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- Dec 6, 2006
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I didn't see this mentioned here yet, but a few weeks ago the New York Times reprinted Stephen King's "What Ails the Short Story," which is the gloomy essay that he leads off the 2007 Best American Short Stories with.
He basically says that the American short story is practically dead, not very well, bottom-shelved in obscure expensive academic mags and almost entirely ignored by mainstream media. He thinks it's going to get even worse in the coming years, not go back to the "stadium act" it was in the days of the Saturday Evening Post. I remain optimistic and hopeful, though -- not that mags like GQ, Atlantic and Esquire will suddenly go back to carrying lots of monthly freelanced fiction again, but that some clever computer-whiz outsider will start up the commercial-literary equivalent of a Drudge Report, Salon or Gawker that carries lots of good short stories, unafraid of current political correctness and taboos, and makes reading stories popular and profitable again, on the Web...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/King2-t.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
He basically says that the American short story is practically dead, not very well, bottom-shelved in obscure expensive academic mags and almost entirely ignored by mainstream media. He thinks it's going to get even worse in the coming years, not go back to the "stadium act" it was in the days of the Saturday Evening Post. I remain optimistic and hopeful, though -- not that mags like GQ, Atlantic and Esquire will suddenly go back to carrying lots of monthly freelanced fiction again, but that some clever computer-whiz outsider will start up the commercial-literary equivalent of a Drudge Report, Salon or Gawker that carries lots of good short stories, unafraid of current political correctness and taboos, and makes reading stories popular and profitable again, on the Web...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/King2-t.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin