With soaring sales, viral hits like Cat Person and a cameo by Tom Hanks, the form seems to be staging a comeback. But did it ever go away?In 2017, almost 50% more short story collections were sold than in the previous year. It was the best year for short stories since 2010. Booksellers are reporting a surge in popularity for the form, commentators note publishers are buying more collections and issuing them with greater care and enthusiasm; in December the newcomer Kristen Roupenian cut five- and seven-figure deals in the UK and US after her New Yorker story “Cat Person” went viral. On top of all that, collections are being reviewed more than ever before, the Sunday Times EFG short story award (worth £30,000) has received its highest ever number of entries and the BBC national short story award continues to grow in popularity. We are experiencing the renaissance of the short story form, right?Wrong; which isn’t to say 2017 wasn’t a good year for the short story – it was, but the “renaissance of the short story” story is an old one that is rolled out year after year. Does that matter? I think it does. By getting caught up in this recurring phantom narrative, and dwelling on press release froth rather than the work being produced, we spurn the opportunity to talk about short stories in a way that might actually deepen how they are understood and engaged with by readers.How can the short story ever have time to wither, given the frequency of its rebirth?In the cases of Tom... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2018-03-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
OpenAI’s ChatGPT’s AI chatbot is so good, too many people are using it, crushing its servers. So the company is debuting a paid ChatGPT Plus service, which will launch in the coming weeks. ChatGPT will cost $20 per month, but don’t despair. OpenAI says that it still plans to offer a... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2023-02-01 21:57:26 UTC ]
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‘Fish Cheeks’ is a short autobiographical narrative by the American writer Amy Tan (born 1952). Tan is probably best-known for The Joy Luck Club, her 1989 novel containing a series of interwoven short stories told by a number of Chinese-American women who are members of the titular club; but... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-01-29 15:00:27 UTC ]
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The following first appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. William Trevor famously described the short story as “the art of the glimpse,” and compression is generally a virtue. But the most engaging and compelling short stories and novels are not necessarily the... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2023-01-27 09:52:28 UTC ]
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Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and three books of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award;... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2023-01-24 09:53:24 UTC ]
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‘Everyday Use’ is one of the most popular and widely studied short stories by Alice Walker. It was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1973 before being collected in Walker’s short-story collection In Love and Trouble. Walker uses ‘Everyday Use’ to explore different attitudes towards Black... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-01-23 15:00:18 UTC ]
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‘Cathedral’ is perhaps the most widely studied of all the short stories of Raymond Carver (1938-88). The story is narrated by a man whose wife has invited her friend, a blind man named Robert, to come and stay with them. Although he is initially uncomfortable and even scathing about their […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-01-22 15:00:57 UTC ]
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Having written and taught short stories for many years, I’ve become increasingly interested in writers who are pushing the edge of how “story” is defined. While “flash fiction” and “micro fiction” are buzzy terms, writing extremely short pieces is nothing new—as I tell my students, Poe did it,... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2023-01-20 09:53:22 UTC ]
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‘Raymond’s Run’ is a 1971 short story by Toni Cade Bambara (1939-95) which originally appeared in the anthology Tales and Short Stories for Black Folks. In the story, a young girl named Hazel Parker prepares for a race; Bambara uses this plot to explore the challenges young black women face […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-01-09 15:00:24 UTC ]
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Don’t miss these short stories featuring firefighting drones, lab-grown mammals, long-buried fan fiction, and much more. Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2022-12-30 10:50:00 UTC ]
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The short stories of the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904) are important precursors to twentieth-century modernism, and can be viewed as forerunners to the short fiction of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and other high modernists. Where other nineteenth-century writers tended to... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-12-28 15:00:24 UTC ]
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Naira Kuzmich died in 2017, at age 29 from lung cancer, but her posthumous short story collection, In Everything I See Your Hand, was only recently brought to fruition by University of New Orleans Press (June 2022). The included stories were widely published in literary journals and one was... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2022-12-22 09:53:38 UTC ]
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The list of novels that began their lives as short stories is long and well known. Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Eudory Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (which began as a short story titled “Gogol”), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (expanded from her 1923... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2022-12-15 09:52:44 UTC ]
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‘Simmering’ is a short story by the Canadian author and poet Margaret Atwood (born 1939). Published in Atwood’s 1983 collection Murder in the Dark, the story might be regarded as a piece of flash fiction, micro-fiction, or even an example of prose poetry. ‘Simmering’ posits a society in which... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-11-28 15:00:57 UTC ]
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Challenging myths about heterosexual white South African men, Prinsloo published four books of short stories in 12 years. Continue reading at The Conversation
[ The Conversation | 2022-11-28 05:37:53 UTC ]
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‘Salvador Late or Early’ is a short story in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, a 1991 collection of short stories by the American writer Sandra Cisneros (born 1954). The story – which lacks a conventional plot and is more of a character study – briefly describes the life of […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-11-25 15:00:30 UTC ]
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‘The Man Who Was Almost a Man’ is a short story by the American author Richard Wright (1908-60), originally published as ‘Almos’ a Man’ in Harper’s Bazaar in 1940 before being revised by Wright later in his life. The final version was published in 1960. In the story, a black […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-11-11 15:00:28 UTC ]
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Emily Temple rounds up the 60 greatest academic satires, campus novels, and boarding school bildungsromans of the last 100 years. | Lit Hub Reading Lists Lynn Caponera considers the wild and wonderful legacy of Maurice Sendak’s creations (and his rigorous work routine). | Lit Hub Art &... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2022-11-05 10:30:11 UTC ]
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It’s possible to love a video game. To be devoted to it, to value what it does for you, and how it makes you feel. To want the best for it. Not in the same way you love a person — or at least, I hope not. But take a look at any major fan convention for video games, movies, TV, or almost... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2022-11-01 15:51:22 UTC ]
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It’s possible to love a video game. To be devoted to it, to value what it does for you and how it makes you feel, and to want the best for it. Not in the same way you love a person — or at least, I hope not. But take a look at any major fan convention for video games, movies, TV, or almost... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2022-10-28 10:45:00 UTC ]
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Combat veteran Bill Glose’s short stories in “All the Ruined Men” crack open the challenges faced by Gulf War soldiers and their families. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2022-10-19 15:00:11 UTC ]
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