Note to King: Don’t Sell Short Stories Short

This year it's Stephen King's turn to announce the impending death of the short story. "American short story alive? Check," he writes in his introduction to the "Best American Short Stories 2007." "American short story well? Sorry, no, can't say so. Current condition stable, but apt to deteriorate in the years ahead." It's a familiar sound, this death knell, which seems to have rung continuously for the last 25 years, at least since young writers began to imitate the declarative style of Raymond Carver. But this is getting ridiculous. At some point the bell has to crack, or the short story has to give up the ghost. I'm betting the bell cracks first.

When I first read a shorter, less avuncular version of King's essay in The New York Times Book Review, I took it for pure provocation, the last-ditch effort of a revivalist preacher throwing down the fire and brimstone, anything to get a rise out of his tent full of apathetic backsliders. Because I write short stories and have only published in literary magazines, I took him seriously. I was pretty sure that, by King's reckoning, I was one of the reasons short fiction is circling the drain.

King bases his diagnosis on the disappearance of short fiction from all but a few general interest magazines and the subsequent relocation of the form to literary magazines. This is bad for the form, he claims, because stories in literary magazines are read by a shrinking audience made up primarily of writers, teachers of writing and editors. Young writers end up writing "airless" and "self-referring" stories targeted at that small audience.

But there's evidence that the size of the audience for literary short fiction today isn't much smaller than it's ever been. Three hundred and forty literary magazines are members of the Council on Literary Magazines and Presses, "a small fraction of what's out there," says the CLMP's Jay Baron Nicorvo. Fifty-nine online literary magazines are CLMP members, and Nicorvo estimates that there are "at least 10 times more" who aren't members.

If literary magazines are flourishing, there must be an audience for the work, even if, by King's definition, it's the wrong audience. The short stories on life support, and what King is pining for, are the genre stories that were the fictional mainstays of magazines like The Saturday Evening Post: crime, lost love, war, seafaring adventure, you name it. Yes, The Post published Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, but more often it published writers like Clarence Budington Kelland, a workhorse who churned out 10 million words for The Post alone, collecting $1 million for his efforts, and who referred to himself as "the best second-rate writer in America."

King's wistfulness for the "days of the old Saturday Evening Post, [when] short fiction was a stadium act," conjures a well-known image among writers: The Post as standard bearer for an idyllic age in which, cigarette in mouth and Underwood at the ready, writers could make an honest wage writing short stories for magazines. At the same time, King bemoans the popularity of another (perhaps former) stadium act, Britney Spears. He even makes an offhand remark about the "disposable" nature of his own best-selling stadium acts, yet he seems unaware of the distinction he's making between middlebrow work for large audiences and the high-quality work he's chosen for this year's "Best American Short Stories." Granted, to a best-selling author, a small audience is a very bad thing. But while King may not be wrong about the results of writing in a vacuum, he's looking back to a golden age that never existed for literary fiction.