Last year fewer than 25 books of short stories were produced by mainstream publishers. And two thirds were by writers from abroad. Where are all the good British short stories? Are we witnessing the death throes of an entire genre? In the first of a two-part instalment, Debbie Taylor, Editor of women’s writing publication ‘Mslexia’, charts the parlous state of the literary short story in the UK
According to our research, more people are writing short stories than any other literary form. Over two thirds of the 1,238 women writers who took part in our survey are producing short stories, making it by far the most popular genre – way ahead of poetry, novels and journalism. What’s more, the majority are writing literary short stories.
Extrapolating these figures out to the entire writing population, many thousands of serious literary short stories must be being written in the UK every year. But they are being written in a publishing vacuum. In the 12 months to June 2003 only 20 short story collections will have been published by mainstream publishers in this country – 13 by authors from abroad.
Let that statistic sink in for a moment. More people in the UK are probably writing short stories than any other literary form. But only seven British collections are published a year.
‘Where are all the new edgy British stories?’ asks Margaret Wilkinson, whose collection, 1956 (Diamond Twig), was broadcast on Radio Four last year. ‘I specialise in teaching the short story, but increasingly I can only find American state-of-the-art illustrations of the form. The most exciting contemporary exponents are all North American: Anne Beattie, Junot Diaz, Richard Ford, Ellen Gilchrist, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, Tobias Woolf.’
Wilkinson’s conviction that the short story is an endangered species has sparked a year-long national campaign to ‘Save our Short Stories’. At its inaugural Emergency Summit in October, publishers, arts activists and writers – including Jackie Kay and Nicolas Blincoe – called for an end to ‘the discrimination currently faced by the short story’. ‘We have to address the short story’s position in literary culture,’ says Mark Robinson of Northern Arts, which sponsored the Summit. The campaign calls for a high-profile prize and annual anthology; for a short story tour and festival; for a conference on the state of the short story in the 21st Century; for reader development projects; for more outlets in newspapers and other media.
On the face of it, it seems strange that the short story should need saving. It’s the perfect form for radio, stage, and performance – far more so than its blowsy big sister, the novel. It’s perfect, too, for the encapsulated solitary read. It fits into magazines and newspapers; it suits the internet, the train journey, those snatched jewels of time while the baby naps.
And it’s the quintessential literary form. Long before people could write, they told stories: myths, folk-tales, memoirs. These tales – whose length was determined by the memory-span of the narrator and the time-span between the end of the meal and the fire going out – were the first ever short stories. Their structure and satisfactions fitted the space they were invented to fill. They were complete and absorbing and shone light on an aspect of life the community felt needed illuminating.
The short story still performs that function – and God knows we’re in as much need of illumination as we ever were. So why are so few stories being published?
The publisher’s stock answer is that they don’t sell. But there is one type of short story that is thriving. The commercial short story has been flowering merrily for years in mass-market women’s magazines like Chat and Take A Break, Women’s Weekly and Woman’s Own. Take A Break sells over four million copies a week and its Feast of Fiction seedling (12 heart-warming stories) has been growing rampantly since its launch two years ago.
‘These are straightforward stories for working-class women,’ says Cari Crook of Midland Exposure, an agency that specialises in placing such stories. ‘They’re cheerful and plot-driven, with heroines who triumph over adversity. They make readers feel better about their lives.’ These are stories for people who don’t read much, to be consumed at one sitting with a cup of tea and a Hobnob.
There are a few books of short stories that sell well too – though nothing approaching four million a week. These are feel-good collections aimed at the mass-market. Bloomsbury’s Magic series is typical. Developed to cash in on the Potter Effect – the first one was edited by JK Rowling herself – and with a proportion of profits going to the National Council for Single Parent Families, the Magic anthologies have blossomed into an annual collection of supernatural tales.
Other notable successes are Disco Biscuits (slang for Ecstasy), a sparky anthology for ‘the chemical generation’ that sold 70,000 at the height of the rave craze; and Girls’ Night Out, another bouncy vol, with sales of 155,000 fuelled by the added feel-good of its link with international relief charity WarChild.
These popular anthologies are the short-story equivalent of The Nation’s Favourite… poetry anthologies: safe and unchallenging. By contrast, your average vol of literary short stories can be the exact opposite: edgy and challenging. Things You Should Know (Granta, from April), by US author AM Holmes, is a good example. Open its cover (featuring a disturbing sheep/dog chimera) and you encounter a doctor dying from ovarian cancer, a masturbating schoolboy, a squatting mother-in-law and more. Enough to put you right off your Jaffacake.
Actually the writing is brilliant – precise and witty – and the ideas are explored with intelligence and compassion. But it’s not an easy read. And it will probably bomb in the bookshops, like the other 19 literary short story collections due out this year.
Apart from the moderately successful All Hail The New Puritans anthology (Fourth Estate) – which sold 20,000 on the back of saturation feature and review coverage – literary collections barely pay their way. The usual print-run of the biennial Asham anthology is just 2,500. The Virago Book of Writing Women, which I co-edited in 1998 and 2000, fared similarly: better than your average vol of poetry, but far short of financial viability. Carol Buchan, who runs the Asham Trust, says that although Waterstone’s coughed up the prize money for the Asham Award and hosted the launch of the 2002 anthology in its Piccadilly store, it failed to stock the book in any of its shops.
Phillip Gwyn Jones wouldn’t divulge the sales of the five collections he brings out heroically each year under HarperCollins’ literary imprint Flamingo, but admitted that HC’s finance tsars are prepared to turn a blind eye to the (presumably abysmal) performance of his beloved short story authors because Flamingo makes a decent overall profit. This means that the short stories are being subsidised by novel sales. Overseas sales help too. Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Dreams did only moderately well in the UK; but its sales in India, Australia and New Zealand have pushed it over the 120,000 mark – it’s been selling a steady 700 a week in India since 2000.
According to Gwyn Jones, marvellous collections by Michèle Roberts, Helen Dunmore and Fay Weldon only appear because the authors hold what he calls ‘a Sword of Damocles’ over the heads of their publishers: ‘Publish my stories, or I’ll take my novels elsewhere.’
But poor sales are not due to lack of publicity or review coverage. Our research found that short stories get a disproportionately large share of reviewers’ attention. Though short stories accounted for less than 0.05 per cent of books published in 2000, they garnered four per cent of mainstream reviews. Publicist Karen Duffy confirms that it’s quite a doddle getting short stories reviewed.
Anthony Doer’s The Shell Collector was the Times’ Book of the Week when it came out in November. ‘It’s easier to get someone to read a short story than a novel. They quickly get a taste for what the collection is like.’
But reviewers’ enthusiasm is not shared by the general public. It seems UK readers just don’t like the form. In her work with reading groups in 2001, Celia Bryce found a real reluctance to broach a volume of short stories. ‘They complained there wasn’t space to get into the characters,’ she told me. Or they had the opposite problem, and the story ended just as they were beginning to feel involved. ‘They preferred the total immersion of a novel.’
There’s a strong sense here that readers don’t know how to approach the form. Their expectations are based on the novel-reading experience, so they find the short story unsatisfying. But the short story is not a novel-in-brief. Aficionados maintain that it’s a distinct genre, as different from the novel as it is from the poem. As such it requires a different attitude and different reading skills. In short, it’s an acquired taste – a taste that is atrophied in the British reader.
This is because there is no place for the short story in British literary culture. ‘I find the situation here amazing,’ says Bloomsbury’s Russian translator Andrew Bromfield. ‘Russian bookshops are full of short stories. Victor Pelevin is one of the most respected writers in Russia. His first three books were short stories.’ In the US, too, the short story is strongly embedded in the literary landscape. ‘I get the New York Times’ literary supplement,’ says Margaret Wilkinson. ‘Every fortnight there’s page after page of reviews and comment on new short story collections.’
In mainland Europe it’s the same. ‘In France, Spain, Italy and Germany they treasure the shorter literary forms – stories, novellas, essays,’ says Phillip Gwyn Jones. ‘Judith Hermann caused a sensation in Germany with The Summer House, Later (out here in June). It sold 200,000 and won three of the top German literary prizes. Jhumpa Lahiri is mobbed in the streets when she visits Bengal.’
Yet both Hermann and Lahiri are debut authors. In the UK few publishers would dare release stories by an unknown author without first softening up the market with a well-received novel. Andrea Barrett’s recent Ship Fever collection was written long before Voyage of the Narwhal brought her public acclaim here. And Judy Budnitz’ Stories were held back until If I Told You Once had been shortlisted for the Orange Prize.
CLICK HERE to read part 2 of Endangered Species.
Mslexia Editor Debbie Taylor has kindly offered her permission to run this story on Arts Hub. For further information on Mslexia magazine, write to Mslexia, PO Box 656, Freepost NEA5566, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE99 2RP or call 0191 261 6656, email or visit www.mslexia.co.uk
