Short Stories - a neglected genre?

[Eric]

In our era of short attention spans and commuting, I am at a loss to understand the way that publishers, both in Britain and France, tend to repeat the cliché that "short stories don't sell", meaning that they can't sell collections of short-stories.

Well, some collections of short stories do sell. Publishers take note: the French author Anna Gavalda has sold 1,577,000 copies in France of her collection entitled Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelque part. These are supposed to be (I haven't read them) straightforward stories from everyday life, and evidently appeal to a lot of people.

I've already posted things here on two collections of short stories in translation (by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Friedebert Tuglas) and wonder why far more authors of short stories aren't translated. After all, some authors such as (at random) Katherine Mansfield, Jorge Luís Borges, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence, Saki, Edgar Allen Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Isaac Babel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Angela Carter, Julio Cortázar, Ernest Hemingway, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a whole host of others managed to get famous by writing stories. Just have a look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_story_author

if you are in doubt.

So what have short stories done wrong? Why do publishers and booksellers try to flog 600-page potboilers, but not books of short stories? Where there's a will there's a way.

Short stories are also a way of introducing authors from abroad. When an author isn't well known, piloting short stories in literary magazines is one way of drawing the attention of Britons and Americans to new names.

Do the rest of you read short stories in translation? If so, which authors?

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Eric

After all, some authors such as (at random) Katherine Mansfield, Jorge Luís Borges, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence, Saki, Edgar Allen Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Isaac Babel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Angela Carter, Julio Cortázar, Ernest Hemingway, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a whole host of others managed to get famous by writing stories.

Is it not the case that the initial market for short stories (magazines) has dried up over the years, meaning that the proving ground that was short story magazines isn't there anymore? Or, at least, is not there en masse. Many collected short stories are surely composed of what was once published across a range of magazines.

Do the rest of you read short stories in translation? If so, which authors?

Hmmm. I'm not the biggest reader of short stories as they tend to go straight over my head, usually because of their subtlety or the ambiguity of their endings. Of short stories in translation, I've not read many, to be honest, but can think of a couple of collections that I have (Rosa Liksom's Dark Paradise, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories)and sitting on my shelves are a few others (Tove Jansson's A Winter Book, We Killed Mangy Dog by Luis Bernardo Honwana from Mozambique, some Chekhov, some Primo Levi, Eileen Chang's Lust, Caution, and some Adalbert Stifter). I do have a hankering for Tatyana Tolstoya's White Walls, although it's not high up on my reading preferences. And, in a moment of synchronicity, I was reading about Georgi Gospodinov's And Other Stories collection last night, waking up to find that it was the latest review added to the Complete Review.

[saliotthomas]

Short stories are not what i like most. Novels like,let say,War and peace or suite Francaise are a crisscross of short stories with a link.This way it does not leave this frustrating felling that i often fell.


I liked Maupassant,specialy the necklasse.Recently i got some from Tolstoy and John Fante-Big hunger.

Informers by Eston Ellis is good(i now dislike the rest of his work)Some interesting ones by Donald Westlake,and T C Boyle has made some really good ones(It has become is trademark lately) Mark Tully's brillant about India.I seem to remenber so from Salman Rushdi to.
I don't know if Flaubert "trois contes" is considered short stories.

By the way,what's the difference betwin a novela and a short story?

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by saliotthomas

By the way,what's the difference betwin a novela and a short story?

The number of words, which itself is difficult to define. I would tend to consider a short story to be a single narrative, of up to about ten thousand words. Beyond that, it's novella territory, providing a longer narrative that may be split off into separate chapters.

[Bjorn]

While I do like short stories, I tend to prefer novels. I've never really reflected much on why that is; I think part of the reason is that in order to be as effective as a full-length novel, a short story often needs (or thinks it needs) to rely more heavily on twists and surprising sucker punches - and while that can make for a great short story, it can also often feel a little too laboured, and often lends itself more to genre fiction.

Two of my favourite ones I've read in recent years are Julio Cortazar's A Certain Lucas and Andrei Volos' Hurramabad, both of which are collections of short stories which are loosely connected both by characters and plot. That's probably my favourite way to read short stories: a number of different angles on similar issues.

Hmmm, now that I think about it, one short story collection that I haven't re-read in a long while is one I have of Wolfgang Borchert's stories. I'm not sure if he's available in English, though. ETA: Apparently he is, though not in print.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by beer good

Wolfgang Borchert's stories. I'm not sure if he's available in English, though.

I've had a quick look on Amazon and The Man Outside is listed, which a reviewer claims is a collection of short stories that were his only work as he died young. The only thing is that it's one of those copies, supposedly published in 1982 that they can offer you new at their Amazon price, but the delivery estimate of a couple of weeks suggests they may be scouring warehouses up and down the country for a copy.

[Bjorn]

Originally Posted by Stewart

I've had a quick look on Amazon and The Man Outside is listed, which a reviewer claims is a collection of short stories that were his only work as he died young. The only thing is that it's one of those copies, supposedly published in 1982 that they can offer you new at their Amazon price, but the delivery estimate of a couple of weeks suggests they may be scouring warehouses up and down the country for a copy.

I just saw that, yeah. It seems to be a translation of the same one I have in the original German, which collects the play Drauβen vor der Tür (with the subtitle "a play no theatre wants to perform and no audience wants to see") and a number of short stories. It's very powerful, bleak stuff - Borchert was a WWII soldier who was dying from illness and injuries by the time he returned home to the ruins of post-war Germany, and supposedly spent every waking hour of the time he had left trying to write about his experiences.

...but that's off-topic, I guess. If I get around to re-reading it (if my German is still up to snuff) I'll post something.

[Eric]

Stewart has a point about the "proving ground" for stories being magazines. They certainly do seem to have dried up in Britain, but that is not the case all over Europe. Most Dutch and Flemish literary magazines have a few stories in every issue, as do mags in Scandinavia and elsewhere. But maybe not in the same way as in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when stories filled columns in daily newspapers, as well.

If you Google for "recueil de nouvelles" you get 269,000 entries; for "collection of short stories" you get 850,000 entries. So they must still be talked about in French and English. But how these break down into "crime & detective", "love and romance", "ghost & horror" would have to be investigated more thoroughly.

Interesting that Stewart mentions Tatyana Tolstoya. I have a book of her stories in Dutch translation, but I've only read one or two. She's quite a productive writer, from what I can see. The stories by the other authors Stewart mentions are unknown to me, except for Toover Yarnson (as she is pronounced), whose stories for adults are very fine and subtle.

Saliotthomas: I've not read Maupassant stories since I was at school. But they did have something, from what I can remember.

As for the cut-off point, words-wise, there are several definitions. Maybe a story up to 10,000 as Stewart suggests. Then a nice big grey area up to about 50,000 which we can call novella. And beyond that it's a novel. Also the number of pages, whatever the size of the print, seems to affect the category.

Picking up on what Beer Good says, I can't make my mind up whether I prefer novels or stories. There is no doubt that if a novel is good, you can lose yourself in a large piece of work with characters that come and go. And the plot and layers can be more complex. But I have on occasions, had bouts of short-story reading, and enjoyed them. Then, I think that they are my favourite genre.

Maybe stories are good as samplers for an author, although a good novelist isn't necessarily a good short-story writer, and vice-versa.

I've not come across Borchert. I'll check him out, next time I'm in Die Weiße Rose, the German bookshop in Amsterdam, named after the resistance movement during WWII.

[elcalifornio]

There was an interesting interview i just read with a journal editor here in the States about the short story (at least in this country). It is true that magazines are the main repository for short stories, especially those that never get collected. And there are a vast number of short story writers in this country; for a while there, I think it was perceived of as "our" genre. Not that i agree with that sentiment, but it is good to see the shorter works of fiction getting some use over here. And as for work in translation, in these American mags, short fiction tends to be the best way to introduce a foreign writer (hence my introduction to Roberto Bolano through a short story, ditto Aleksandr Hemon--though he does write in English, i think).

right now, i'm reading Ignacio Padilla's Antipodes and on the to-read is a collection by Cortazar and Five Stories of Ferrara by Giorgio Bassani.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by elcalifornio

...as for work in translation, in these American mags, short fiction tends to be the best way to introduce a foreign writer (hence my introduction to Roberto Bolano through a short story, ditto Aleksandr Hemon--though he does write in English, i think).

I've noticed a few Bolano stories on The New Yorkersite. And a few months back I remember reading an Andrei Platonov short.

[Heteronym]

The publishers and general public may neglect this fine format, but I believe the best 20th century writing came mostly from short story writers. So far this year I've discovered such writers as Dino Buzzati, Giovanni Papini, Saki and G.K. Chesterton. And just recently one of Adolfo Bioy Casares' collections was published in Portugal, and I can't wait to get it (today probably) after the enthusiam I felt reading one of his novels.

[Irene Wilde]

Originally Posted by Heteronym

The publishers and general public may neglect this fine format, but I believe the best 20th century writing came mostly from short story writers. So far this year I've discovered such writers as Dino Buzzati, Giovanni Papini, Saki and G.K. Chesterton. And just recently one of Adolfo Bioy Casares' collections was published in Portugal, and I can't wait to get it (today probably) after the enthusiam I felt reading one of his novels.

I thought I'd bring this thread back for two reasons:

1. While going through my disorganized brain for my "50 favorites" I realized that many of the stories that had a lasting impact on me were short fiction stories read online, in magazines, anthologies, or other collections.

2. Dorothy Parker, who wrote in what was probably the golden era of American short fiction, wrote, "Any bookseller will be glad to tell you, in his interesting argot, that 'short stories don't go.' People take up a book of short stories and say, 'oh, what's this? Just a lot of those short things?' and put it right down again." She wrote that in 1927! The era of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lardner, and yes, Mrs. Parker herself. She never considered herself a great writer because she never completed a novel, having internalized this idea that the novel is the only medium for a great writer. Very sad. No painter's greatness is determined by the size of his canvas, why should writers be judged so?

[Eric]

I didn't know that it was Dorothy Parker that said that. But the adage has been used a lot by publishers to publish only novels, while regarding short-stories as things that people publish in magazines, and are rarely collected.

The novel does give the author a chance to expand. Which is presumably why some authors write short-stories but when they move on to novels they go over the top and write 800-page novels. I haven't got any examples ready, but there are authors like that.

I'm not very well acquainted at all with U.S. or Canadian short-story writers, as I've tended to look to Europe, rather than North America. But the genre is concise and forces the author to focus plot and characterisation.

I have to say that authors of good novels are not always authors of good short-stories, and vice-versa. I read a story earlier this year and thought: eh, what's this, what's the author trying to say, self-indulgent stuff, this. But I later read a novel by the same author, which was brilliant. Some authors clearly need space to develop threads, whilst others like to create cameos, mood poems, quick-fire dramas, and stick to the small scale of writing stories.

So agree with both Irene and Heteronym that the genre deserves being taken seriously. I think my favourites through the years have remained Jorge Luís Borges, Bruno Schulz, and Katherine Mansfield. Those three wrote almost exclusively in the short format, which makes me think that there are perhaps born short-story writers as there are born novelists.

Other short-story writers I've enjoyed will not be so well known here on World Literature forum. These include three authors whose stories have never really broken though in English translation. One is Kristien Hemmerechts, a contemporary Flemish author who writes perceptive and sometimes moving stories about personal relationships, man-woman, child-parent. Another, is the Norwegian author of the 1950s, Johan Borgen; here it is the mood I appreciate. And some of the Estonian Absurdist author Arvo Valton are certainly worth reading. Others have copied him, but he remains the master.

Two of the books of translations that I've published are books of short-stories. In 1995, Jaan Kross' book of six stories from the Nazi German and Soviet Russian occupations of Estonia appeared. And in 2006 a book of several Gothic Symbolist stories by Friedebert Tuglas from around 1915-20 came out. I greatly enjoyed translating both these selections. At present, I've signed a contract to translate 12 short-stories, a novella and two or three novel-excerpts from Estonian, written by different authors from about 1890 to the present day. So, when they have sorted out some small teething problems with the contract, I shall be getting on with those.

[Heteronym]

At times I think I prefer short stories to novels. A good writer should only need a couple of pages to develop and transmit an idea; it sometimes astonishes me how one short-story can contain an obvious, surprising truth in a few sentences. Short-stories are also more readable and so allow more intimacy with the reader: there are many favorite novels I know I'll never read again; but I always have patience for a bit of Borges, Cortazar, Quiroga, Buzzati again.

[obooki]

I was thinking yesterday, looking through everyone's favourite 50 novels - maybe we should do 50 favourite short stories, though it would probably take a lot longer to think about and remind myself of them.

[Heteronym]

I must have read 5 times more short-stories than novels: now that would be a difficult list

[Eric]

You know my views on lists, but indeed, a list of 50 short-stories would break the mould - and is likely to be easy to achieve. As long as the list is openly subjective, and there is no ranking involved, it could introduce us to new short-stories and their authors, as well as classics.

To write mine, I'd have to start delving.

[Mirabell]

I have tended to avoid short stories, as I love thick books, always havem romance, the like. there are some writers whose short stories I have always admired. Eric on point that good short story writers often do not make good novelists and vice versa.

I think that Bachmann and Böll are two masters of teh short story in german. Böll is usually an insufferably tedious writer of novels, which sound like good short stories stretched for too long. Wolfgang Borchert, Kafka. If the three women stories count, then Musil's a great writer of stories.

I admire Richard Ford's stories in Rock Springs, Hemingway's stories (as I cannot really stand his novels, apart from The Sun Also Rises), which are so tender and feminine, James Salter's stories, A.L. Kennedy's. I also cherish Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection of stories and what I've read of Malamud's stories and Bellows'. Isaac B. Singer is a revelation, of course. I love the Dubliners. I like William T. Vollman's Rainbow collection a lot.I have a lotsa love& admiration for Barthelme and Barth. Poe, Borges, of course. Christa Wolf writes great short stories.

That's it, off the cuff and looking at my shelves.

I admire good short story writers. Ian McEwan once remarked that he found the form, in his own experience, to be a sort of laboratory. I like that comment, and I suppose that's why the form lends itself well to aspiring writers. You can try on different voices, techniques, styles, etc. And the everlasting importance of every word, every punctuation mark.

Angela Carter, James Salter, Raymond Carver, Harold Brodkey, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ian McEwan - these are a few of my favourites.

[PinaFreud]

Well, at the moment I'm reading a book of short stories....Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth). It's a genre I really love, and I can't see a good reason to justify the publishers' attitude.
My best favourites: Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Savyon Liebrecht....