The State of the Short Story

The latest issue of n + 1 carries a bold essay by Elif Batuman.

“New American fiction” is, to my mind, immediately and unhappily equivalent to new American short fiction. And yet I think the American short story is a dead form, unnaturally perpetuated, as Lukacs once wrote of the chivalric romance, “by purely formal means, after the transcendental conditions for its existence have already been condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic.”

The contemporary American novel actually fares just as poorly in the essay, and, while my assessment of the literary landscape is slightly more optimistic in its own grim way, I enjoy reading something with bite. The establishment needs a shot fired across its bow now and again.

Read the rest of the essay at n + 1.