Let’s not drag this out: the short story is back. There is evidence of a revival in a genre that for decades has been eclipsed by the novel. Sales jumped 45 per cent last year, driven by collections from big names such as Tom Hanks and awards for prominent short story writers.
More than 690,000 short stories and anthologies were sold in the UK in 2017, generating £5.88 million, the genre’s highest sales since 2010.
The two biggest hits came from the pens of writers better known for their success in other creative forms. Uncommon Type: Some Stories, Hanks’ debut book, sold 67,459 copies despite mixed reviews, just ahead of Paris for One and Other Stories by the romance novelist Jojo Moyes, with 61,789 sales.
Publishing experts said that the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Alice Munro, the Canadian writer, had helped to raise the genre’s profile. The following year George Saunders became the first winner of the £40,000 Folio Prize for his short story collection Tenth of December.
“For years there’s been this publishing wisdom that short story collections don’t sell, and that actually publishers only endure short stories,” said Jason Arthur of Penguin Random House, which published the Hanks collection.
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“They will publish them purely because they think it’s a way of getting a young writer’s novel, or of indulging an established writer between novels. And that’s certainly changing.”
The viral success of Cat Person, a short story published in The New Yorker about the dysfunctional early relationship between a young woman and slightly older man, highlighted how easily digested short stories could appeal to those who rarely picked up novels.
Mr Arthur said it was often suggested that short stories were the “perfect form of fiction for our technological, time-poor age” but he was not entirely convinced that this was behind their resurgence. “Short stories demand a lot of the reader. They demand the same concentration that you need to give to poetry,” he said. “If a novel is something that you can lose yourself in, get comfortable in and spend weeks reading, a short story will give you a blast like a cold shower.”
Stephen Lotinga, chief executive of the Publishers Association, said that short story podcasts were helping readers to discover new titles. “It doesn’t do the form justice if we dismiss it as just being down to more limited attention spans,” he added.
Other titles in last year’s top ten short story bestsellers included The Pier Falls, the debut collection by Mark Haddon, and Men Without Women by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.
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Natalia de la Ossa, retail manager of the London Review Bookshop, said that in December it sold about 40 per cent more short fiction anthologies than the previous year. “We certainly feel that there has been a recent flurry of short story collections by great writers,” she told The Bookseller magazine.