true phone hacking tales where the texts in the phone hackings are so literary and fantastic. There are many amazing tales out there online that come pretty close to a great short story. Of people writing of mishaps or even ranting wildly about their lives on reddit.
So maybe that makes a great short story seem less special that someone could tell their tale on a reddit thread and it could have that quality…I don’t know. Maybe both things are special.
This is really funny. I feel like this is one of your fake letters, maybe, and you are not serious.
Those Slate letters, fake or not, are entertaining content. To be short stories, I’d expect that they’d first have to be transparent about being fictional. Would people still pay to read them, if Slate tagged them that way? Would be an interesting experiment but my bet is that the subscriptions would go down. You may be different, but most people reading those are entertained primarily by thoughts of just how stupid and grotesque others can be, and by the invitation to comment on that. If they know it’s all made up, it becomes inherently less interesting. Anyone could say those things, it is different to live them.
Next I think they’re not stories because usually they’re just problems. The person has not done anything in response yet. So to call it a story, I’d expect to see the protagonist act— writing a letter to get advice is an action, but too many stories like that would also become boring quickly.
I wholeheartedly endorse this piece, though to be fair I've never been a big fan of short stories (even the classics). I used to use them in the classroom, because it's easier to teach 8th graders a whole short story than a whole novel, and I came to appreciate the ones I had on my syllabus. But it's not like I was reading them for fun.
I can name a few exceptions. I still love Bradbury's short stories. I also went through a period of reading a bunch of the original Sherlock Holmes stories. But those were meant as quick entertainment, and when we want quick entertainment of that sort today, we don't usually read.
Today, literary short stories serve, for most people, more as exercises (in writing or reading) than as art to be engaged with. Part of the issue, I think, is the delivery method. If I'm paying for a printed text, I'll choose a full-length book, because I can spend more time with it, and I just like them more. We can put traditional short stories online, but that's a terrible format for them. People keep saying "where's the fiction on Substack?" to which I reply "why?" You want to read dialogue and action and descriptive language on a web browser? Are you insane? The Slate stories (and Naomi's tales) work the way they do because they don't follow traditional short story prose, instead leaning into the type of prose that we typically read on web browsers.
The only traditional short story that's ever really broken through these barriers was "Cat Person," and that one did it by getting grafted (possibly against its will) to a hot-button cultural issue. That's never happening again, even if you wanted it to.
I've been reading your irony on your site--and the humor, too. I have to admit though that the conclusion might be that all fiction -- and the best reaches emotional truth more profoundly than any other work I read and—write. We may not be successful doing this work -- as perhaps my novel up now proves, but all of it comes from the heart and says more than I could say any other way.
Funny, I never read Shouts & Mumurs, but I always read the short stories and they are almost always entertaining and quite good. There are some bummers, where you go why the fuck did someone write that, but for the most part, for me it's the best part of the magazine. So dead, yeah, in the same way theater is dead, serious films in theaters are dead, or poetry is dead, or fine art is dead, or jazz is dead. So what? It's just not a big part of pop culture and I guess we have to say that's okay. Just like rap will be dead at some point, but there will be rappers out there laying it down with a fervor, grey beards and a light in their eyes. Couldn't get me to even look at that shit on Slate, that's for sure.
The simple answer is that they're not short stories because they're literally not short stories. They may be entertaining writing, but not every piece of entertaining writing is a short story.
I mean… “literally”? They’re short. They’re stories…
Ok then commercials, jokes, job ads, novellas, Amazon reviews, press releases, news articles etc etc etc etc are all short stories then great
Sorry, I was just (pedantically) insisting on the literal meaning of the word, “literally.”
There are so many points here to disagree with. First, I don't think that we can claim that, in American culture, fake nonfiction is just the same as fiction. I think that that concept was put to bed pretty conclusively by the 2006 James Frey scandal. Readers (including Oprah!) were very very upset that large chunks of a memoir they had paid money for and recommended to friends were fabricated. The same level of scandal would not happen if your fake letter to Slate were exposed. But if it turned out that *all* of the letters to advice columnists at Slate were fake, and that Slate's advice columnists had deliberately penned or commissioned them to drive clicks, it would also be a (small) scandal and imo it would kind of shatter the illusion of voyeurism that underpins the whole enterprise. AITA is slightly different since no one is getting paid for that, but I would assert that that in and of itself is a meaningful distinction: there are no controls for quality, accuracy, or anything else, and part of the pleasure comes from deciding what the intent was behind a given post.
In any event, if your writing's success depends on tricking readers, what you're writing is not fiction.
As someone who teaches creative writing to both undergraduates and graduate students, I'm also weirded out by this idea that everyone involved in that enterprise is perpetuating a scam. When a student's story is boring... I tell them. I don't say it in the harshest way I possibly can, but I also do think that I owe them my honest opinion, which I unpack at length in writing. I also teach them published stories that I don't find boring. (I'm surprised to see you say that you consider all published contemporary short stories to be boring because I know you're a fan of Ted Chiang, who's one of the authors I teach in this context, and who exclusively writes short stories, and who doesn't read anything like an imitation of Chekov. You also write interesting short stories on here yourself!)
I also always allow students in every workshop to submit novel excerpts and the class I'm currently teaching to undergrads is designed to help students plan and begin to execute book length fiction projects. And I've worked one-on-one with MFA students as they complete their theses, which are frequently novels. MFA programs don't depend on short fiction to exist.
All of that said... In my heart, I think you're largely right. One of the most distressing things about current literary culture is this mind-numbing incuriosity so many writers have about what narrative media people (including themselves) actually consume for entertainment. Fiction doesn't have to be *only* entertainment, but it usually has to be entertainment first, in order to gain the relevance that makes it worthwhile to read for other reasons.
I’d counter-counter-argue that neither Ted Chiang nor Naomi are writing “literary short fiction.”
Ted Chiang's most recent short story collection was published by Knopf and glowingly reviewed in the New Yorker by Joyce Carol Oates; his most recent short story was published by the New York Times. Yes, he works in the tradition of sci-fi -- ie genre fiction -- but over the last 3+ decades genre fiction has become fully integrated into the literary mainstream. Look at Pulitzer prize winner Michael Chabon, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, MacArthur fellow Kelly Link, MacArthur fellow and Man Booker winner George Saunders, Roy E. Disney Chair in Creative Writing at Pomona College Jonathan Lethem... I could go on and on. Anyone who is mentally excluding these writers from the contemporary canon legitimized by the mainstream literary establishment is just not paying attention. (Which it's possible to do because of the irrelevance described in this post! The average person probably doesn't know who most of these writers are because they're not that famous outside of the literary world. But within it they are at the highest echelon.)
The point I was making about Naomi's own work, even though it isn't yet receiving this kind of recognition, is that she's writing short fiction, and she's writing it at least partly influenced by other (or at least one other) contemporary writers who are doing the same thing with mainstream literary success. She's not only writing fake nonfiction influenced by fake nonfiction.
another good title would be "I stopped reading short stories so everyone else must have as well"
There are simple pleasures, like gossipy letters, and there are more difficult pleasures that reward some investment. Some of Chekhov's stories have conventional endings, but he's famous for sudden, ambiguous endings that make you see the story in a different light. Virginia Woolf described these endings: "as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it." These endings often frustrate readers at first. They can be an acquired taste.
I agree that a lot of literary short fiction today is boring. I agree that the ecosystem is no longer working. There are many reasons. People have reduced attention spans due to smartphone addiction and screens are just no good for reading long texts. Algorithmically curated content feeds have got people addicted to shallow, pandering content. Few people are willing to invest in reading an ambiguous three thousand word story when they could just scroll.
There are also cultural reasons. Contemporary upper middle class culture really emphasizes psychological safety. There is an extreme reluctance to offend and to be offended. There is a Chekhov story that ends with a drunken wife-beating peasant having his limbs amputated due to frostbite, from which he will surely die. His doctor mocks his desire to live a little longer. Flannery O'Connor's most famous story ends with an entire family being murdered, including the children. I don't think our culture has the appetite for stuff like this anymore. We prefer mildly arousing gossip to anything with teeth.
I often see internet people argue for the elevation of light, joyous entertainment, but my feeling is that you can only experience true joy if you open yourself up to the possibility of true disappointment. Many Chekhov stories end in failure, but some have uplifting endings, most famously The Lady with the Dog.
So there's the question: should writers adapt to the new culture or cling to old culture? The answer to questions like that is usually somewhere in the middle. But generally I think writers should write the best stories they can and I have a hard time thinking that writers who have enjoyed Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Salinger, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, and Jhumpa Lahiri are going to be satisfied producing light gossip.
---
"Sorrow" - https://americanliterature.com/author/anton-chekhov/short-story/sorrow/
"A Good Man is Hard to Find" - https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/229/O'Connor%20A%20Good%20Man%20is%20Hard%20to%20Find.pdf
"Lady with the Dog" - https://shortstoryamerica.com/pdf_classics/chekhov_lady_withthe_pet_dog.pdf
I think, if you have to go back to "Lady with the Dog" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" for good short fiction, then that really proves Naomi's point.
I also mentioned Jhumpa Lahiri, who published Interpreter of Maladies in 1999 and Alice Munro, who published Runaway in 2003. I agree that contemporary short fiction is boring, but the thing is, the good, old stories still work.
I don’t agree with this one, I read good and entertaining contemporary short fiction. Thomas Ligotti, e.g., is one of my favourites. I can mention lots of names of living authors whose short fiction I have read recently and I’ve found entertaining: Carlos Yushimito, Neil Gaiman, Paolo Bacigalupi, Mariana Enriquez, Jacinta Escudos…
If the malaise is limited to English language literary short stories that's more evidence that lack of commercial exposure is the culprit here. The way genre publishers use short stories to promote pre-orders and limited editions suggests there's a demand for them. The literary equivalent is what, giving a zine/poem to everyone who shows up to your indie book story signing on World Book Day? That feels more like a keepsake than an incentive.
I've mentioned three English-language authors and I've just mentioned authors I've read recently (in the last months). There is no malaise, just a columnist that is talking about her displease with short fiction. That she doesn't read short fiction doesn't mean short fiction is dead. It just mean she prefers to read some other things.
So... not a George Saunders fan?
First, fiction is not a product, is a process. A fiction story based in actual facts is still fiction, regardless of the actuality of the facts. So if a non-fiction story is actually fake it doesn't make a difference, because fictionality is on the text, not on the facts.
Then there is this other thing, if you or a lot of people prefer non-fiction stories or gossip or even reading the instructions of a washing machine, it doesn't mean fiction short stories are dead, it just means you prefer non-fiction stories or texts. I mean, how many people did read Chekhov's stories in his times? Probably a lot less than the readers a fiction author has today, because you see, there is this problem: now we have a lot more of readers and authors than one century ago.
PS. Excuse my English, it is not my first language and this is a difficult topic.
Hm. I love reading short stories. A good short story can make me go wild. I must have at least 100 short story collections in my house. So I can’t see it ever dying. I agree with your claim that a lot of them are not memorable. There are simply a lot of bad ones. But when you get a good one—then YOWZA. No letter to Slate can ever beat it.
As long as it is possible for one to be written, then short stories cannot die.
That’s not to say that nothing can come close that is not a short story. Sometime real life tales are absolutely fantastic and have a similar effect to a great short story. I have read a couple true phone hacking tales where the texts in the phone hackings are so literary and fantastic. There are many amazing tales out there online that come pretty close to a great short story. Of people writing of mishaps or even ranting wildly about their lives on reddit.
So maybe that makes a great short story seem less special that someone could tell their tale on a reddit thread and it could have that quality…I don’t know. Maybe both things are special.
Always enjoy reading anything Naomi writes. This is another great piece. I think she is onto something about what’s happened to literary fiction.
Very well written, the only problem is I love literary short stories 🥲
NTA.
This is really funny. I feel like this is one of your fake letters, maybe, and you are not serious.
Those Slate letters, fake or not, are entertaining content. To be short stories, I’d expect that they’d first have to be transparent about being fictional. Would people still pay to read them, if Slate tagged them that way? Would be an interesting experiment but my bet is that the subscriptions would go down. You may be different, but most people reading those are entertained primarily by thoughts of just how stupid and grotesque others can be, and by the invitation to comment on that. If they know it’s all made up, it becomes inherently less interesting. Anyone could say those things, it is different to live them.
Next I think they’re not stories because usually they’re just problems. The person has not done anything in response yet. So to call it a story, I’d expect to see the protagonist act— writing a letter to get advice is an action, but too many stories like that would also become boring quickly.
I wholeheartedly endorse this piece, though to be fair I've never been a big fan of short stories (even the classics). I used to use them in the classroom, because it's easier to teach 8th graders a whole short story than a whole novel, and I came to appreciate the ones I had on my syllabus. But it's not like I was reading them for fun.
I can name a few exceptions. I still love Bradbury's short stories. I also went through a period of reading a bunch of the original Sherlock Holmes stories. But those were meant as quick entertainment, and when we want quick entertainment of that sort today, we don't usually read.
Today, literary short stories serve, for most people, more as exercises (in writing or reading) than as art to be engaged with. Part of the issue, I think, is the delivery method. If I'm paying for a printed text, I'll choose a full-length book, because I can spend more time with it, and I just like them more. We can put traditional short stories online, but that's a terrible format for them. People keep saying "where's the fiction on Substack?" to which I reply "why?" You want to read dialogue and action and descriptive language on a web browser? Are you insane? The Slate stories (and Naomi's tales) work the way they do because they don't follow traditional short story prose, instead leaning into the type of prose that we typically read on web browsers.
The only traditional short story that's ever really broken through these barriers was "Cat Person," and that one did it by getting grafted (possibly against its will) to a hot-button cultural issue. That's never happening again, even if you wanted it to.
Reporting back: couldn’t tack it shut from the inside.
I've been reading your irony on your site--and the humor, too. I have to admit though that the conclusion might be that all fiction -- and the best reaches emotional truth more profoundly than any other work I read and—write. We may not be successful doing this work -- as perhaps my novel up now proves, but all of it comes from the heart and says more than I could say any other way.
Please say that the “there” in the title is an intentional typo lol
It's just there to be funny. Not a typo.
Riiight ok.
Ok. Everybody seems confused by that. Changed the title.
Funny, I never read Shouts & Mumurs, but I always read the short stories and they are almost always entertaining and quite good. There are some bummers, where you go why the fuck did someone write that, but for the most part, for me it's the best part of the magazine. So dead, yeah, in the same way theater is dead, serious films in theaters are dead, or poetry is dead, or fine art is dead, or jazz is dead. So what? It's just not a big part of pop culture and I guess we have to say that's okay. Just like rap will be dead at some point, but there will be rappers out there laying it down with a fervor, grey beards and a light in their eyes. Couldn't get me to even look at that shit on Slate, that's for sure.