Against the Attention Economy: Short Stories Are Not Quick Literary Fixes | Literary Hub

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But the short story boom never came. Instead, we’ve seen the mainstream venues for literary short fiction dry up. Often, the only contact the general reading public has with short fiction is in The New Yorker. Prestige publications remain in the form of The Paris Review, Tin House, Zyzzyva, Granta, Harper’s, and The Literary Review. But if you were to pull a random person off the street and ask them about the last short story they read, I imagine you’d receive, at first, a confused silence, and then maybe a title by Hemingway or Flannery O’Connor. “Hills Like White Elephants” or “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” What I hear these days is a kind of shellacked amusement. Editors and writers who repeat, in the beat after and following a soft laugh, “Wow, I’m surprised we aren’t reading more short fiction. Attention spans!”
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