Short Story Week at The Millions: A Brief Introduction

Recently, the innovative literary magazine One-Story launched a campaign to “Save the Short Story.” As the essay below suggests, we at The Millions found this effort admirable, and also puzzling. Is “the short story” even a single thing? And, if so, does it need saving? On both questions, the evidence seems mixed. We can agree, however, that short stories seem to have lost some of their prominence in the popular imagination. Mainstream book coverage tends to track the agendas of the publishing industry; those agendas, in turn, tend to be driven by coverage. With our “Short Story Week,” we aim to subvert the cycle. Between now and Friday, we hope

to revisit the work of living masters,
to celebrate the writers who paved their way,
to talk a bit about teaching the short story, and writing it,
to link to interesting short-story sites and periodicals
to provide a selective bibliography of our favorite story collections,
and, as always, to hear from you.

In short: we hope you enjoy it. We’ll be linking to the week’s installments below.

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Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of City on Fire and A Field Guide to the North American Family. In 2017, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.