Category: short fiction

These days I’m thinking a lot about the long short story, in the terms Richard Ford established — a long short story being just short of a novella in length. Whereas the novella is “designed” with an arc like a novel, the long short story has an arc like short fiction. We know the boundaries between these forms are rough and fuzzy. But for discussion, the long short story would be no longer than 15,000 words. The idea is that it is a long work of fiction that is not long enough to be bound in book form by itself. Normally the long short story is too long for the litmags, but fits nicely in a collection of stories, often serving as the anchor tenant. “Brokeback Mountain,” in Annie Proulx’s famous story collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories might be an example (although most of those stories are pretty long and I think “Brokeback…” played in the New Yorker). I’m not sure, but many Alice Munro stories have the long arc I’m thinking of, for example her “Passion” and “Silent” from the Runaway collection. I have a notion that online publishing might be perfect for the long short story, often as engaging and absorbing as a novel and at the same time with that graceful story arc that requires only an hour to read yet allows complexity and more than one turn before coming in for a landing. Can you name some other authors who write these or specific stories that fit this description?