As we conclude our Salinger unit, having looked at a few of his short stories from The New Yorker, which were then compiled in Nine Stories, and looking ahead to Jorge Luis Borges (who never wrote anything longer than a short story), I found this essay by Stephen King in The New York Times to be relevant and interesting. He asks a simple question: “What ails the short story?” And he comes up with some insightful conclusions. In his essay, King looks at how the audience is an important, and sometimes limiting, factor that the short story writer has to deal with:
What’s not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker). It’s more like copping-a-feel reading. There’s something yucky about it.
