This piece provided by Jonathan Mendelsohn, of the Indigo Fiction Blog team.  

I don’t think anyone would argue with the fact that even a rather mediocre dental hygienist makes more money in a given year than most writers make in a decade. Generally it is only the best of the best, the luckiest of the luckiest, or the most connected of the most connected who can do so well as to make a living off of their craft. And that’s the novelists. In a modern world where the screen (phone, TV or computer) is so ubiquitous that your local barbershop is likely to have 40 or more flat inches on their wall to help you pass the time, it seems fair to say that most writers would struggle to pay their cell phone bills if they tried to earn a living by exclusively writing short stories.

The temptation then is to leap to the conclusion that the short story is dead. And yet the New Yorker as I’ve heard it, continues to pay short story legends like Alice Munro and William Trevor a special fee to have first access to any story those writers send out – that’s how valuable these works are. And when the magazine does select a work for publication, even a dental hygienist would envy the purchase price. Then you get Francis Ford Coppola, who in 1997 started a magazine devoted to short stories and design. Zoetrope: All Story is based on the great director’s love of fiction and his belief that so many great movies come on the backs of great short stories. This would seem to bode well for the form’s future. So too does the inclusion below of two writers who came to the English world’s attention over the last decade not from their novels, but on the back of their debut story collections.

Perhaps you are only familiar one, two or all three of the world-class writers listed below as novelists. If so, you might want to also consider their masterful work in the short form, where narrative and poetry so often collide, and where a twist ending shocks the heck out of you in the best way possible – that “Usual Suspects” like turn that you never saw coming but when it comes you say, Of course!

J. D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger only wrote one novel (you know the one), but he published three other books. The first, released just a couple years after “The Catcher in the Rye,” was a collection of stories with the less than cryptic title Nine Stories.  It has been argued in any number of places that Salinger was a master of the short form and that he wasn’t really a novelist at all. Not only do many a Salinger fan in fact prefer  Nine Stories as well as the very long short stories (or mini novellas, if you prefer) collected in Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters to The Catcher in the Rye, but some have argued that the novel itself is really just a connected collection of short stories about a character named Holden.

Then as now the benchmark for short fiction excellence is set by seeing one’s name in the New Yorker. Seven of Salinger’s nine stories were published there, including the book’s opening story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” considered by many to be the greatest short story written in the 20^th century. A far cry from Holden’s angst-ridden teenage tale, these stories are about people of a whole variety of ages, though to be fair they do highlight Salinger’s particular genius for voicing the characters of children. They are as shocking as they are whimsical, as melancholy as they are illuminating, and through even the most disturbing of them runs a line of wit particular to the talent of Jerome David Salinger.

If you had to read one (other than “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”) try the lesser known “The Laughing Man,” a story on its surface about boys, baseball and heroes, but that is particularly noteworthy for its story-within-a-story, a tale of stupendous imagination and breadth, nothing to do with high school, nor set anywhere near Central Park.

Jhumpa Lahiri

A novel lover, especially one who loves that treasure trove of literature that comes from India, or writers of Indian origin (for more blogs on these authors, see the note after this blog’s conclusion, may well have discovered Jhumpa Lahiri’s first and thus far only novel The Namesake or maybe saw the 2006 Mira Nair directed film of the same name. But did they realize it was her second book and that her first, Interpreter of Maladies was not only a New Yorker Best Debut selection, and a top ten pick on Oprah’s book list, but that the Indian-American writer’s first ever book, published when she was all of 32, won her the Pulitzer? And if that weren’t enough to restore one’s belief in the short story consider that the slender collection of nine stories (starting to wonder if this number is significant) has sold more than 15 million copies. Perhaps that can attest to the breadth, depth and interest that Lahiri creates in these stories of cultures colliding, or marriages subsiding and of her general talent for painting the realist details of the human condition.

If you had to read just one: the book’s opening story “A Temporary Matter” is an oh-so-subtle, oh-so-devastating thing of genius. When the power goes out, the truth will emerge.

David Bezmozgis

This year David Bezmozgis published his first novel, The Free World, a book we could well see CBC voters adding to the Giller long list. To be fair, the Toronto-based writer was already big news in the literary world, having just prior to the novel’s release been selected as one of the New Yorker’s Top 20 Writers Under 40. The reputation was developed on the back of just seven short stories about Russian Jewish immigrants to suburban Toronto collected in Natasha and Other Stories.  When the New Yorker, Harpers and Zoetrope: All Story select your stories for publication you know you have something cooking, and these carefully trim and often rather witty, albeit dry, stories concerned with the Berman family, living in a less than appealing and rather drab pocket of Toronto, pack a narrative punch that explain all the attention that this still rather new writer has received. It is a rare ability indeed to effectively mix tragedy and comedy to the degree that Bezmozgis does in these stories.

If you had to read one, the eponymous “Natasha” is a thing of erotic and literary beauty.

Let’s not be naïve. The short story is undoubtedly a less popular form of fiction today than the novel, but it also happens to be one of the world’s great arts, not yet lost. Here’s to keeping it found.

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For Further Reading (of novelists who also write great short stories):

Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder

Haruki Murakami’s Blind Willow Sleeping Woman

Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag

… and as mentioned, writers of Indian origin have been featured in previous editions of the fiction blog:

See this blog for a discussion of Rohinton Mistry

and these others for interviews & discussions with:

Anuradha Roy

Sarita Mandanna

Amitav Ghosh

Bharati Mukherjee

and Shilpi Gowda