The American Short Story since 1950

Throughout this book, I’ve suggested that when reading a short story we tend to take account, consciously or unconsciously, of the context in which it appears: whether in a magazine, surrounded by a variety of other kinds of writing, in a volume of stories ‘selected’ by single author, in a multi-authored collection arranged around a common theme, or in an anthology labelled ‘the best’ (of one category or another). Where we read the story shapes the expectations we bring to our reading of it, and thus the effect it has on us. It was not the same experience to encounter a Barthelme story in the little magazine Art and Literature, sandwiched between Jean Genet and spatial theory, as it was to read one in the New Yorker, with cartoons and light verse cutting into its three-column layout. More recently, Joyce Carol Oates, reviewing George Saunders’s Pastoralia, noted how different his ‘goofy riffs on the travails of freaks and losers who sometimes manage to rise, only just barely, to the human’ seemed when collected between hard covers and in their ‘original settings in the columns of the New Yorker, amid glossy advertisements for high-priced merchandise’. In the magazine setting, she argued, the stories recall the ‘spectacle’ of lunatics provided for the.’ voyeuristic fascination/revulsion of those eighteenth-century European aristocrats who visited asylums’.¹ Short stories appear in many places and thus gain, or lose, from many contexts. Susan Minot’s ‘Thanksgiving Day’, for example, which was written for her creative writing class at Columbia, was first published in the little magazine Grand Street and then in an anthology of ‘best’ new stories by ‘young writers’, and finally in what her publishers suggested she call a novel, Monkeys, as one of six chronologically arranged stories about a single family² Another story that ended up in Monkeys, ‘The Navigator’, also appeared first in Grand Street, then in volume of women’s writing, in a collection of stories about alcoholism and in a book of stories set on beaches.³

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