SPL Reads!

By now, we’ve heard so much about western society’s shrinking attention span that I believe most of us are willing to take it for granted.  The blame gets passed around to television, video games, and the ubiquitous internet boogeyman.  And it’s good fodder for discussions that involve the shaking of heads, the wringing of hands, and the wise stroking of beards.  But I’m not willing to wholeheartedly throw my lot in with the woe-is-me-alas-our-downfall crowd.  I have reason to believe that all hope is not yet lost.  Working at a library as I do, I’m witness to the reading habits of the public.  And this is what I see: tweens and teens lugging around doorstop-sized Harry Potter books, young adults filling up waiting lists for Stephanie Meyer’s latest epic, and adults choosing tomes by Stephen King, Robert Jordan, and Ken Follett (just three authors who have dealt in enormous word counts in their latest novels).  The Avid Readers book club just finished putting to bed Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night, which weighs in at a healthy 700+ pages (although the jury is still out on how that particular work fared…expect an update soon). In short, it seems that people are still willing to unplug long enough to get lost in a good long book.  And while that does my heart good, I wonder if something has gotten lost in the shuffle:  the short story.

Some of my favorite authors dealt wrote extensively in the short fiction format: H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert E. Howard, Anton Chekov, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, and Philip K. Dick.  Stephen King is gearing up to publish a new collection of short fiction (some fans, myself included, maintain that some of King’s greatest works are his short stories), promising to bring short stories to the bestseller list.  And magazines like McSweeney’s, Weird Tales, and Harper’s still publish short fiction.  What does all this mean?  Short fiction is still out there, and although it is not the moneymaker (for both authors and publishers) that it once was, short fiction still finds an audience.

It seems strange to expound on the virtues of the short story in an age where the attention span has, if not exactly shrunken, been radically dissected by the myriad demands that our rapidly expanding technology has placed upon our senses.  It seems counterintuitive that single-sitting fiction has lost its appeal in this age in which people insist that they’d read more if only they had the time.  I have been on a bit of a short story kick lately.  I polished off Ray Bradbury’s The October Country and have spent time cherry-picking in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age.  Most of the stories are ideal for one-sitting readings.  You can gulp down several on a lunch break.  You can read one in the time it takes to brew and drink that evening cup of tea.  It seems that if those who complain that they have no time for reading would perhaps give short fiction a try, they might soon rediscover their love for reading.  And then…who knows…maybe they’ll end up lugging that huge Neal Stephenson book out of the library without even giving a second thought to the television they’re missing or their sadly neglected blogs (ha ha ha).