The Long and Unprofitable Life of the Short Story Collection

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The Long and Unprofitable Life of the Short Story Collection<br>The ugly duckling of the literary world<br>Laura B. McGrath<br>May 13, 2026

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When I started this substack, I made myself a promise: I will not write about MFA programs. I will not break that promise— but I might bend it, a little bit.<br>It’s impossible to write about the institutions and industries that support literary culture today without, at least, a passing glance at the MFA program— or even at the cottage industry “critiquing” MFA programs, which can seem to be as expansive (and singularly focused) as the MFA program itself. The standard lines criticism are so played out that I need not rehearse them here. Along with the well-worn appraisal of the MFA program’s uses and abuses comes a denouncement of so-called “MFA Fiction,” which typically entails a consideration of the creative writing workshop’s signal form: the short story.<br>Elif Batuman has called the short story a zombie form in the 21st century. Chad Harbach has claimed that it is merely pedagogical. Short stories exist, by consensus, to become novels. Yet, the short story has a long and storied (ha) history in American letters, and a has played a significant role in the history of the US publishing industry. But now, in the 21st century, who actually reads short stories? Why do we (writers) write them? Why do we (magazines, anthologies) publish them? Why— when the short story has such a small readership and an even smaller market— does this form continue to exist?<br>In Middlemen, I answer these questions by thinking about the short story’s role as an audition— a tryout, designed to show off a writer’s range and catch the attention of the right reader. It’s not for general readers; it’s for very specific readers: namely, the agents and editors that can help build a writer’s career. And not just any writer, but a specific class of literary writer. Questions about the commercial market of the short story, I argue, are misplaced. The short story, now, demonstrates the opposite of commerciality. It is about proving one’s literary aspirations, aesthetic commitments, and artistic worthiness. To write short stories is a mark of distinction. Only a certain sort of writer commits to the form— and only a certain sort of agent will agree to represent them.<br>While very few writers write and publish their short stories, even fewer publish short story collections. The collection is an ugly duckling form, never theorized by scholars or even much considered by critics. A story collection is treated, merely, as the sum of its parts, and it’s the parts, the individual stories, that are the unit of evaluation and criticism. But the collection, I argue, is an art form unto itself— yet, it’s one that’s received very little attention.<br>Perhaps this is because there is not much of a market for the short story collection. In 2025, 5% of the fiction deals reported were for short story collections. And debut story collections are an even more rarefied group, with only 1.1% of fiction deals reported for debut collections.1 But what what surprised me, while researching the history of the short story collection, is that there has never been a market for short story collections.

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I always assume that, in US publishing, there is nothing new under the sun. The “golden age” is a perpetually receding horizon, always out of reach. But I also assumed that short story collections had a thriving history, corresponding with the health of the short story itself. But no. As I write in Chapter Three: The Collection:<br>Since as early as 1915, Publishers Weekly has stated as common knowledge that “there is a belief— possible a superstition— that books of short stories are almost foredoomed plugs.” Successful collections have always been treated as exceptions. “Books of short stories can be popular,” an ad for Alfred A. Knopf imprint Borzoi Books protested (perhaps too much) on behalf of Thyra Samter Winslow’s Picture Frames in 1923. When a collection sold well, its success was treated as newsworthy in itself. “The book trade still accepts without question the axiom that books of short stories do not sell,” Publishers Weekly reported in 1941: “It has always seemed odd to so many people that this would be so, especially since American writers have used the form with so much distinction; and it is always a pleasure to report that a book of fine stories is finding its public.” (The successful collection in question was the first from Eudora Welty.)”

But every few years— say, once a decade— a short story collection has succeeded beyond critics’ wildest expectations, resulting in claims of the collection’s renaissance. It happened with Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Anne Mason. Again, with Edward P. Jones. And again, at the end of the 20th century, when collections by Junot Díaz, George Saunders, and Jhumpa Lahiri published in (relatively)...