Do people read short stories anymore? It’s fair to say that they do, but the audience just isn’t what it used to be (in quantity more so than quality). As Stephen King puts it in The NYT Sunday Book Review, “Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ.” Ouch.
Novels vs. Short Stories
The part of this shrinking audience equation that always sticks with me is the why of it. In a world of ever-decreasing attention spans, it’s interesting that the novel, and not the short story, still reigns supreme in the literary world. They’re called short stories, after all. You would think that narrative brevity would have a certain appeal for people who often think in 140 character increments. But what is it about short stories that causes a good chunk of readers to shy away?