CL.09.UMP-385

We live in an age defined by velocity—scrolling, skipping, switching—yet paradoxically, the short story, a form designed for brevity, finds itself increasingly marginalized. While one might expect readers starved for time to gravitate toward texts consumable in a single session, contemporary audiences overwhelmingly favor the novel’s expansive immersion, perhaps precisely because it accommodates our fragmented attention. The novel permits us to dip in and out; the short story demands we stay present. It requires active participation, asking readers to supply the conclusions, connections, and insights that authors deliberately withhold. We once celebrated the short story as readable “in one sitting”—but we no longer sit still long enough to read.
This paradox deepens when we consider the form’s trajectory. The short story, rooted in accessible traditions—the folktale, the fable, the feuilleton’s serialized installments—has migrated from popular culture to cultural niche. Today it appears predominantly in outlets coded as elite or specialized: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, obscure science fiction anthologies, small press journals. What was once democratic has become discerning; what was once mainstream has become marginal.
Yet this conference refuses the nostalgic impulse to simply mourn this shift or advocate a return to “better” reading practices. We reject the fantasy of fireside reading in overstuffed armchairs as the proper antidote to digital distraction. As Kenneth Goldsmith argues in Wasting Time on the Internet, the very behaviors we associate with contemporary reading—hopping, skimming, superficial engagement—can be generative, productive, and creative in their own right. Our interest lies not in lamenting what we’ve lost but in interrogating what is: What does the current state of short story reading and writing reveal about literary form, attention economies, and the future of narrative itself?
Finally, we cannot ignore the political dimensions embedded in these questions. We live in an era simultaneously characterized by perpetual distraction and by what Lyotard identified as the exhaustion of grand narratives—we are, in multiple senses, “short of stories.” The decline of encompassing metanarratives has fragmented our collective sense-making, even as our reading practices fragment our individual attention. What does the marginalization of the short story mean in this context? Is the form’s eclipse symptomatic of broader cultural shifts, or does it offer unique resources for navigating our fragmented present?

Topics of Interest
We invite submissions that engage with the contemporary short story through critical, theoretical, historical, or creative lenses. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Attention and Form: How do contemporary short stories negotiate, resist, or accommodate fragmented attention? What formal innovations emerge from these negotiations?

Distribution and Access: The migration of short fiction from mass-market magazines to literary journals, online platforms, and subscription services. What audiences are included or excluded by these shifts?

Speed and Slowness: Does the short story require a different temporality than other forms? How do contemporary writers engage with or subvert expectations of “quick” reading?

Immersion vs. Intensity: Why do readers choose novelistic immersion over short story concentration? What pleasures or affordances does each mode offer?

Popular Roots, Elite Present: How did a form with deeply democratic origins become associated with literary prestige? What is gained or lost in this transformation?

Digital Habitats: Short fiction on social media, in email newsletters, on platforms like Wattpad or Medium. How do digital environments reshape the form’s possibilities?

The Politics of Fragmentation: Reading the decline of both the short story and grand narratives as interconnected phenomena. What political work can or can’t short fiction perform today?

Productive Distraction: Following Goldsmith and others, can we theorize distracted or superficial reading as generative rather than deficient? What would this mean for short story criticism?

Genre and Niche: Science fiction, horror, speculative fiction, and other genre short stories as thriving subcultural forms. What sustains short fiction in these communities?

Global Perspectives: How do these questions play out differently across national literatures and literary markets? Where is short fiction thriving, and why?

Pedagogical Implications: Teaching short stories in an age of distraction. What happens in the classroom?

The Future of the Form: Speculative or evidence-based arguments about where short fiction is headed. New hybrids, mutations, or extinctions?