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Posted on May 17, 2021

What is a Short Story? Definitions and Examples

A short story is a form of fiction writing defined by its brevity . A short story usually falls between 3,000 and 7,000 words — the average short story length is around the 5,000 mark. Short stories primarily work to encapsulate a mood, typically covering minimal incidents with a limited cast of characters — in some cases, they might even forgo a plot altogether.   

Many early-career novelists have dabbled in the form and had their work featured in literary magazines and anthologies. Others, like Raymond Carver and Alice Munro, have made it their bread and butter. From “starter” short story writers to short story experts, there’s an incredible range of short stories out there.

In this series of guides, we'll be looking into short stories and showing you how any writer can write a powerful piece of short fiction — and even get it published. But before we get into the weeds, let's look at a few examples to demonstrate the range and flexibility of this form.

What short story should you read next?

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Broadly speaking, you could answer the question of "what is a short story" in a few ways, starting with the most obvious.

A classic short narrative

Though short stories must inherently be concise pieces of writing, they often incorporate elements of the novel to retain a similar impact. A ‘classic short narrative’ is the most story-telling-by-the-numbers that a short story can get — the plot will imitate long-form fiction by having a defined exposition, escalating rising action , a climax, and a resolution.

Short stories do differ from longer prose works in some respects: they’re unlikely to contain a huge cast of characters, multiple points of view , or successive climaxes like those found in novellas and novels. But despite these cuts, if the author does their job right, a ‘classic’ short story will be just as affecting and memorable as a novel — if not more so.

Example #1: “Speaking in Tongues” by ZZ Packer

Tia, disillusioned with her strict Pentecostal upbringing in a sleepy Southern town, escapes her great-aunt’s clutches to find her mother in Atlanta. This story starts with a classic expository beat — Tia at school, flicking through a religious textbook, dreaming of another life. This is followed by a crisis: Tia travels by bus to the big city, befriends a man on the street, and goes to stay with him, only to learn that he is a drug dealer and a pimp. Eventually, Tia returns home to her great-aunt. In all, it’s a sensitive story about the vulnerability of youth and the longing for family.

As short stories go, “Speaking In Tongues” has a pretty impressive narrative. You can see how the premise and plot could work as a longer piece of fiction, but they pack even more of a punch in this shorter form.

A vignette is a short story that presents a neatly packaged moment in time, usually in quite a technically accomplished fashion. ‘Vignette’ is French word more frequently used to signify a small portrait, but in a literary sense, it means “a brief evocative description, account, or episode”. This could be of a person, event or place. 

Fleetingness is at the crux of a vignette short story. For that reason, it is likely to be heavy on description, light on plot. You might find a particularly embellished description of a character or setting, often with a strong dose of symbolism that corresponds with a central theme.

Example #2: “Viewfinder” by Raymond Carver

“Viewfinder” has a simple premise: a traveling photographer takes a photo of the narrator’s house, sells it to him on his doorstep, and is invited in for coffee. The story emphasizes feelings of loneliness that come to the fore in their interaction, captured brilliantly by Carver’s unadorned writing style. Tales like this that attribute importance to the mundane are arguably best served by a concise form as Carver's fascination with banal events could have become repetitive and rudderless in a longer piece of work.

Many critics agree that no one writes the American working classes quite like Carver. His stories chronicle the everyday experiences of Midwestern men and women eking out a living then fish, play cards, and shoot the breeze as life passes them by. It won Carver immense critical acclaim in his lifetime and is a great example of short-form writing that emphasizes mood rather than plot.

An anecdote

An anecdote recounted to friends is most successful when it’s pacey, humorous, and has a quick crescendo. The same can be said of short stories that capitalize on this storytelling device. 

Anecdotal stories take on a more conversational tone and are more meandering in style, in contrast to the directness of other short stories and flash fiction . It can have a conventional story structure, like the classic short narrative, or it may focus on a particular stylistic recounting of an event. Basically, an anecdote allows a writer to have fun with the way a story is told — though exactly how it unfolds remains important too.

Example #3: “We Love You Crispina” by Jenny Zhang

Zhang’s 2017 short story collection Sour Heart chronicles the rough-and-tumble lives of recently immigrated Chinese-American living in downtown Manhattan. The stories in this collection are told from the perspectives of children, and the narrative takes full advantage of the impish, filterless way in which children relate their own experiences to themselves and others.

In “We Love You Crispina”, young Christina’s life in a crowded Washington Heights tenement block is refracted through her naive, contradictory understandings of the world. Her parents are struggling to get a leg up and are contemplating sending her back to Shanghai — but Christina is more concerned with how the bed bugs in their cramped apartment are making her itchy, and dissecting the interactions she has in the school playground. It’s a wonderfully nuanced exercise in contrast, as well as a reminder of what feels most important to us when we’re small, rendered potently through Christina’s 'anecdotal' voice.

An experiment with genre  

Short stories, by nature, are more flexible pieces of fiction that aren’t wedded to the diktat of longer-form fiction. It means they can play around with and challenge the expectations of a genre’s expected conventions, in a relatively ‘low stakes’ way compared to a full-blown novel. 

Oftentimes, an experiment won’t be a complete reinvention of the genre. Instead, one might find a refreshing twist on a classic trope — or, as in the example below, upping the ante and taking a genre to heights it has never been before.

Example #4: “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

This short story sent shock waves through the American literary establishment when it was first published in 1953. It follows a Southern family on a road trip to visit the children’s grandmother — who end up crashing their car and happening upon a mysterious group of men. I won’t spoil the rest for you, but one word of warning: don’t expect a happy ending.

“A Good Man Is Hard To Find” incorporates common themes of Southern gothic literature , like religious imagery, and — surprise surprise — characters meeting a gruesome demise, but its controversial final scene marks it out. The macabre detail was shocking to audiences at the time but is now held up as a stellar example of the genre (and also exemplifies how a well-executed bit of subversion can become the golden standard in literature!). You might want to sleep with one eye open after reading this, but that’s half the point, right?

An exercise in extreme brevity

How many words do you actually need to tell a great story? If you were to ask that to someone who writes flash fiction , they tell you "fewer than 1,000 words."

The defining element that sets flash fiction apart from the standard-issue short story — other than word count — is that much more needs to be implied, rather than said upfront. Flash fiction, and especially mega-short microfiction, perfectly embody this principle of inference, which itself derives from Ernest Hemingway ’s Iceberg Theory of story development.

Example #5 “Curriculum” by Sejal Shah

“ Curriculum ”, clocking in at exactly 500 words, is a great sampling of the emotional, personal language that appears frequently in flash fiction. A handkerchief, some cream cloth, and a pair of glasses become important symbols around which Shah contemplates identity and womanhood, in the form of a series of questions that follow her descriptions of the objects.

This kind of deliberate, highly considered structure ensures that Shah’s flash fiction makes a razor-sharp point, whilst also allowing for a contemplative tone that transcends the words on the page. When done well, this style of short fiction can be a greater-than-expected vehicle for thoughtful comments on a range of issues.

If you’re in the mood to read more around the form, check out our picks for the 31 best short stories .

As you can see, the short story is an art form on its own that requires deftness, clarity, and a strong grasp of how to make an economy of words compelling and innovative. If you’re feeling ready to write a short story of your own, proceed to the next post in this series.

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The short story is a fiction writer’s laboratory: here is where you can experiment with characters, plots, and ideas without the heavy lifting of writing a novel. Learning how to write a short story is essential to mastering the art of storytelling . With far fewer words to worry about, storytellers can make many more mistakes—and strokes of genius!—through experimentation and the fun of fiction writing.

Nonetheless, the art of writing short stories is not easy to master. How do you tell a complete story in so few words? What does a story need to have in order to be successful? Whether you’re struggling with how to write a short story outline, or how to fully develop a character in so few words, this guide is your starting point.

Famous authors like Virginia Woolf, Haruki Murakami, and Agatha Christie have used the short story form to play with ideas before turning those stories into novels. Whether you want to master the elements of fiction, experiment with novel ideas, or simply have fun with storytelling, here’s everything you need on how to write a short story step by step.

How to Write a Short Story: Contents

The Core Elements of a Short Story

How to write a short story outline, how to write a short story step by step, how to write a short story: length and setting, how to write a short story: point of view, how to write a short story: protagonist, antagonist, motivation, how to write a short story: characters, how to write a short story: prose, how to write a short story: story structure, how to write a short story: capturing reader interest, where to read and submit short stories.

There’s no secret formula to writing a short story. However, a good short story will have most or all of the following elements:

• A protagonist with a certain desire or need. It is essential for the protagonist to want something they don’t have, otherwise they will not drive the story forward.
• A clear dilemma. We don’t need much backstory to see how the dilemma started; we’re primarily concerned with how the protagonist resolves it.
• A decision. What does the protagonist do to resolve their dilemma?
• A climax. In Freytag’s Pyramid , the climax of a story is when the tension reaches its peak, and the reader discovers the outcome of the protagonist’s decision(s).
• An outcome. How does the climax change the protagonist? Are they a different person? Do they have a different philosophy or outlook on life?

Of course, short stories also utilize the elements of fiction , such as a setting , plot , and point of view . It helps to study these elements and to understand their intricacies. But, when it comes to laying down the skeleton of a short story, the above elements are what you need to get started.

Note: a short story rarely, if ever, has subplots. The focus should be entirely on a single, central storyline. Subplots will either pull focus away from the main story, or else push the story into the territory of novellas and novels.

The shorter the story is, the fewer of these elements are essentials. If you’re interested in writing short-short stories, check out our guide on how to write flash fiction .

Some writers are “pantsers”—they “write by the seat of their pants,” making things up on the go with little more than an idea for a story. Other writers are “plotters,” meaning they decide the story’s structure in advance of writing it.

You don’t need a short story outline to write a good short story. But, if you’d like to give yourself some scaffolding before putting words on the page, this article answers the question of how to write a short story outline:

https://writers.com/how-to-write-a-story-outline

There are many ways to approach the short story craft, but this method is tried-and-tested for writers of all levels. Here’s how to write a short story step-by-step.

1. Start With an Idea

Often, generating an idea is the hardest part. You want to write, but what will you write about?

What’s more, it’s easy to start coming up with ideas and then dismissing them. You want to tell an authentic, original story, but everything you come up with has already been written, it seems.

Here are a few tips:

• Originality presents itself in your storytelling, not in your ideas. For example, the premise of both Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ostrovsky’s The Snow Maiden are very similar: two men and two women, in intertwining love triangles, sort out their feelings for each other amidst mischievous forest spirits, love potions, and friendship drama. The way each story is written makes them very distinct from one another, to the point where, unless it’s pointed out to you, you might not even notice the similarities.
• An idea is not a final draft. You will find that exploring the possibilities of your story will generate something far different than the idea you started out with. This is a good thing—it means you made the story your own!
• Experiment with genres and tropes. Even if you want to write literary fiction , pay attention to the narrative structures that drive genre stories, and practice your storytelling using those structures. Again, you will naturally make the story your own simply by playing with ideas.

If you’re struggling simply to find ideas, try out this prompt generator , or pull prompts from this Twitter .

2. Outline, OR Conceive Your Characters

If you plan to outline, do so once you’ve generated an idea. You can learn about how to write a short story outline earlier in this article.

If you don’t plan to outline, you should at least start with a character or characters. Certainly, you need a protagonist, but you should also think about any characters that aid or inhibit your protagonist’s journey.

When thinking about character development, ask the following questions:

• What is my character’s background? Where do they come from, how did they get here, where do they want to be?
• What does your character desire the most? This can be both material or conceptual, like “fitting in” or “being loved.”
• What is your character’s fatal flaw? In other words, what limitation prevents the protagonist from achieving their desire? Often, this flaw is a blind spot that directly counters their desire. For example, self hatred stands in the way of a protagonist searching for love.
• How does your character think and speak? Think of examples, both fictional and in the real world, who might resemble your character.

In short stories, there are rarely more characters than a protagonist, an antagonist (if relevant), and a small group of supporting characters. The more characters you include, the longer your story will be. Focus on making only one or two characters complex: it is absolutely okay to have the rest of the cast be flat characters that move the story along.

Learn more about character development here:

https://writers.com/character-development-definition

3. Write Scenes Around Conflict

Once you have an outline or some characters, start building scenes around conflict. Every part of your story, including the opening sentence, should in some way relate to the protagonist’s conflict.

Conflict is the lifeblood of storytelling: without it, the reader doesn’t have a clear reason to keep reading. Loveable characters are not enough, as the story has to give the reader something to root for.

Take, for example, Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story The Cask of Amontillado . We start at the conflict: the narrator has been slighted by Fortunato, and plans to exact revenge. Every scene in the story builds tension and follows the protagonist as he exacts this revenge.

In your story, start writing scenes around conflict, and make sure each paragraph and piece of dialogue relates, in some way, to your protagonist’s unmet desires.

Read more about writing effective conflict here:

What is Conflict in a Story? Definition and Examples

4. Write Your First Draft

The scenes you build around conflict will eventually be stitched into a complete story. Make sure as the story progresses that each scene heightens the story’s tension, and that this tension remains unbroken until the climax resolves whether or not your protagonist meets their desires.

Don’t stress too hard on writing a perfect story. Rather, take Anne Lamott’s advice, and “write a shitty first draft.” The goal is not to pen a complete story at first draft; rather, it’s to set ideas down on paper. You are simply, as Shannon Hale suggests, “shoveling sand into a box so that later [you] can build castles.”

5. Step Away, Breathe, Revise

Whenever Stephen King finishes a novel, he puts it in a drawer and doesn’t think about it for 6 weeks. With short stories, you probably don’t need to take as long of a break. But, the idea itself is true: when you’ve finished your first draft, set it aside for a while. Let yourself come back to the story with fresh eyes, so that you can confidently revise, revise, revise .

In revision, you want to make sure each word has an essential place in the story, that each scene ramps up tension, and that each character is clearly defined. The culmination of these elements allows a story to explore complex themes and ideas, giving the reader something to think about after the story has ended.

6. Compare Against Our Short Story Checklist

Does your story have everything it needs to succeed? Compare it against this short story checklist, as written by our instructor Rosemary Tantra Bensko.

Below is a collection of practical short story writing tips by Writers.com instructor Rosemary Tantra Bensko . Each paragraph is its own checklist item: a core element of short story writing advice to follow unless you have clear reasons to the contrary. We hope it’s a helpful resource in your own writing.

Update 9/1/2020: We’ve now made a summary of Rosemary’s short story checklist available as a PDF download . Enjoy!

Click to download

Your short story is 1000 to 7500 words in length.

The story takes place in one time period, not spread out or with gaps other than to drive someplace, sleep, etc. If there are those gaps, there is a space between the paragraphs, the new paragraph beginning flush left, to indicate a new scene.

Each scene takes place in one location, or in continual transit, such as driving a truck or flying in a plane.

Unless it’s a very lengthy Romance story, in which there may be two Point of View (POV) characters, there is one POV character. If we are told what any character secretly thinks, it will only be the POV character. The degree to which we are privy to the unexpressed thoughts, memories and hopes of the POV character remains consistent throughout the story.

You avoid head-hopping by only having one POV character per scene, even in a Romance. You avoid straying into even brief moments of telling us what other characters think other than the POV character. You use words like “apparently,” “obviously,” or “supposedly” to suggest how non-POV-characters think rather than stating it.

Your short story has one clear protagonist who is usually the character changing most.

Your story has a clear antagonist, who generally makes the protagonist change by thwarting his goals.

(Possible exception to the two short story writing tips above: In some types of Mystery and Action stories, particularly in a series, etc., the protagonist doesn’t necessarily grow personally, but instead his change relates to understanding the antagonist enough to arrest or kill him.)

The protagonist changes with an Arc arising out of how he is stuck in his Flaw at the beginning of the story, which makes the reader bond with him as a human, and feel the pain of his problems he causes himself. (Or if it’s the non-personal growth type plot: he’s presented at the beginning of the story with a high-stakes problem that requires him to prevent or punish a crime.)

The protagonist usually is shown to Want something, because that’s what people normally do, defining their personalities and behavior patterns, pushing them onward from day to day. This may be obvious from the beginning of the story, though it may not become heightened until the Inciting Incident , which happens near the beginning of Act 1. The Want is usually something the reader sort of wants the character to succeed in, while at the same time, knows the Want is not in his authentic best interests. This mixed feeling in the reader creates tension.

The protagonist is usually shown to Need something valid and beneficial, but at first, he doesn’t recognize it, admit it, honor it, integrate it with his Want, or let the Want go so he can achieve the Need instead. Ideally, the Want and Need can be combined in a satisfying way toward the end for the sake of continuity of forward momentum of victoriously achieving the goals set out from the beginning. It’s the encounters with the antagonist that forcibly teach the protagonist to prioritize his Needs correctly and overcome his Flaw so he can defeat the obstacles put in his path.

The protagonist in a personal growth plot needs to change his Flaw/Want but like most people, doesn’t automatically do that when faced with the problem. He tries the easy way, which doesn’t work. Only when the Crisis takes him to a low point does he boldly change enough to become victorious over himself and the external situation. What he learns becomes the Theme.

Each scene shows its main character’s goal at its beginning, which aligns in a significant way with the protagonist’s overall goal for the story. The scene has a “charge,” showing either progress toward the goal or regression away from the goal by the ending. Most scenes end with a negative charge, because a story is about not obtaining one’s goals easily, until the end, in which the scene/s end with a positive charge.

The protagonist’s goal of the story becomes triggered until the Inciting Incident near the beginning, when something happens to shake up his life. This is the only major thing in the story that is allowed to be a random event that occurs to him.

Your characters speak differently from one another, and their dialogue suggests subtext, what they are really thinking but not saying: subtle passive-aggressive jibes, their underlying emotions, etc.

Your characters are not illustrative of ideas and beliefs you are pushing for, but come across as real people.

Your language is succinct, fresh and exciting, specific, colorful, avoiding clichés and platitudes. Sentence structures vary. In Genre stories, the language is simple, the symbolism is direct, and words are well-known, and sentences are relatively short. In Literary stories , you are freer to use more sophisticated ideas, words, sentence structures, styles , and underlying metaphors and implied motifs.

Your plot elements occur in the proper places according to classical Three Act Structure (or Freytag’s Pyramid ) so the reader feels he has vicariously gone through a harrowing trial with the protagonist and won, raising his sense of hope and possibility. Literary short stories may be more subtle, with lower stakes, experimenting beyond classical structures like the Hero’s Journey. They can be more like vignettes sometimes, or even slice-of-life, though these types are hard to place in publications.

In Genre stories, all the questions are answered, threads are tied up, problems are solved, though the results of carnage may be spread over the landscape. In Literary short stories, you are free to explore uncertainty, ambiguity, and inchoate, realistic endings that suggest multiple interpretations, and unresolved issues.

Some Literary stories may be nonrealistic, such as with Surrealism, Absurdism, New Wave Fabulism, Weird and Magical Realism . If this is what you write, they still need their own internal logic and they should not be bewildering as to the what the reader is meant to experience, whether it’s a nuanced, unnameable mood or a trip into the subconscious.

Literary stories may also go beyond any label other than Experimental. For example, a story could be a list of To Do items on a paper held by a magnet to a refrigerator for the housemate to read. The person writing the list may grow more passive-aggressive and manipulative as the list grows, and we learn about the relationship between the housemates through the implied threats and cajoling.

Your short story is suspenseful, meaning readers hope the protagonist will achieve his best goal, his Need, by the Climax battle against the antagonist.

Your story entertains. This is especially necessary for Genre short stories.

The story captivates readers at the very beginning with a Hook, which can be a puzzling mystery to solve, an amazing character’s or narrator’s Voice, an astounding location, humor, a startling image, or a world the reader wants to become immersed in.

Expository prose (telling, like an essay) takes up very, very little space in your short story, and it does not appear near the beginning. The story is in Narrative format instead, in which one action follows the next. You’ve removed every unnecessary instance of Expository prose and replaced it with showing Narrative. Distancing words like “used to,” “he would often,” “over the years, he,” “each morning, he” indicate that you are reporting on a lengthy time period, summing it up, rather than sticking to Narrative format, in which immediacy makes the story engaging.

You’ve earned the right to include Expository Backstory by making the reader yearn for knowing what happened in the past to solve a mystery. This can’t possibly happen at the beginning, obviously. Expository Backstory does not take place in the first pages of your story.

Your reader cares what happens and there are high stakes (especially important in Genre stories). Your reader worries until the end, when the protagonist survives, succeeds in his quest to help the community, gets the girl, solves or prevents the crime, achieves new scientific developments, takes over rule of his realm, etc.

Every sentence is compelling enough to urge the reader to read the next one—because he really, really wants to—instead of doing something else he could be doing. Your story is not going to be assigned to people to analyze in school like the ones you studied, so you have found a way from the beginning to intrigue strangers to want to spend their time with your words.

Whether you’re looking for inspiration or want to publish your own stories, you’ll find great literary journals for writers of all backgrounds at this article:

https://writers.com/short-story-submissions

Learn How to Write a Short Story at Writers.com

The short story takes an hour to learn and a lifetime to master. Learn how to write a short story with Writers.com. Our upcoming fiction courses will give you the ropes to tell authentic, original short stories that captivate and entrance your readers.

Rosemary – Is there any chance you could add a little something to your checklist? I’d love to know the best places to submit our short stories for publication. Thanks so much.

Hi, Kim Hanson,

Some good places to find publications specific to your story are NewPages, Poets and Writers, Duotrope, and The Submission Grinder.

“ In Genre stories, all the questions are answered, threads are tied up, problems are solved, though the results of carnage may be spread over the landscape.”

Not just no but NO.

See for example the work of MacArthur Fellow Kelly Link.

[…] How to Write a Short Story: The Short Story Checklist […]

Thank you for these directions and tips. It’s very encouraging to someone like me, just NOW taking up writing.

[…] Writers.com. A great intro to writing. https://writers.com/how-to-write-a-short-story […]

Hello: I started to write seriously in the late 70’s. I loved to write in High School in the early 60’s but life got in the way. Around the 00’s many of the obstacles disappeared. Since then I have been writing more, and some of my work was vanilla transgender stories. Here in 2024 transgender stories have become tiresome because I really don’t have much in common with that mind set.

The glare of an editor that could potentially pay me is quite daunting, so I would like to start out unpaid to see where that goes. I am not sure if a writer’s agent would be a good fit for me. My work life was in the Trades, not as some sort of Academic. That alone causes timidity, but I did read about a fiction writer who had been a house painter.

This is my first effort to publish since the late 70’s. My pseudonym would perhaps include Ahabidah.

Gwen Boucher.

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Home » Writing » What is a short story?

What is the history of the short story?

Short-form storytelling can be traced back to ancient legends, mythology, folklore, and fables found in communities all over the world. Some of these stories existed in written form, but many were passed down through oral traditions. By the 14 th century, the most well-known stories included  One Thousand and One Nights (Middle Eastern folk tales by multiple authors, later known as  Arabian Nights ) and Canterbury Tales  (by Geoffrey Chaucer).

It wasn’t until the early 19th century that short story collections by individual authors appeared more regularly in print. First, it was the publication of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, then Edgar Allen Poe’s Gothic fiction, and eventually, stories by Anton Chekhov, who is often credited as a founder of the modern short story.

The popularity of short stories grew along with the surge of  print magazines  and journals. Newspaper and magazine editors began publishing stories as entertainment, creating a demand for short, plot-driven narratives with mass appeal. By the early 1900s,  The Atlantic Monthly , The New Yorker , and  Harper’s Magazine were paying good money for short stories that showed more literary techniques. That golden era of publishing gave rise to the short story as we know it today.

What are the different types of short stories?

Short stories come in all kinds of categories: action, adventure, biography, comedy, crime, detective, drama, dystopia, fable, fantasy, history, horror, mystery, philosophy, politics, romance, satire, science fiction, supernatural, thriller, tragedy, and Western. Here are some popular types of short stories, literary styles, and authors associated with them:  

• Fable: A tale that provides a moral lesson, often using animals, mythical creatures, forces of nature, or inanimate objects to come to life (Brothers Grimm, Aesop)
• Flash fiction : A story between 5 to 2,000 words that lacks traditional plot structure or character development and is often characterized by a surprise or twist of fate (Lydia Davis)
• Mini saga: A type of micro-fiction using exactly 50 words (!) to tell a story
• Vignette: A descriptive scene or defining moment that does not contain a complete plot or narrative but reveals an important detail about a character or idea (Sandra Cisneros)
• Modernism:  Experimenting with narrative form, style, and chronology (inner monologues, stream of consciousness) to capture the experience of an individual (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf)
• Postmodernism: Using fragmentation, paradox, or unreliable narrators to explore the relationship between the author, reader, and text (Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges)
• Magical realism: Combining realistic narrative or setting with elements of surrealism, dreams, or fantasy (Gabriel García Márquez)
• Minimalism: Writing characterized by brevity, straightforward language, and a lack of plot resolutions (Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel)

What are some famous short stories?

• “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) – Edgar Allen Poe
• “The Necklace” (1884) – Guy de Maupassant
• “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• “The Story of an Hour” (1894) – Kate Chopin
• “Gift of the Magi” (1905) – O. Henry
• “The Dead,” “The Dubliners” (1914) – James Joyce
• “The Garden Party” (1920) – Katherine Mansfield
• “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) – Ernest Hemingway
• “The Lottery” (1948) – Shirley Jackson
• “Lamb to the Slaughter” (1953) – Roald Dahl
• “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (1955) – Gabriel García Márquez
• “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) – James Baldwin
• “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953), “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1961) – Flannery O’Connor

What are some popular short story collections?

• The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
• Labyrinths – Jorge Luis Borges
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman – Haruki Murakami
• Nine Stories – J.D. Salinger
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – Raymond Carver
• The Stories of John Cheever – John Cheever
• Welcome to the Monkey House – Kurt Vonnegut
• Complete Stories – Dorothy Parker
• Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri
• Suddenly a Knock at the Door – Etgar Keret

Do you have a short story collection or another book project in the works? Download our free layout software , BookWright, today and start envisioning the pages of your next book!

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Short Fiction Overview

18 min read • november 18, 2021

Laura Walton

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What is a Short Story?

It’s not just a story that is short. Well, it is that, but a short story is not just a piece of a longer story or novel: it is a brief, stand-alone piece of literature with a beginning, middle, and end, character development, theme, and all of the fun literary devices that exist in longer stories. It does what a novel does, in fewer pages and tighter images, sentences, and phrases. This means that a literary short story is almost always denser than a novel.

Wait. Literary short story ? As opposed to what?

Literary vs. Commercial Fiction

Okay, so. If you like to read, and you read widely, then you probably have a few different types of literature that you go to at different times. Sometimes, you’re lying on the beach, or on a holiday break at home, and you want something easy to follow, with a clear beginning, middle, and end, without complicated plot or character development. That’s cool, and books and stories that fall into that category are called commercial fiction .

Commercial fiction is meant to be consumed quickly and easily, and doesn’t require repeat reading to get the full impact of the stories told. Examples of some popular commercial fiction include novels like Divergent, The Da Vinci Code, Crazy Rich Asians, and The Hunger Games .

There is nothing wrong with reading commercial fiction: even we literature teachers need a break from diving deeply into novels, and these books and stories provide an escape from reality for a short while. But you won’t see commercial fiction appearing on the AP Lit exam. Why? Because there isn’t enough deep analysis to be done with commercial fiction.

As opposed to commercial fiction, which provides an escape from the real world, literary fiction forces us to dive more deeply into the real world, even through fictional worlds, and think about our reality through literary devices and parallels. Literary fiction requires multiple readings, and deep readings at that, to fully understand the text. We are often unsatisfied with the endings of literary short stories and novels because, like in reality, they don’t end with loose ends tied up.

Literary fiction leaves us with questions. It makes us go back and find “something that we missed.” Literary fiction uses figurative language and literary devices - devices that, by definition, are indirect descriptors - to depict a story, and depict an author’s view of the world. The literature you read in your AP Lit class - the kind that can make your head hurt with multiple deeper meanings and symbols - is literary fiction .

Is there a clear-cut line between the two types? Nope. As with most things in life, fiction falls in a spectrum: some commercial fiction has literary elements, and some literary fiction may toe the line of being consumable and commercial (and enjoyable to read!). Just know that what you will study in AP Lit and analyze on the exam will fall into the literary category in some way.

How are short stories used on the AP Literature Exam?

You will read and analyze entire poems during the multiple-choice and free-response Q1 sections of the exam. You will analyze an entire novel or play for your free-response Q3. But short stories don’t have their own special section, and you will rarely, if ever, get to analyze a full short story on the exam.

Then what’s the point of studying short stories??

Firstly, they do appear on the exam, but in excerpts and pieces in the multiple-choice and free-response Q2 portions. (Just because a short story is “short,” doesn’t mean it can fit on one page for your analysis.)

Secondly, analyzing short stories prepares you for reading and analyzing longer novels like a boss scholar: if you’re used to searching a short text for deeper symbolism, characterization , tone , and literary devices , then you’ll use the same skills to search novels and plays.

And finally, because you only get those brief excerpts from short stories, novels, and plays on the exam, and you’re in the habit of reading short stories like a scholar, then you’ll breeze through analyzing the excerpts on the exam. Or it’ll at least make it a bit easier on you.

How to read a short story. Like, really read it.

Okay, cool. Now you know the difference between literary and commercial fiction, why literary fiction is used in your AP Lit class and on the exam, and how literary short stories are used on the AP Lit exam itself. Now, it’s time for why you’re really here.

How the devil do I read a short story like a scholar?

First of all, read the story more than once. Think you’ve got an easy night because your teacher only assigned a ten-page story to read? Think again. Short literary fiction is designed to be perplexing, and reading the story only once is likely going to leave you mega-confused.

Read the story at least twice, ideally three or four times, and annotate the story during those second and third and fourth reads. I always suggest reading it the first time for understanding, and the second and subsequent reads for further comprehension and analysis.

Neat. Got it. But annotation : my teacher tells me to annotate, but I never know what to annotate, or how!

Different people annotate in different ways, and the more you do it, the better you’ll get at annotating in a way that makes sense to you. Start with a simple, consistent symbol system, like this one

! anything that stands out to you in some way, or is surprising

* anything that is important (I’ll get to what can be “important” later on)

? anything that is confusing, or that you have a specific question about

→ anything that has a real-world connection or parallel

Circle words or phrases that are unfamiliar, or that are used in a way that you’ve never seen.

Underline or highlight the particular phrases or passages that elicit these reactions, and mark them with these symbols. A word of caution: avoid highlighting or underlining hugely long passages, and especially without using an annotation system. Otherwise, you might end up with the whole short story highlighted, with no real annotation or notes for you to refer back to!

Next, you want to make notes in the margins near these marked phrases and passages. For example, if something stood out to you, briefly note what about the passage, precisely, stood out. Or, write the question that you have about the particular phrase or paragraph or character. Annotations do not have to be long: they just need to make sense to you as you go back through the text and look for evidence to use in your writing and discussions.

Another effective annotation tool, especially for comprehension, is summary and paraphrasing: next to each passage or paragraph, write a brief summary, in your own words, describing what is happening. In this way, you can also ask questions, mark what stands out to you, and make connections between the text and the real world (which is where you’re going to find themes ). If you want even more practice or guidance with annotation , we have a stream for that !

🎥 Watch: AP Literature - Annotating for Understanding

Now, then. Back to my favorite teacher phrase: “Mark anything that’s important.” You’re probably thinking to yourself, “But everything is important! Highlight all the things!” Or, perhaps, “Nothing is important or more important in this text. Gahhhh!”

So, let’s talk about what's “important” in a short story , shall we? We’ll work with “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin for these sections, so read it and annotate it as explained above. The story is super short, and great for a quick dive into reading short stories like a champ.

The (Sometimes) Hidden Question: Overall Meaning

For every single analysis you do for a short story , you must determine its overall meaning and general themes . Why? Because every AP Lit exam question, whether it directly states it or not, will ask you how some aspect of the story you’re working with ties into the overall meaning of the text .

This phrase is most commonly seen with Q3 prompts (that is, prompts that ask you to analyze full novels and plays), but short stories also have overall meaning and purpose that you need to determine for analysis. Let’s look at some sample prompts to show this.

Sample Prompt 1: In serious literature, no scene of violence exists for its own sake. Choose a novel or play that confronts the reader or audience with a scene or scenes of violence and analyze the significance of the scene or scenes to the work’s meaning. (from CollegeBoard.org)

Sample Prompt 2: Choose a novel or play in which cultural, physical, or geographical surroundings shape psychological or moral traits in a character. Then write a well-organized essay in which you analyze how surroundings affect this character and illuminate the meaning of the work as a whole . (from CollegeBoard.org)

In these two Q3 prompts, as with most of the past and future prompts you’ll see, the question asks you not only to analyze a particular aspect of the story (violence, surroundings, etc.), but how that aspect “illuminates” or highlights the meaning of the work. “Meaning” can also be worded as “author’s purpose,” as in the following sample:

Sample Prompt 3: Although literary critics have tended to praise the unique in literary characterization , many authors have employed the stereotyped character successfully. Select a novel or play and analyze how the conventional or stereotyped character(s) function(s) to achieve the author’s purpose. (from CollegeBoard.org)

When you determine the overall meaning of a text, you’re determining why the author chose to write the text, AKA the author’s purpose, as well. So, don’t fall into the trap where you simply describe the first part of the prompt and leave out tying it back to the meaning; otherwise, you’ve only answered half of the question. Your thesis statement should answer all the questions asked in the prompt.

Short Stories and Complex Relationships. (No, Not That Kind. Maybe.)

Another common phrase you’ll see in AP Lit prompts, especially for Q2 (the prose prompt), is “analyze the complex relationship between…” or other variations of complexity. Because you’re studying and analyzing literary fiction , you will find complexity in the text. Finding the overall meaning or author’s purpose in a text should lead you to the complex aspect of the story you need.

But what, exactly, counts as “complex” or a “complex relationship”? Complexity is anything that makes something, well, complicated. Consider the following example regarding fatherhood:

Society values fathers as figures of protection, love, and wisdom for their children.

How might an author make this idea of the fatherhood complex? They might portray a father who does not display one or any of these traits, or a character who questions what fatherhood means to him versus what his society believes.

Or, to tie an example into “The Story of an Hour”:

Society dictates that marriage is an expression of love and devotion, and a spouse should grieve the loss of a spouse.

How does the author create complexity in her short story ? Louise, rather than feeling grief and loss at her husband’s death, feels freed and triumphant, even though she knows this is wrong in her society’s eyes.

Your prompt may (and has in the very recent past!) ask you to describe “how the author explores the complex interplay between emotions and social propriety” in the passage. You would then use examples of the plot, diction, literary devices , and figurative language to describe how and why the author shows this complexity.

Literary Devices and Figurative Language in Short Stories

One of the major items you’ll look for in short stories on the AP Lit exam is literary devices, and their effect on the passage as a whole , or tied into a particularly complex aspect of the story. So, you’ll want to mark the literary devices you see, and describe the what, how, and why of the device:

• What is the literary device being used?
• How does the author use this device? Who or what does it describe? Where does it appear? How does this device show complexity and overall meaning ?
• Why does the author choose to use this device to accomplish what? Why does the author choose this literary device over another to show complexity and meaning?

A common pitfall with describing literary devices is doing just that - simply describing the device, and not what its purpose or effect is in the story. Any phrase or sentence you pull should be evidence towards your thesis and used as such in your essay. If you highlight a literary device from a story in your essay, you’d better be ready to describe how and why it’s used; otherwise, you’ve wasted valuable time and cramped your hand for nothing.

🎥 Watch: AP Literature - Figurative Language and Function

Let’s do an example from “Story of an Hour”:

There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory.

There are multiple literary devices we can pull out of this sentence, but let’s focus on the simile: “she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory.” Great! We have the what : Chopin uses a simile to describe what Louise looks like. But don’t stop there.

How does Chopin use this device? She uses the simile to compare her main character, Louise, to a goddess of victory, of triumph, as she leaves her room for the first time since believing she is free from the shackles of marriage.

Now, for the more difficult part: why does Chopin use a simile, and in particular, this simile, to describe Louise? You may consider why she would choose a simile over other literary devices (such as imagery or metaphor), or why she chose the particular image of a goddess of victory instead of simply a goddess, or a winner of a race, or something similar.

This is where your analysis ties into your thesis. What are you trying to prove through your thesis, and how does this simile, and use of this simile, support your argument? How does this phrase you’ve pulled tie into the complexity and meaning of the story overall?

The simile can hearken back to the discussion of social complexity: that Louise, rather than follow social customs and grieve her husband’s death, walks like a goddess of victory over the stifling institution of marriage. But, she is just that: like a goddess of victory, rather than metaphorically being one, and will lose that image at her husband’s arrival.

Characterization in Short Stories

Remember: a short story is not just a piece of a story. It’s a story with a plot and character development, with a defined beginning, middle, and end, in a shorter space than a novel or play. Sure, you might be thrown into the middle of a setting or scene, but that doesn’t mean that a character isn’t fully hashed out in a short span of time, or that a “complex relationship” can’t develop between two or more characters.

This means that you, yes you, can and will do complex analyses of characters in short stories or excerpts.

When reading literary short stories, look for and annotate any figurative language , diction, and narration that fleshes out a character. Physical descriptions, flashbacks, dialogue, and the characters' responses to the action of the story all form their characterization . If an author bothered to fit a description into the small space they chose to write the story, then it’s important and should be marked.

In “The Story of an Hour,” Louise is a full-fledged character with personality traits, flaws, and development, all in the span of two pages. Chopin describes the “complex relationship” between Louise and her husband in two short sentences:

“And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she had not.”

Spouses are expected to love each other, yet in these lines, Louise admits that this was not always the case. Chopin also portrays Louise’s complex relationship with her society in the following paragraph:

“There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.”

Louise does not agree with the norms placed upon her by her society: she looks forward to “living for herself” rather than by the will of her husband or the institution of marriage, and she believes she will find happiness outside of where her society deems it appropriate to do so. Chopin continues, through narration, imagery, and figurative language , to fully develop Louise into a complex character. Assume that this is the case with every piece of literary fiction you read, and analyze accordingly.

All Roads Lead to Tone and Irony

This is where finding the overall meaning of the text is important again: you have to know an author’s tone towards a subject or person before you can determine meaning. Does the author have a positive or negative tone towards a social norm or idea? How does the author show this tone through their diction (word choice)?

In “The Story of an Hour,” Chopin displays her negative tone towards marriage in the following line:

“There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.”

We can infer Chopin’s negative tone through words such as “blind persistence,” which imply that men and women of her time followed a norm without fully seeing or understanding its reasoning, and through the phrase “believe they have a right,” implying that people believe, but do not actually hold, the right towards another “fellow-creature.”

So, we know that Chopin does not see marriage as a positive institution. As a result, we know her overall purpose includes showing her readers this idea, and that any part of her story that portrays marriage in a positive light is likely to be ironic. You can do this same exercise (with more examples to prove your point) with any short story you read

Ooh, the irony! Errr, remind me what that is again, exactly?

Irony breeds in short stories: they are an excellent medium to show an author’s often divisive view of a social norm, stereotype, or relationship. Short stories move through a plot quickly, allowing an author to get to an ironic ending or description more quickly than in a novel or play. Missing an author’s ironic tone or plot twist can result in a misreading of the text and misanalysis on the exam.

Yikes! So, how do we make sure we spot irony in a short story ?

First of all, remember that something is ironic when the reader expects one outcome, and the opposite happens. We see irony appear in three different forms:

Verbal Irony: The author or a character says something, but means the opposite. (A lot of people call this being “sarcastic.” Sarcasm is a type of irony, but involves being cruel on purpose, whereas irony is not always cruel.)

Example: “[Selling babies for eating] would increase the care and tenderness of mothers towards their children...” - Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal” (He definitely means the opposite of what he is saying. Trust me.)

Situational Irony: The reader expects one event or ending, but the opposite occurs.

Example: Instead of being happy about her husband’s appearance after believing him dead, Louise dies of heart failure at the end of “The Story of an Hour.”

Dramatic Irony : The reader knows something the characters in the story do not.

Example: The doctors proclaimed that Louise died of “heart disease - of the joy that kills” at the sight of her husband. We, the audience, know she died of shock and horror at her husband’s appearance.

Irony can be notoriously hard to spot in written texts. Why? Because our markers for irony, especially verbal irony, are just that: verbal. We listen for our friend’s tone of voice when they say they’re having a “great day” (is it actually great, or are they miserable and being ironic?). Unfortunately, we have yet to invent a special font for irony, so we have to look for other aspects in a short story to find it:

• Tone : See the explanation at the beginning of this section.
• Context: What is the author discussing in the short story ? For example, we know that the ending of “The Story of an Hour” is dramatically ironic because we go the context that Louise wants to be free of her marriage, not back in it. If something doesn’t make sense with the rest of the plot or descriptions from the story, go back and re-read it with an ironic tone in mind, and it may come together.
• Hyperbole: Are other parts of the text, like descriptions of characters or situations, exaggerated to an extreme degree? Do you see stereotypes in a piece of fiction? It’s likely that the author is attempting to ridicule and subvert these norms and stereotypes through exaggeration and irony.
• Diction: Word choice ties into context and hyperbole. How is the author describing particular characters and situations? Are the words the author chooses portraying something in a positive or negative light? Do they exaggerate a situation? Diction will also indicate tone , which will indicate whether or not an author is being ironic.

Thematic Analysis of a Short Story

So, now you have the tools to annotate and mark the important aspects of a short story for analysis, and you know what to look for. Now, what do you do with this evidence, and how will you use it on the exam?

As explained in the separate sections above, you will use whatever you find in the short story to support your thesis statement that you create based on the prompt you receive in the Free Response section of the exam. When you do timed writing, keep these tips in mind:

• DO read and mark the entire prompt before diving into the story. This way, you’ll narrow down what you’re analyzing.
• DO consider the what, how, and why of an author’s literary choices ( tone , literary devices , characterization , etc.). High scores on AP Lit essays are built on diving into the “whys” of the stories, not just the “whats.”
• DON’T feel like you need to mark and find every single literary device or super-secret symbol in the story. Focus on what you need to prove your thesis, and only your thesis.

You will also use short story excerpts for the Multiple Choice section of the exam. Many of the same strategies remain as for the Free Response analysis:

• Read through the questions before reading the story. Mark any lines or passages that the questions ask you to analyze specifically.
• Annotate for comprehension and clarity (using summary and paraphrase).
• The questions will ask for the whats, hows, and whys of a story and the author’s choices - be sure to look and mark for all three as you annotate.

For either section, the best things you can do for yourself are READ WIDELY and PRACTICE using past AP Lit prompts, multiple-choice questions, and good, dense examples of literary short stories.

Some good, dense literary short stories for practice (and enjoyment!)

Want to work your analysis chops on short stories, but don’t know where to begin? Here is a non-exhaustive list of good, dense literary short stories to dive into and practice the skills detailed in this guide. As a caution, much literary fiction by nature contains mature content and controversial subject matter; feel free to look up a synopsis of any short story to determine if the story is right for you:

“This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” by Sherman Alexie

“The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman

“Hill Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway

“Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

“Revelation” by Flannery O’Connor

“The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe

Key Terms to Review ( 11 )

Characterization

Complex Relationships

Dramatic Irony

Figurative Language

Literary Devices

Literary Fiction

Overall Meaning

Short Story

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48 Writing About Short Fiction

Dr. Karen Palmer

Analysis means to break something down in order to better understand how it works. To analyze a literary work is to pull it apart and look at its discrete components to see how those components contribute to the meaning and/or effect of the whole. Thus, a literary analysis argument considers what has been learned in analyzing a work (What do the parts look like and how do they function?) and forwards a particular perspective on their contribution to the whole (In light of the author’s use of diction, for example, what meaning does the novel, as a whole, yield?).

When writing a critical theory paper, your goal is to bring out a deeper meaning in a text through the application of a critical theory. For instance, you might show how an author illustrates the status of women in a particular time period (as in “The Story of an Hour”) or how a short story’s focus on money or status highlights a disparity between the classes (“The Necklace”).

Your own findings from your analysis of the primary text should be a priority in your interpretation of the work. Analytical skills are invaluable as you explore any subject, investigating the subject by breaking it down and looking closely at how it functions. Finding patterns in your observations, then, helps you to interpret your analysis and communicate to others how you came to your conclusions about the subject’s meaning and/or effect. As you make your case to the readers, it is crucial that you make it clear how your perspective is relevant to them. Ideally, they will come away from your argument intrigued by the new insights you have revealed about the subject.

Step 5: Researching

Although analysis is a crucial phase in writing about any subject, the next step of contributing to society’s knowledge and understanding is to participate in the scholarly dialog on the subject. The dialog among scholars, conveyed through academic articles and books, is a crucial resource for any researcher.

Regardless of the type of critical lens you are using for your paper, discovering more about the author of the text can add to your understanding of the text and add depth to your argument. Author pages are located in the Literature Online ProQuest database. Here, you can find information about an author and his/her work, along with a list of recent articles written about the author. This is a wonderful starting point for your research.

The next step is to attempt to locate an article about the text itself. It’s important to narrow down your database choices to the Literature category. In some cases, the options will be numerous. You can narrow down the choices by adding your critical lens to the search terms. ie “Story of an Hour” and feminism

In the case that your results are very limited, you might need to think outside of the box. Look for the author’s name and your critical theory. It’s possibly that articles have been written about another of the author’s pieces that can still add to your project. Another option is to search the full ProQuest database or the newspaper databases. Some periodicals publish literary criticism and reviews. Since they are popular, rather than academic, sources, these may be found in the periodical databases, rather than the literature options.

Another option is to search for an article relating to the critical lens you’ve chosen. For example, you might look for an article on the key elements of feminist literary criticism or on Freud’s id, ego, and superego to help you support your argument.

Finally, you might look for articles pertinent to an issue discussed in the short story. For example, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is about the treatment of post-partum depression. A modern day article on the appropriate treatment for this illness or a survey of the treatment of the illness could be a fantastic addition to your paper.

Remember, it is helpful to keep a Research Journal to track your research. Your journal should include, at a minimum, the correct MLA citation of the source, a brief summary of the article, and any quotes that stick out to you. A note about how you think the article adds to your understanding of the topic or might contribute to your project is a good addition, as well.

Step 6: Creating a Thesis and Outline

By the time you have completed an analysis of the story and finished your research, you should have a pretty clear idea about what you want to say about the text you’ve chosen. Your thesis should convey the main point you want to make about the story as viewed through the lens you chose. Perhaps you are looking at “The Yellow Wallpaper” through a feminist lens. Perhaps you want to call attention to the fact that women’s voices were unheard in their battles with post-partum depression. Your thesis might say something like, “Gilman used her short story to highlight the inappropriate and often harmful treatment women suffering from post-partum depression received and, in so doing, advocated for women’s voices to be heard.”

Once your argument is in place, the next step is to create an outline of your paper. Remember–your outline is like the skeleton of your paper. Without a solid foundation, your argument will not work properly.

One common misconception students entertain when they approach literary analysis essays is the idea that the structure of the essay should follow the structure of the literary work. The events of short stories, novels, and plays are often related chronologically, in linear order from the moment when the first event occurs to the moment of the last. Yet, it can be awkward to write a literary analysis using the story’s chronology as a basic structure for your own essay. Often, this approach leads to an essay that simply summarizes the literary work. Since a literary analysis paper should avoid summary for summary’s sake, the writer should avoid an essay structure that results in that pattern.

If chronology is not the primary structural factor in setting up a literary analysis paper, what is? You might consider the following hints in arranging the points of your own essay:

• What are your major points?
• What order will most effectively lead the reader to your perspective on this subject?
• Paragraph breaks should (a) cue the reader regarding shifts in focus and (b) break down ideas into small enough chunks that the reader does not lose sight of the currently emphasized point. On the other hand, in an academic essay, the paragraphs should not seem “choppy.” Rather each should be long enough to develop its point thoroughly before shifting to the next.

In most cases, a literary analysis outline will have the following parts:

• Introduction (hook, topic, thesis)
• Summary of the work and background of the author
• Argument (at least three points)

Here is a complete student outline for the story, “Everything in This Country Must,” by Colum McCann.

• Thesis: In “Everything in This Country Must” the author reveals the effect that grief can have on someone through the use of terminology, relationships, imagery, irony, and paradox.
• Born in Dublin, Ireland February 28 th , 1965.
• He was a reporter.
• He is a Creative Writing Professor at Hunter College.
• When was it written?
• What time is it based in?
• A short synopsis on what it is about.
• Soldiers use expletives. A true reflection of soldiers here.
• Contrast between American perception on certain words, versus what they mean in the United Kingdom.
• What Katie calls the soldiers. For the readers’ benefit and humor.
• Father’s relationship with Mammy and Fiachra.
• Father’s relationship with Katie.
• Father’s relationship with the draft horse.
• Father’s relationship with the soldiers.
• The soldiers’ relationship with each other.
• The vivid descriptions and the extensive use of simile.
• The darkness and rain seem to reflect the mood of the story. (Note: the very last sentence of the story.)

The British soldiers, (possibly the same ones who killed Mammy and Fiachra in a car accident) are the object of all the father’s loathing and blame. But they are also the savior of his favorite horse.

The entire story is based on saving the draft horse. At the end of the story, though, the father shoots it, and it dies. Why would he do that?

9. Conclusion:

Colum McCann reveals to the reader the innate and devastating effect grief can have on even the best of people. He does this in a beautiful short story and accomplished this through terminology, relationships, imagery, irony, and paradox.

Watch this video with some additional tips for creating an outline:

Step 7: Drafting

Writing an introduction.

The formula for a successful introduction for a literary analysis essay should feel very familiar to you. Your first task as a writer is to draw your readers into your essay by connecting their own experiences with the topic of your paper. This is accomplished by a hook that relates to your readers and draws them into your argument. For example, if you were writing about the treatment of post-partum depression in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” you might begin your paper with a statistic about the number of women who experience it. This statistic shows readers that your topic has significance to a modern issue and possibly to their own lives, as well.

Once you’ve successfully hooked your audience, you should transition into your topic. In this case, you’ll need to give your readers the author and title of the piece you are discussing. For example, you might say something like, “Post-partum depression is nothing new. In fact, Charlotte Perkins Gilman addresses the improper treatment of post-partum depression in her short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.'” This sentence provides a bridge from the hook to the thesis.

Finally, your introduction should include a strong statement of your argument. “Gilman used her short story to highlight the inappropriate and often harmful treatment women suffering from post-partum depression received and, in so doing, advocated for women’s voices to be heard.” This final piece of the introduction leaves no doubt about the essay’s argument.

Remember that, while there are three key parts to an introduction, this does not mean that you will only have three sentences in your introductory paragraph.

Background Information

When writing an analysis of a short story, it’s important to consider your readers’ experience with the text. In general, you should assume that the reader is familiar with the short story, but that it may have been awhile since they have read it. Therefore, including a brief summary of the plot of the text is an important part of ensuring that your readers can follow your argument.

Here are some basic tips for writing a summary:

• Begin with an introductory sentence  that states the text’s title, author and main thesis or subject.
• Write in your own words–do not include quotes.
• In less than five sentences, tell readers the general plot of the story, including key characters, events, and ideas.
• Do not insert any of your own opinions, interpretations, deductions or comments into a summary.

Depending on the type of analysis you are writing, the information about the author might also be an important element to include in your background section. This could be as simple as a single sentence telling readers when the piece was written or as complex as a short paragraph describing the historical and cultural context of the piece.

Body Paragraphs

Remember that your body paragraphs have three key components:

• Topic sentence that tells readers what point you will be discussing in the paragraph and relates back to the thesis. The topic sentence is also where you would include a transition from the previous paragraph.
• Support/Evidence for your point from the story, following the Quote Formula .
• Wrap up the paragraph by explaining to readers how the evidence you’ve provided proves your point.

Here’s a brief video explaining these the parts of a body paragraph in a literary analysis essay:

Here’s a brief video recapping the process of writing a literary analysis of the short story, “Story of an Hour”:

Incorporating Secondary Sources

One of the keys to a successful literary analysis is engaging in the academic conversation about the author and the work you’ve chosen. This means that you should incorporate your secondary sources into your analysis, as well as the primary text you are studying. Look for areas where an expert voice will help to strengthen the argument you are making in your paper. Since you’ve built your argument on your own analysis in combination with your research, this should be a fairly straightforward process. Remember to always surround quotes with your own words and follow the Quote Formula !

Conclusions

What this handout is about.

This handout will explain the functions of conclusions, offer strategies for writing effective ones, help you evaluate your drafted conclusions, and suggest conclusion strategies to avoid.

ABOUT CONCLUSIONS

Introductions and conclusions can be the most difficult parts of papers to write. While the body is often easier to write, it needs a frame around it. An introduction and conclusion frame your thoughts and bridge your ideas for the reader.

Just as your introduction acts as a bridge that transports your readers from their own lives into the “place” of your analysis, your conclusion can provide a bridge to help your readers make the transition back to their daily lives. Such a conclusion will help them see why all your analysis and information should matter to them after they put the paper down.

Your conclusion is your chance to have the last word on the subject. The conclusion allows you to have the final say on the issues you have raised in your paper, to synthesize your thoughts, to demonstrate the importance of your ideas, and to propel your reader to a new view of the subject. It is also your opportunity to make a good final impression and to end on a positive note.

Your conclusion can go beyond the confines of the assignment. The conclusion pushes beyond the boundaries of the prompt and allows you to consider broader issues, make new connections, and elaborate on the significance of your findings.

Your conclusion should make your readers glad they read your paper. Your conclusion gives your reader something to take away that will help them see things differently or appreciate your topic in personally relevant ways. It can suggest broader implications that will not only interest your reader, but also enrich your reader’s life in some way. It is your gift to the reader.

STRATEGIES FOR WRITING AN EFFECTIVE CONCLUSION

One or more of the following strategies may help you write an effective conclusion.

Friend: Why should anybody care?

You: That’s important because plantation owners tried to keep slaves from being educated so that they could maintain control. When Douglass obtained an education, he undermined that control personally.

You can also use this strategy on your own, asking yourself “So What?” as you develop your ideas or your draft.

• Return to the theme or themes in the introduction. This strategy brings the reader full circle. For example, if you begin by describing a scenario, you can end with the same scenario as proof that your essay is helpful in creating a new understanding. You may also refer to the introductory paragraph by using key words or parallel concepts and images that you also used in the introduction.
• Synthesize, don’t summarize: Include a brief summary of the paper’s main points, but don’t simply repeat things that were in your paper. Instead, show your reader how the points you made and the support and examples you used fit together. Pull it all together.
• Include a provocative insight or quotation from the research or reading you did for your paper.
• Propose a course of action, a solution to an issue, or questions for further study. This can redirect your reader’s thought process and help her to apply your info and ideas to her own life or to see the broader implications.
• Point to broader implications. For example, if your paper examines the Greensboro sit-ins or another event in the Civil Rights Movement, you could point out its impact on the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. A paper about the style of writer Virginia Woolf could point to her influence on other writers or on later feminists.

STRATEGIES TO AVOID

• Beginning with an unnecessary, overused phrase such as “in conclusion,” “in summary,” or “in closing.” Although these phrases can work in speeches, they come across as wooden and trite in writing.
• Stating the thesis for the very first time in the conclusion.
• Introducing a new idea or subtopic in your conclusion.
• Ending with a rephrased thesis statement without any substantive changes.
• Making sentimental, emotional appeals that are out of character with the rest of an analytical paper.
• Including evidence (quotations, statistics, etc.) that should be in the body of the paper.

FOUR KINDS OF INEFFECTIVE CONCLUSIONS

• The “That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It” Conclusion. This conclusion just restates the thesis and is usually painfully short. It does not push the ideas forward. People write this kind of conclusion when they can’t think of anything else to say. Example: In conclusion, Frederick Douglass was, as we have seen, a pioneer in American education, proving that education was a major force for social change with regard to slavery.
• The “Sherlock Holmes” Conclusion. Sometimes writers will state the thesis for the very first time in the conclusion. You might be tempted to use this strategy if you don’t want to give everything away too early in your paper. You may think it would be more dramatic to keep the reader in the dark until the end and then “wow” him with your main idea, as in a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The reader, however, does not expect a mystery, but an analytical discussion of your topic in an academic style, with the main argument (thesis) stated up front. Example: (After a paper that lists numerous incidents from the book but never says what these incidents reveal about Douglass and his views on education): So, as the evidence above demonstrates, Douglass saw education as a way to undermine the slaveholders’ power and also an important step toward freedom.
• The “America the Beautiful”/”I Am Woman”/”We Shall Overcome” Conclusion. This kind of conclusion usually draws on emotion to make its appeal, but while this emotion and even sentimentality may be very heartfelt, it is usually out of character with the rest of an analytical paper. A more sophisticated commentary, rather than emotional praise, would be a more fitting tribute to the topic. Example: Because of the efforts of fine Americans like Frederick Douglass, countless others have seen the shining beacon of light that is education. His example was a torch that lit the way for others. Frederick Douglass was truly an American hero.
• The “Grab Bag” Conclusion. This kind of conclusion includes extra information that the writer found or thought of but couldn’t integrate into the main paper. You may find it hard to leave out details that you discovered after hours of research and thought, but adding random facts and bits of evidence at the end of an otherwise-well-organized essay can just create confusion. Example: In addition to being an educational pioneer, Frederick Douglass provides an interesting case study for masculinity in the American South. He also offers historians an interesting glimpse into slave resistance when he confronts Covey, the overseer. His relationships with female relatives reveal the importance of family in the slave community.

WORKS CONSULTED

We consulted these works while writing the original version of this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find the latest publications on this topic. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial .

All quotations are from:

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave , edited and with introduction by Houston A. Baker, Jr., New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Strategies for Writing a Conclusion. Literacy Education Online, St. Cloud State University. 18 May 2005 <http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/conclude.html>.

Conclusions. Nesbitt-Johnston Writing Center, Hamilton College. 17 May 2005 <http://www.hamilton.edu/academic/Resource/WC/SampleConclusions.html>.

Complete Draft

Here’s a sample student paper that uses psychological criticism to analyze Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Black Cat”:

Attributions:

• Content created by Dr. Karen Palmer. Licensed under CC BY NC SA .
• Content adapted from Writing and Literature , licensed under CC BY SA .
• Summary content adapted from “ Writing a Summary ” licensed under CC BY .
• Conclusions from UNC Writing Center and licensed CC BY-NC-ND.

The Worry Free Writer Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Karen Palmer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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What Is Short Fiction?

Short fiction , sometimes called the short story, is a popular form of written literature. Short stories must tell a complete story, including set-up, conflict, and resolution, in a brief form, often less than 10,000 words. In the mid-20th century, short fiction was one of the most popular forms of written entertainment. Many great writers have produced short stories in addition to, or instead of, longer work. Other forms of short fiction are found in media such as audio drama and comic books.

Short fiction was not established as a literary genre until the 19th century. Before that time, short narratives appeared in the form of fables, songs, and poems. In the 1800s, magazines that published chapters of ongoing serial novels also included self-contained stories, and writers began creating work to fill their pages. Early masters of the short story included Russian writer Nikolai Gogol and American authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Poe also wrote an 1846 essay, “The Philosophy of Composition,” that discussed his approach to the short story.

Short fiction is not merely a matter of length. There are certain aesthetic standards established by these earlier writers that apply to most short stories. The writer must be able to establish characters, mood and setting in no more than a few paragraphs. These early paragraphs, and particularly the first line, must capture and hold the reader’s attention. With limited space, the writer must ensure that each individual word moves the story forward, or is otherwise essential; this requires some mastery of literary technique .

Masters of the short story include Russian writer Anton Chekhov and Americans John Cheever and Raymond Carver. Other writers were adept at both short and long-form works, including Ernest Hemingway , Flannery O’Connor, and James Joyce. In the years after World War II, short fiction thrived in magazines such as The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post . Meanwhile, other magazines published short stories in popular genres such as mystery and science fiction. These latter magazines included early short fiction by highly regarded writers like Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Stephen King .

The actual length of short fiction is not established and is often determined by the editor of a particular publication. Most sources offer a limit somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 words. Others will accept anything up to 20,000 words, after which the story is regarded as a novella , or short novel. Stories that are shorter than 1,000 words, sometimes much shorter, have developed a form of their own, the short-short story, sometimes called flash fiction . Masters of this form can create characters, plot, and a satisfying resolution in a space shorter than this page.

AS FEATURED ON:

Related Articles

• What Is a Flash Drama?
• What Is the Difference between a Fable and a Short Story?
• What Are the Different Short Story Genres?
• What Are the Different Types of Fiction Publishers?
• What Are the Different Types of Mystery Fiction?
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• What Is Sudden Fiction?

Discussion Comments

Post your comments.

• By: L'Isola D'Oro American author Ernest Hemingway wrote both long and short fiction.
• By: bepsphoto James Joyce wrote short fiction as well as novels.
• By: Konstantin Yuganov Fictional stories that are shorter than 1,000 words are sometimes called flash fiction.

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The Importance of Short Fiction in Literature: Why It Should Not Be Overlooked

by English Plus | Apr 8, 2023 | Short Stories for Everyone

Introduction

Short fiction as a distinct genre, short fiction as an exercise in conciseness, short fiction as a way to explore ideas, short fiction as a platform for new writers, short fiction as a tool for teaching literature, short fiction as a source of inspiration.

Short fiction, also known as short stories, is a genre of literature that is often overlooked in favor of its longer counterparts, such as novels and novellas. However, short fiction has its own unique qualities that make it an important part of the literary landscape. In this article, we will explore the importance of short fiction in literature, and why it should not be overlooked.

One of the main reasons why short fiction is important in literature is that it is a distinct genre in its own right. Short stories have a specific structure and style that sets them apart from longer works of fiction. In a short story, every word counts, and the author must use their words carefully to create a complete and satisfying narrative in a limited amount of space.

Another reason why short fiction is important is that it teaches writers the value of conciseness. Because short stories have a limited amount of space, writers must learn to be economical with their language, and to choose their words carefully. This skill is valuable not just in short fiction, but in all forms of writing.

Short fiction also allows writers to explore ideas in a more focused way than longer works of fiction. Because short stories are shorter, they can be used to explore a single idea or theme in depth, without the need for a complex plot or multiple subplots. This allows writers to delve deeper into a particular idea or theme, and to do so in a way that is more accessible to readers.

Another important aspect of short fiction is that it provides a platform for new writers to showcase their work. Many literary magazines and anthologies specialize in publishing short fiction, and this provides an opportunity for writers who are just starting out to get their work in front of a wider audience. This can be invaluable for writers who are trying to build their careers and establish themselves in the literary world.

Short fiction is also an important tool for teaching literature. Because short stories are shorter and more focused than longer works of fiction, they can be used in the classroom to teach literary analysis and critical thinking skills . Short stories are often used to teach students about literary devices such as characterization, symbolism, and foreshadowing, and they can be used to introduce students to a wide range of authors and writing styles.

Finally, short fiction is important because it can be a source of inspiration for writers and readers alike. Many writers find that reading short stories is a great way to generate new ideas and inspiration for their own work. Similarly, readers often find that short stories are a great way to experience a wide range of writing styles and to discover new authors and voices.

In conclusion, short fiction is an important part of the literary landscape, and it should not be overlooked in favor of longer works of fiction. Short stories have a unique structure and style that sets them apart from longer works of fiction, and they offer writers and readers a wide range of benefits. Whether you are a writer looking to hone your craft, a reader looking for new inspiration, or a student studying literature, short fiction is an important genre that should not be ignored.

• Short fiction : A genre of literature characterized by its brevity, typically under 10,000 words.
• Novella : A work of fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, typically between 20,000 and 50,000 words.
• Literary landscape : The overall state of literature within a particular cultural context, including the types of works being produced, the trends and movements within the field, and the audience for literature.
• Conciseness : The quality of being brief and to the point, without unnecessary elaboration or repetition.
• Narrative : A story or account of events or experiences, either fictional or based on real life.
• Theme : A central idea or message that is conveyed through a work of literature or other artistic medium.
• Plot : The sequence of events that make up the story in a work of fiction.
• Subplot : A secondary plot or story that runs parallel to the main plot in a work of fiction.
• Literary magazine : A publication that specializes in publishing literary works such as fiction, poetry, and essays.
• Anthology : A collection of literary works, typically short stories, poems, or essays, by different authors.
• Writing style : The way in which a writer uses language and other elements of writing to convey their ideas and create their unique voice.
• Literary analysis : The examination and interpretation of a work of literature in order to understand its meaning and significance.
• Critical thinking : The ability to analyze and evaluate information in order to form a reasoned judgement or conclusion.
• Characterization : The way in which an author creates and develops the characters in a work of fiction, including their personalities, motivations, and relationships with other characters.
• Symbolism : The use of symbols to represent ideas or concepts within a work of literature or other artistic medium.
• Foreshadowing : The use of hints or clues in a work of fiction to suggest events or outcomes that will occur later in the story.
• Inspiration : The act of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, often as a result of encountering a work of art or other creative work.
• Genre : A category or type of artistic or literary work, characterized by certain stylistic or thematic elements.
• Structure : The way in which a work of literature is organized, including its plot, subplots, and overall narrative structure.
• Audience : The group of people for whom a work of literature is intended, including its readership and target demographic.

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Short Fiction Forms: Novella, Novelette, Short Story, and Flash Fiction Defined

When it comes to fiction, a short narrative can be found in many forms, from a slim book to just a few sentences. Short fiction forms can generally be broken down based on word count. The guidelines in this article can help you understand how short fiction is commonly defined. There are, however, no exact universal rules that everyone agrees upon, especially when it comes to flash fiction. When submitting your work for publication or contest entry, you should follow the specifications or submission guidelines. With that in mind, here's a list of short fiction forms and their definitions.

A work of fiction between 20,000 and 49,999 words is considered a novella. Once a book hits the 50,000 word mark, it is generally considered a novel. (However, a standard novel is around 80,000 words, so books between 50,000 to 79,999 words may be called short novels.) A novella is the longest of the short fiction forms, granting writers freedom for an expanded story, descriptions, and cast of characters, but still keeping the condensed intensity of a short story. Modern trends generally seem to be moving away from publishing novellas. Novellas are more commonly published as eBooks in specific genres, especially romance, sci-fi, and fantasy.

A novelette falls in the range of 7,500 to 19,999 words. The term once implied a book that had a romantic or sentimental theme, but today a novelette can be any genre. While some writers still use the term novelette, others might prefer to simply call it a short novella or long short story. Like the novella, a novelette may be difficult to pitch to an agent, but might work better as an eBook in niche genres.

Short story

Short stories fall in the range of about 1,000 to 7,499 words. Due to its brevity, the narrative in a short story is condensed, usually only focusing on a single incident and a few characters at most. A short story is self-contained and is not part of a series. When a number of stories are written as a series it's called a story sequence. Short stories are commonly published in magazines and anthologies, or as collections by an individual author.

Flash fiction

Flash fiction is generally used as an umbrella term that refers to super short fiction of 1,000 words or less, but still provides a compelling story with a plot (beginning, middle, and end), character development, and usually a twist or surprise ending. The exact length of flash fiction isn't set, but is determined by the publisher.

Types of flash fiction

There are many new terms that further define flash fiction. For example, terms like short shorts and sudden fiction are used to describe longer forms of flash fiction that are more than 500 words, while microfiction refers to the shortest forms of flash fiction, at 300 to 400 words or less. Here are some of the types of flash fiction:

Sudden fiction/Short short stories

The terms sudden fiction and short short stories refer to longer pieces of flash fiction, around 750 to 1,000 words. However, the definition varies and may include pieces up to 2,000 words, such as in the series that helped popularize the form, Sudden Fiction and New Sudden Fiction .

Postcard fiction

Postcard fiction is just what it sounds like—a story that could fit on a postcard. It's typically around 250 words, but could be as much as 500 or as few as 25. An image often accompanies the text to create the feeling of looking at a postcard, with the reader turning it over to read the inscription on the back.

Microfiction/Nanofiction

Microfiction and nanofiction describe the shortest forms of flash fiction, including stories that are 300 words or less. Microfiction includes forms such as drabble, dribble, and six-word stories.

Drabble is a story of exactly 100 words (not including the title). Just because the form is short doesn't mean you can skimp on the basics of a good story. It should have a beginning, middle, and end, and include conflict and resolution. You can read examples of drabbles at 100WordStory.org .

Dribble/Mini-saga

When writing a drabble isn't challenging enough, you can try your hand at writing a dribble, which is a story told in exactly 50 words.

Six-word stories

Ready to boil down a story and squeeze out its essence? Try writing a six-word story. It's not easy, but it's possible to write a complete story with conflict and resolution in six words, according to flash fiction enthusiasts. The most well-know example of a six-word story, often misattributed to Ernest Hemingway , is, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." The story evokes deep emotion, causing the reader to ponder the circumstances that brought the character to post the advertisement. You can read more examples of six-word stories on Narrative Magazine's website (with a free account), which are more carefully selected, or you can browse user-submitted stories on Reddit . Some authors also write flash nonfiction, composing six-word memoirs .

Short Fiction Challenge

Now that you are more familiar with some of the forms of short fiction, why not give it a try? Flash fiction can provide a helpful change of pace and help fine tune your writing skills. The limited word count forces you to consider the weight of every action, every character, and every word. Writing good short fiction takes time and practice. Sometimes it's the shortest pieces that can take the longest to write.

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12.14: Sample Student Literary Analysis Essays

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• Page ID 40514

• Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap
• City College of San Francisco via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative

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The following examples are essays where student writers focused on close-reading a literary work.

While reading these examples, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the essay's thesis statement, and how do you know it is the thesis statement?
• What is the main idea or topic sentence of each body paragraph, and how does it relate back to the thesis statement?
• Where and how does each essay use evidence (quotes or paraphrase from the literature)?
• What are some of the literary devices or structures the essays analyze or discuss?
• How does each author structure their conclusion, and how does their conclusion differ from their introduction?

Example 1: Poetry

Victoria Morillo

Instructor Heather Ringo

3 August 2022

How Nguyen’s Structure Solidifies the Impact of Sexual Violence in “The Study”

Stripped of innocence, your body taken from you. No matter how much you try to block out the instance in which these two things occurred, memories surface and come back to haunt you. How does a person, a young boy , cope with an event that forever changes his life? Hieu Minh Nguyen deconstructs this very way in which an act of sexual violence affects a survivor. In his poem, “The Study,” the poem's speaker recounts the year in which his molestation took place, describing how his memory filters in and out. Throughout the poem, Nguyen writes in free verse, permitting a structural liberation to become the foundation for his message to shine through. While he moves the readers with this poignant narrative, Nguyen effectively conveys the resulting internal struggles of feeling alone and unseen.

The speaker recalls his experience with such painful memory through the use of specific punctuation choices. Just by looking at the poem, we see that the first period doesn’t appear until line 14. It finally comes after the speaker reveals to his readers the possible, central purpose for writing this poem: the speaker's molestation. In the first half, the poem makes use of commas, em dashes, and colons, which lends itself to the idea of the speaker stringing along all of these details to make sense of this time in his life. If reading the poem following the conventions of punctuation, a sense of urgency is present here, as well. This is exemplified by the lack of periods to finalize a thought; and instead, Nguyen uses other punctuation marks to connect them. Serving as another connector of thoughts, the two em dashes give emphasis to the role memory plays when the speaker discusses how “no one [had] a face” during that time (Nguyen 9-11). He speaks in this urgent manner until the 14th line, and when he finally gets it off his chest, the pace of the poem changes, as does the more frequent use of the period. This stream-of-consciousness-like section when juxtaposed with the latter half of the poem, causes readers to slow down and pay attention to the details. It also splits the poem in two: a section that talks of the fogginess of memory then transitions into one that remembers it all.

In tandem with the fluctuating nature of memory, the utilization of line breaks and word choice help reflect the damage the molestation has had. Within the first couple of lines of the poem, the poem demands the readers’ attention when the line breaks from “floating” to “dead” as the speaker describes his memory of Little Billy (Nguyen 1-4). This line break averts the readers’ expectation of the direction of the narrative and immediately shifts the tone of the poem. The break also speaks to the effect his trauma has ingrained in him and how “[f]or the longest time,” his only memory of that year revolves around an image of a boy’s death. In a way, the speaker sees himself in Little Billy; or perhaps, he’s representative of the tragic death of his boyhood, how the speaker felt so “dead” after enduring such a traumatic experience, even referring to himself as a “ghost” that he tries to evict from his conscience (Nguyen 24). The feeling that a part of him has died is solidified at the very end of the poem when the speaker describes himself as a nine-year-old boy who’s been “fossilized,” forever changed by this act (Nguyen 29). By choosing words associated with permanence and death, the speaker tries to recreate the atmosphere (for which he felt trapped in) in order for readers to understand the loneliness that came as a result of his trauma. With the assistance of line breaks, more attention is drawn to the speaker's words, intensifying their importance, and demanding to be felt by the readers.

Most importantly, the speaker expresses eloquently, and so heartbreakingly, about the effect sexual violence has on a person. Perhaps what seems to be the most frustrating are the people who fail to believe survivors of these types of crimes. This is evident when he describes “how angry” the tenants were when they filled the pool with cement (Nguyen 4). They seem to represent how people in the speaker's life were dismissive of his assault and who viewed his tragedy as a nuisance of some sorts. This sentiment is bookended when he says, “They say, give us details , so I give them my body. / They say, give us proof , so I give them my body,” (Nguyen 25-26). The repetition of these two lines reinforces the feeling many feel in these scenarios, as they’re often left to deal with trying to make people believe them, or to even see them.

It’s important to recognize how the structure of this poem gives the speaker space to express the pain he’s had to carry for so long. As a characteristic of free verse, the poem doesn’t follow any structured rhyme scheme or meter; which in turn, allows him to not have any constraints in telling his story the way he wants to. The speaker has the freedom to display his experience in a way that evades predictability and engenders authenticity of a story very personal to him. As readers, we abandon anticipating the next rhyme, and instead focus our attention to the other ways, like his punctuation or word choice, in which he effectively tells his story. The speaker recognizes that some part of him no longer belongs to himself, but by writing “The Study,” he shows other survivors that they’re not alone and encourages hope that eventually, they will be freed from the shackles of sexual violence.

Works Cited

Nguyen, Hieu Minh. “The Study” Poets.Org. Academy of American Poets, Coffee House Press, 2018, https://poets.org/poem/study-0 .

Example 2: Fiction

Todd Goodwin

Professor Stan Matyshak

Advanced Expository Writing

Sept. 17, 20—

Poe’s “Usher”: A Mirror of the Fall of the House of Humanity

Right from the outset of the grim story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe enmeshes us in a dark, gloomy, hopeless world, alienating his characters and the reader from any sort of physical or psychological norm where such values as hope and happiness could possibly exist. He fatalistically tells the story of how a man (the narrator) comes from the outside world of hope, religion, and everyday society and tries to bring some kind of redeeming happiness to his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, who not only has physically and psychologically wasted away but is entrapped in a dilapidated house of ever-looming terror with an emaciated and deranged twin sister. Roderick Usher embodies the wasting away of what once was vibrant and alive, and his house of “insufferable gloom” (273), which contains his morbid sister, seems to mirror or reflect this fear of death and annihilation that he most horribly endures. A close reading of the story reveals that Poe uses mirror images, or reflections, to contribute to the fatalistic theme of “Usher”: each reflection serves to intensify an already prevalent tone of hopelessness, darkness, and fatalism.

It could be argued that the house of Roderick Usher is a “house of mirrors,” whose unpleasant and grim reflections create a dark and hopeless setting. For example, the narrator first approaches “the melancholy house of Usher on a dark and soundless day,” and finds a building which causes him a “sense of insufferable gloom,” which “pervades his spirit and causes an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an undiscerned dreariness of thought” (273). The narrator then optimistically states: “I reflected that a mere different arrangement of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression” (274). But the narrator then sees the reflection of the house in the tarn and experiences a “shudder even more thrilling than before” (274). Thus the reader begins to realize that the narrator cannot change or stop the impending doom that will befall the house of Usher, and maybe humanity. The story cleverly plays with the word reflection : the narrator sees a physical reflection that leads him to a mental reflection about Usher’s surroundings.

The narrator’s disillusionment by such grim reflection continues in the story. For example, he describes Roderick Usher’s face as distinct with signs of old strength but lost vigor: the remains of what used to be. He describes the house as a once happy and vibrant place, which, like Roderick, lost its vitality. Also, the narrator describes Usher’s hair as growing wild on his rather obtrusive head, which directly mirrors the eerie moss and straw covering the outside of the house. The narrator continually longs to see these bleak reflections as a dream, for he states: “Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building” (276). He does not want to face the reality that Usher and his home are doomed to fall, regardless of what he does.

Although there are almost countless examples of these mirror images, two others stand out as important. First, Roderick and his sister, Madeline, are twins. The narrator aptly states just as he and Roderick are entombing Madeline that there is “a striking similitude between brother and sister” (288). Indeed, they are mirror images of each other. Madeline is fading away psychologically and physically, and Roderick is not too far behind! The reflection of “doom” that these two share helps intensify and symbolize the hopelessness of the entire situation; thus, they further develop the fatalistic theme. Second, in the climactic scene where Madeline has been mistakenly entombed alive, there is a pairing of images and sounds as the narrator tries to calm Roderick by reading him a romance story. Events in the story simultaneously unfold with events of the sister escaping her tomb. In the story, the hero breaks out of the coffin. Then, in the story, the dragon’s shriek as he is slain parallels Madeline’s shriek. Finally, the story tells of the clangor of a shield, matched by the sister’s clanging along a metal passageway. As the suspense reaches its climax, Roderick shrieks his last words to his “friend,” the narrator: “Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door” (296).

Roderick, who slowly falls into insanity, ironically calls the narrator the “Madman.” We are left to reflect on what Poe means by this ironic twist. Poe’s bleak and dark imagery, and his use of mirror reflections, seem only to intensify the hopelessness of “Usher.” We can plausibly conclude that, indeed, the narrator is the “Madman,” for he comes from everyday society, which is a place where hope and faith exist. Poe would probably argue that such a place is opposite to the world of Usher because a world where death is inevitable could not possibly hold such positive values. Therefore, just as Roderick mirrors his sister, the reflection in the tarn mirrors the dilapidation of the house, and the story mirrors the final actions before the death of Usher. “The Fall of the House of Usher” reflects Poe’s view that humanity is hopelessly doomed.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 1839. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library . 1995. Web. 1 July 2012. < http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/PoeFall.html >.

Example 3: Poetry

Amy Chisnell

Professor Laura Neary

Writing and Literature

April 17, 20—

Don’t Listen to the Egg!: A Close Reading of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”

“You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” said Alice. “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called ‘Jabberwocky’?”

“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.” (Carroll 164)

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass , Humpty Dumpty confidently translates (to a not so confident Alice) the complicated language of the poem “Jabberwocky.” The words of the poem, though nonsense, aptly tell the story of the slaying of the Jabberwock. Upon finding “Jabberwocky” on a table in the looking-glass room, Alice is confused by the strange words. She is quite certain that “ somebody killed something ,” but she does not understand much more than that. When later she encounters Humpty Dumpty, she seizes the opportunity at having the knowledgeable egg interpret—or translate—the poem. Since Humpty Dumpty professes to be able to “make a word work” for him, he is quick to agree. Thus he acts like a New Critic who interprets the poem by performing a close reading of it. Through Humpty’s interpretation of the first stanza, however, we see the poem’s deeper comment concerning the practice of interpreting poetry and literature in general—that strict analytical translation destroys the beauty of a poem. In fact, Humpty Dumpty commits the “heresy of paraphrase,” for he fails to understand that meaning cannot be separated from the form or structure of the literary work.

Of the 71 words found in “Jabberwocky,” 43 have no known meaning. They are simply nonsense. Yet through this nonsensical language, the poem manages not only to tell a story but also gives the reader a sense of setting and characterization. One feels, rather than concretely knows, that the setting is dark, wooded, and frightening. The characters, such as the Jubjub bird, the Bandersnatch, and the doomed Jabberwock, also appear in the reader’s head, even though they will not be found in the local zoo. Even though most of the words are not real, the reader is able to understand what goes on because he or she is given free license to imagine what the words denote and connote. Simply, the poem’s nonsense words are the meaning.

Therefore, when Humpty interprets “Jabberwocky” for Alice, he is not doing her any favors, for he actually misreads the poem. Although the poem in its original is constructed from nonsense words, by the time Humpty is done interpreting it, it truly does not make any sense. The first stanza of the original poem is as follows:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogroves,

An the mome raths outgrabe. (Carroll 164)

If we replace, however, the nonsense words of “Jabberwocky” with Humpty’s translated words, the effect would be something like this:

’Twas four o’clock in the afternoon, and the lithe and slimy badger-lizard-corkscrew creatures

Did go round and round and make holes in the grass-plot round the sun-dial:

All flimsy and miserable were the shabby-looking birds

with mop feathers,

And the lost green pigs bellowed-sneezed-whistled.

By translating the poem in such a way, Humpty removes the charm or essence—and the beauty, grace, and rhythm—from the poem. The poetry is sacrificed for meaning. Humpty Dumpty commits the heresy of paraphrase. As Cleanth Brooks argues, “The structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations” (203). When the poem is left as nonsense, the reader can easily imagine what a “slithy tove” might be, but when Humpty tells us what it is, he takes that imaginative license away from the reader. The beauty (if that is the proper word) of “Jabberwocky” is in not knowing what the words mean, and yet understanding. By translating the poem, Humpty takes that privilege from the reader. In addition, Humpty fails to recognize that meaning cannot be separated from the structure itself: the nonsense poem reflects this literally—it means “nothing” and achieves this meaning by using “nonsense” words.

Furthermore, the nonsense words Carroll chooses to use in “Jabberwocky” have a magical effect upon the reader; the shadowy sound of the words create the atmosphere, which may be described as a trance-like mood. When Alice first reads the poem, she says it seems to fill her head “with ideas.” The strange-sounding words in the original poem do give one ideas. Why is this? Even though the reader has never heard these words before, he or she is instantly aware of the murky, mysterious mood they set. In other words, diction operates not on the denotative level (the dictionary meaning) but on the connotative level (the emotion(s) they evoke). Thus “Jabberwocky” creates a shadowy mood, and the nonsense words are instrumental in creating this mood. Carroll could not have simply used any nonsense words.

For example, let us change the “dark,” “ominous” words of the first stanza to “lighter,” more “comic” words:

’Twas mearly, and the churly pells

Did bimble and ringle in the tink;

All timpy were the brimbledimps,

And the bip plips outlink.

Shifting the sounds of the words from dark to light merely takes a shift in thought. To create a specific mood using nonsense words, one must create new words from old words that convey the desired mood. In “Jabberwocky,” Carroll mixes “slimy,” a grim idea, “lithe,” a pliable image, to get a new adjective: “slithy” (a portmanteau word). In this translation, brighter words were used to get a lighter effect. “Mearly” is a combination of “morning” and “early,” and “ringle” is a blend of “ring” and "dingle.” The point is that “Jabberwocky’s” nonsense words are created specifically to convey this shadowy or mysterious mood and are integral to the “meaning.”

Consequently, Humpty’s rendering of the poem leaves the reader with a completely different feeling than does the original poem, which provided us with a sense of ethereal mystery, of a dark and foreign land with exotic creatures and fantastic settings. The mysteriousness is destroyed by Humpty’s literal paraphrase of the creatures and the setting; by doing so, he has taken the beauty away from the poem in his attempt to understand it. He has committed the heresy of paraphrase: “If we allow ourselves to be misled by it [this heresy], we distort the relation of the poem to its ‘truth’… we split the poem between its ‘form’ and its ‘content’” (Brooks 201). Humpty Dumpty’s ultimate demise might be seen to symbolize the heretical split between form and content: as a literary creation, Humpty Dumpty is an egg, a well-wrought urn of nonsense. His fall from the wall cracks him and separates the contents from the container, and not even all the King’s men can put the scrambled egg back together again!

Through the odd characters of a little girl and a foolish egg, “Jabberwocky” suggests a bit of sage advice about reading poetry, advice that the New Critics built their theories on. The importance lies not solely within strict analytical translation or interpretation, but in the overall effect of the imagery and word choice that evokes a meaning inseparable from those literary devices. As Archibald MacLeish so aptly writes: “A poem should not mean / But be.” Sometimes it takes a little nonsense to show us the sense in something.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry . 1942. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1956. Print.

Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass. Alice in Wonderland . 2nd ed. Ed. Donald J. Gray. New York: Norton, 1992. Print.

MacLeish, Archibald. “Ars Poetica.” The Oxford Book of American Poetry . Ed. David Lehman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 385–86. Print.

Attribution

• Sample Essay 1 received permission from Victoria Morillo to publish, licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International ( CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 )
• Sample Essays 2 and 3 adapted from Cordell, Ryan and John Pennington. "2.5: Student Sample Papers" from Creating Literary Analysis. 2012. Licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported ( CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 )

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An Appraisal

Alice Munro, a Literary Alchemist Who Made Great Fiction From Humble Lives

The Nobel Prize-winning author specialized in exacting short stories that were novelistic in scope, spanning decades with intimacy and precision.

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By Gregory Cowles

Gregory Cowles is a senior editor at the Book Review.

The first story in her first book evoked her father’s life. The last story in her last book evoked her mother’s death. In between, across 14 collections and more than 40 years, Alice Munro showed us in one dazzling short story after another that the humble facts of a single person’s experience, subjected to the alchemy of language and imagination and psychological insight, could provide the raw material for great literature.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

And not just any person, but a girl from the sticks. It mattered that Munro, who died on Monday night at the age of 92, hailed from rural southwestern Ontario, since so many of her stories, set in small towns on or around Lake Huron, were marked by the ambitions of a bright girl eager to leave, upon whom nothing is lost. There was the narrator of “Boys and Girls,” who tells herself bedtime stories about a world “that presented opportunities for courage, boldness and self-sacrifice, as mine never did.” There was Rose, from “The Beggar Maid,” who wins a college scholarship and leaves her working-class family behind. And there was Del Jordan, from “Lives of Girls and Women” — Munro’s second book, and the closest thing she ever wrote to a novel — who casts a jaundiced eye on her town’s provincial customs as she takes the first fateful steps toward becoming a writer.

Does it seem reductive or limiting to derive a kind of artist’s statement from the title of that early book? It shouldn’t. Munro was hardly a doctrinaire feminist, but with implacable authority and command she demonstrated throughout her career that the lives of girls and women were as rich, as tumultuous, as dramatic and as important as the lives of men and boys. Her plots were rife with incident: the threatened suicide in the barn, the actual murder at the lake, the ambivalent sexual encounter, the power dynamics of desire. For a writer whose book titles gestured repeatedly at love (“The Progress of Love,” “The Love of a Good Woman,” “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”), her narratives recoiled from sentimentality. Tucked into the stately columns of The New Yorker, where she was a steady presence for decades, they were far likelier to depict the disruptions and snowballing consequences of petty grudges, careless cruelties and base impulses: the gossip that mattered.

Munro’s stories traveled not as the crow flies but as the mind does. You got the feeling that, if the GPS ever offered her a shorter route, she would decline. Capable of dizzying swerves in a line or a line break, her stories often spanned decades with intimacy and sweep; that’s partly what critics meant when they wrote of the novelistic scope she brought to short fiction.

Her sentences rarely strutted or flaunted or declared themselves; but they also never clanked or stumbled — she was an exacting and precise stylist rather than a showy one, who wrote with steely control and applied her ambitions not to language but to theme and structure. (This was a conscious choice on her part: “In my earlier days I was prone to a lot of flowery prose,” she told an interviewer when she won the Nobel Prize in 2013. “I gradually learned to take a lot of that out.”) In the middle of her career her stories started to grow roomier and more contemplative, even essayistic; they could feel aimless until you approached the final pages and recognized with a jolt that they had in fact been constructed all along as intricately and deviously as a Sudoku puzzle, every piece falling neatly into place.

There was a signature Munro tone: skeptical, ruminative, given to a crucial and artful ambiguity that could feel particularly Midwestern. Consider “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which — thanks in part to Sarah Polley’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation, “ Away From Her ” (2006) — may be Munro’s most famous story; it details a woman’s descent into senility and her philandering husband’s attempt to come to terms with her attachment to a male resident at her nursing home. Here the husband is on a visit, confronting the limits of his knowledge and the need to make peace with uncertainty, in a characteristically Munrovian passage:

She treated him with a distracted, social sort of kindness that was successful in holding him back from the most obvious, the most necessary question. He could not demand of her whether she did or did not remember him as her husband of nearly 50 years. He got the impression that she would be embarrassed by such a question — embarrassed not for herself but for him. She would have laughed in a fluttery way and mortified him with her politeness and bewilderment, and somehow she would have ended up not saying either yes or no. Or she would have said either one in a way that gave not the least satisfaction.

Like her contemporary Philip Roth — another realist who was comfortable blurring lines — Munro devised multilayered plots that were explicitly autobiographical and at the same time determined to deflect or undermine that impulse. This tension dovetailed happily with her frequent themes of the unreliability of memory and the gap between art and life. Her stories tracked the details of her lived experience both faithfully and cannily, cagily, so that any attempt at a dispassionate biography (notably, Robert Thacker’s scholarly and substantial “Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives,” from 2005) felt at once invasive and redundant. She had been in front of us all along.

Until, suddenly, she wasn’t. That she went silent after her book “Dear Life” was published in 2012, a year before she won the Nobel, makes her passing now seem all the more startling — a second death, in a way that calls to mind her habit of circling back to recognizable moments and images in her work. At least three times she revisited the death of her mother in fiction, first in “The Peace of Utrecht,” then in “Friend of My Youth” and again in the title story that concludes “Dear Life”: “The person I would really have liked to talk to then was my mother,” the narrator says near the end of that story, in an understated gut punch of an epitaph that now applies equally well to Munro herself, but she “was no longer available.”

Read by Greg Cowles

Audio produced by Sarah Diamond .

Gregory Cowles is the poetry editor of the Book Review and senior editor of the Books desk. More about Gregory Cowles

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short-fiction essay

• Thread starter Espero Antos
• Start date Jul 28, 2012

Espero Antos

Senior member.

• Jul 28, 2012

Dear all, My understanding has always been that by an "essay" is still invariably to be meant a "short non-fiction literary composition", as in the first usage of such word by Francis Bacon, basically matching to-day main definition ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/essay ). If so, then what is a "short-fiction essay" supposed to be, as in many instances throught the web (e.g. in this abstract of what seems to be a collection of critical essays on a famous contemporary artist: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10553706-john-currin and thus no works of fictional literature are expected to be found). Many thanks in advance! Non-fictionally yours, E_A  

The word "essay" does not appear on the page you have linked. Many of the Google hits are not sentences, but the ones that are seem to be assignments to write an essay about a short piece of fiction not about short essays that are fictional, i.e. it's a short-fiction essay, not a short fiction-essay.  

Thanks for your reply, Myridon. Please find below the complete text of the abstract to which I referred (one has to click on the link "more" at the bottom of the first part of the text to read further). My query relates to the final sentence. "A catalogue of new work by American artist John Currin, one of the world’s foremost figurative painters. John Currin’s work draws upon a broad range of cultural influences that include Renaissance oil paintings, 1950s women’s magazine advertisements, and contemporary politics. Labeled as mannerist, caricaturist, radical conservative, or satirist, Currin continues to confound expectations and evade categorization. While his virtuosic technique is indebted to the history of classical painting, the images engage startlingly contemporary ideas about the representation of the human figure. Currin paints challengingly perverse images of female subjects, from lusty doe-eyed nymphs to more ethereal feminine prototypes. With his uncanny ability to locate the point at which the beautiful and the grotesque are in perfect balance, he produces subversive portraits of idiosyncratic women in conventional settings. This much-anticipated volume comes four years after the definitive John Currin , and it features an interview with the artist by Angus Cook and six short-fiction essays by Wells Tower".  

essay, n. 8. A composition of moderate length on any particular subject, or branch of a subject; originally implying want of finish, ‘an irregular undigested piece’ (Johnson), but now said of a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range. Click to expand...

PaulQ said: However, I admit that unless it is an idiom, "short-fiction" as a qualifier is puzzling and produces no exact hits on search engines. Click to expand...

For my short fiction essay I chose the first essay prompt. The prompt talks about “The Lottery” and “In the Penal Colony” and Click to expand...

Espero Antos said: (...) This much-anticipated volume comes four years after the definitive John Currin , and it features an interview with the artist by Angus Cook and six short-fiction essays by Wells Tower". Click to expand...

Myridon said: Are you insisting on the presence of the hyphen? Click to expand...

25 Great Nonfiction Essays You Can Read Online for Free

Alison Doherty

Alison Doherty is a writing teacher and part time assistant professor living in Brooklyn, New York. She has an MFA from The New School in writing for children and teenagers. She loves writing about books on the Internet, listening to audiobooks on the subway, and reading anything with a twisty plot or a happily ever after.

View All posts by Alison Doherty

I love reading books of nonfiction essays and memoirs , but sometimes have a hard time committing to a whole book. This is especially true if I don’t know the author. But reading nonfiction essays online is a quick way to learn which authors you like. Also, reading nonfiction essays can help you learn more about different topics and experiences.

Besides essays on Book Riot,  I love looking for essays on The New Yorker , The Atlantic , The Rumpus , and Electric Literature . But there are great nonfiction essays available for free all over the Internet. From contemporary to classic writers and personal essays to researched ones—here are 25 of my favorite nonfiction essays you can read today.

“Beware of Feminist Lite” by  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The author of We Should All Be Feminists  writes a short essay explaining the danger of believing men and woman are equal only under certain conditions.

“It’s Silly to Be Frightened of Being Dead” by Diana Athill

A 96-year-old woman discusses her shifting attitude towards death from her childhood in the 1920s when death was a taboo subject, to World War 2 until the present day.

“Letter from a Region in my Mind” by James Baldwin

There are many moving and important essays by James Baldwin . This one uses the lens of religion to explore the Black American experience and sexuality. Baldwin describes his move from being a teenage preacher to not believing in god. Then he recounts his meeting with the prominent Nation of Islam member Elijah Muhammad.

“Relations” by Eula Biss

Biss uses the story of a white woman giving birth to a Black baby that was mistakenly implanted during a fertility treatment to explore racial identities and segregation in society as a whole and in her own interracial family.

“Friday Night Lights” by Buzz Bissinger

A comprehensive deep dive into the world of high school football in a small West Texas town.

“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates examines the lingering and continuing affects of slavery on  American society and makes a compelling case for the descendants of slaves being offered reparations from the government.

“Why I Write” by Joan Didion

This is one of the most iconic nonfiction essays about writing. Didion describes the reasons she became a writer, her process, and her journey to doing what she loves professionally.

“Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Roger Ebert

With knowledge of his own death, the famous film critic ponders questions of mortality while also giving readers a pep talk for how to embrace life fully.

“My Mother’s Tongue” by Zavi Kang Engles

In this personal essay, Engles celebrates the close relationship she had with her mother and laments losing her Korean fluency.

“My Life as an Heiress” by Nora Ephron

As she’s writing an important script, Ephron imagines her life as a newly wealthy woman when she finds out an uncle left her an inheritance. But she doesn’t know exactly what that inheritance is.

“My FatheR Spent 30 Years in Prison. Now He’s Out.” by Ashley C. Ford

Ford describes the experience of getting to know her father after he’s been in prison for almost all of her life. Bridging the distance in their knowledge of technology becomes a significant—and at times humorous—step in rebuilding their relationship.

“Bad Feminist” by Roxane Gay

There’s a reason Gay named her bestselling essay collection after this story. It’s a witty, sharp, and relatable look at what it means to call yourself a feminist.

“The Empathy Exams” by Leslie Jamison

Jamison discusses her job as a medical actor helping to train medical students to improve their empathy and uses this frame to tell the story of one winter in college when she had an abortion and heart surgery.

“What I Learned from a Fitting Room Disaster About Clothes and Life” by Scaachi Koul

One woman describes her history with difficult fitting room experiences culminating in one catastrophe that will change the way she hopes to identify herself through clothes.

“Breasts: the Odd Couple” by Una LaMarche

LaMarche examines her changing feelings about her own differently sized breasts.

“How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story” by Donna Minkowitz

A journalist looks back at her own biased reporting on a news story about the sexual assault and murder of a trans man in 1993. Minkowitz examines how ideas of gender and sexuality have changed since she reported the story, along with how her own lesbian identity influenced her opinions about the crime.

“Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell

In this famous essay, Orwell bemoans how politics have corrupted the English language by making it more vague, confusing, and boring.

“Letting Go” by David Sedaris

The famously funny personal essay author , writes about a distinctly unfunny topic of tobacco addiction and his own journey as a smoker. It is (predictably) hilarious.

“Joy” by Zadie Smith

Smith explores the difference between pleasure and joy by closely examining moments of both, including eating a delicious egg sandwich, taking drugs at a concert, and falling in love.

“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan

Tan tells the story of how her mother’s way of speaking English as an immigrant from China changed the way people viewed her intelligence.

“Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace

The prolific nonfiction essay and fiction writer  travels to the Maine Lobster Festival to write a piece for Gourmet Magazine. With his signature footnotes, Wallace turns this experience into a deep exploration on what constitutes consciousness.

“I Am Not Pocahontas” by Elissa Washuta

Washuta looks at her own contemporary Native American identity through the lens of stereotypical depictions from 1990s films.

“Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White

E.B. White didn’t just write books like Charlotte’s Web and The Elements of Style . He also was a brilliant essayist. This nature essay explores the theme of fatherhood against the backdrop of a lake within the forests of Maine.

“Pell-Mell” by Tom Wolfe

The inventor of “new journalism” writes about the creation of an American idea by telling the story of Thomas Jefferson snubbing a European Ambassador.

“The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf

In this nonfiction essay, Wolf describes a moth dying on her window pane. She uses the story as a way to ruminate on the lager theme of the meaning of life and death.

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Opinion: Alice Munro’s stories gave voice to women’s unspoken, almost unspeakable, inner lives

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I was 15 — a Canadian kid growing up on a diet of my country’s many remarkable authors and a would-be writer myself — when I first read Alice Munro’s “Lives of Girls and Women.” I skimmed that slim volume of short stories with the supreme haughtiness of youth. I remember thinking something along these lines: Women’s lives are nothing like that.

Less than two decades later, I would close the last page of that same book with a shiver, thinking to myself: Women’s lives are exactly like this.

Alice Munro, who died Monday at 92, saw our lives so clearly.

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Alice Munro, acclaimed short-story writer and Nobel Prize winner, dies at 92

Alice Munro, the Nobel Prize-winning short story author known for ‘Dear Life,’ has died. She was 92.

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Why did it take me so many years to understand the stories about women that Munro had to offer? My early adulthood began in the 1990s, at a time when young women were assured they could be anything. Wasn’t gender inequality yesterday’s news? Surely the fact that Munro was a celebrated writer was proof that the complex problems she wrote about were naturally becoming a thing of the past. I could appreciate the creative genius of her skills, but if women’s lives were such a problem, I was sure the problem had already been solved.

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Sometime in my 20s, I began to realize the utter delusion of this view. I started to read her in earnest, this time with some humility. In her stories, I saw the lives of women I recognized — the university degree my grandmother longed for but could never earn, the TV production career my mother left when she got married, the lopsided power men wielded in the world. And I also saw my self-doubt, my relationships with decent, occasionally very damaged men, the conflict between my dreams for my own life and the competing demands of my own family. These things were almost unspeakable; they were as hard to characterize as the air. But Alice Munro made them real, and somehow the fact that these quiet revelations took place in parts of Canada I knew made them even more so.

Later, I saw her stories reflected back to me in the mirror of the lives of my patients, older women of Munro’s generation who would eagerly confide how happy and relieved they were to have a woman as a doctor. They often trusted me with the same kind of tales Munro naturally told, the ones that had seemed fantastical or overwrought before I began to understand the lives of girls and women.

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I once asked a patient in her 80s about the origin of a faint, knotted scar that ran down the midline of her lower abdomen. She told me she’d had a Caesarean section, when her one living child was born. Then, almost as an afterthought, she offered what was practically a Munro story: She’d once delivered a stillborn. She’d gone to milk the cows in the barn that day, worked harder than she intended. The next day the baby was born dead. She’d carried that weight for 60 years. She’d always blamed herself for the loss of that child, for being, as she told me in a soft voice, “such a damn fool.”

Munro’s stories often have these same types of somber turns. They are full of necessary revelations — about marriage and sex, childbirth and death, fidelity and recklessness and desire. But often their central events are private disclosures, small but consequential failures, confessed to the reader or some third party much later in life. And perhaps most importantly, her writing invites compassion for her narrators, who are often unable to muster it for themselves.

In inviting that compassion, perhaps her stories also opened the door to a crucial question, one that occurs to me only now. If we see ourselves in those narrators, aren’t we obligated to have some compassion for ourselves, too?

Not all of Munro’s stories were about disaster. Many of her finest, most unforgettable works are about the grenades that only briefly lost their pins, the grace of moments when a split second, good instinct or a stroke of luck shields a protagonist from catastrophe. They are moments when the children could have drowned but didn’t, moments that seemed primed for violence — until the storm cloud passed over quietly, carrying on to somewhere else.

That’s a woman’s life too, isn’t it? The constant, necessary vigilance against potential disaster. If the disaster never happens, a man can say all that fussing was just neurotic. But that’s a view from outside the fear, formed after the danger has passed. The ever-present threat of what could happen, wherever you are, whether crossing the street or the Atlantic: That tension defines a woman’s life. Not just a woman’s life, of course — men feel it too. But it is inseparable from a woman’s life, because women’s lives are so often about tending to everyone other than themselves.

There is a line in Munro’s short story “Wood,” and it is one of my favorites in her entire body of work. A man named Roy is cutting trees, and he steps into a hole. As he realizes he is about to fall and break his leg, Munro writes, “What happens to Roy now is the most ordinary and yet the most unbelievable thing.”

I think about that line all the time. Tragedy is ordinary as an event in human history — and only unbelievable when it touches us. A writer who wants to take us into that tragedy has to look after us well. That’s what Alice Munro did. And she made it look so bewilderingly easy, dissecting that plane between the ordinary and the unbelievable as expertly as any surgeon. She showed us life as a series of moments that can cradle or betray us, full of infinite, rippling aftermaths, the miraculous banality in the days we rearrange again and again and again before, someday, we die.

So that’s what I felt when I learned of Munro’s death — hardly a surprise at the age of 92. The most ordinary and the most unbelievable thing. It describes what happens every day in a hospital, and hopefully in a sparse handful of days of our lives. And it is also the space where the world’s very best writers dwell.

Jillian Horton is a writer and physician. Her first book, “We Are All Perfectly Fine: A Memoir of Love, Medicine and Healing,” is being adapted for television. @jillianhortonMD

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What are 'the kids' thinking these days? Honor Levy aims to tell in 'My First Book'

Leland Cheuk

What are the kids thinking these days? That seems be to the question behind the publication of My First Book , the buzzy debut story collection by Honor Levy.

The 26-year-old writer was the subject of a viral profile in The Cut , earlier this month, in which she described the praise she received for her story "Good Boys" on The New Yorker website as "not undeserved" and demurred when asked whether she's the voice of her generation. Social media discourse and the inevitable backlash aside, Levy's first book is an amusing, if uneven, take on growing up white, privileged, and Gen Z, the first generation to completely be born after the existence of the internet.

Readers won't find meticulously plotted story arcs, fleshed-out characters, emotional epiphanies, or any other earmarks of conventional literary fiction. Most of Levy's stories run fewer than 12 pages and feel like very long flash fiction, written in a voice dense with the chaotic patois of the internet. In her strongest stories, Levy channels the blitzkrieg of contradictory micro-observations we absorb from social media, video games, and doomscrolling to create the absurd, incomprehensible cacophony that anyone born after 1997 had to grow up enduring. These stories seem to ask: How can anyone expect a well-adjusted adult to rise from all this noise?

In "Internet Girl," the main character is 11 and very online, and Levy's portrayal of her narrator's interiority is both compellingly satirical and frighteningly plausible. She writes:

"It's 2008, and my dad gets laid off and everything is happening all at once. All at once, there are two girls and one cup and planes hitting towers and a webcam looking at me and me smiling into it and a man and a boy and a love and a stranger on the other end. All at once, there are a million videos to watch and a million more to make. All at once it's all at once. It's beginning and ending all at once all the time. I'm twenty-one. I'm eleven. I'm on the internet. I'm twenty-one."

Another strong piece is "Love Story," the collection's opener, which is about a boy and a girl having an online relationship that seems to consist entirely of texting and sending pics of their bodies to each other. Levy poignantly captures the girl's vulnerability. "Little girl lost can't even find herself," Levy writes. "Pictures of her naked body are out there everywhere, in the cloud floating, and under the sea, coursing through cables in the dark. It's so dark."

Levy smartly skewers late capitalism in "Halloween Forever," about a young woman trying to survive a surreal and drug-filled Halloween night in Brooklyn. She meets a "boy from Stanford dressed as a cowboy," who, when sufficiently coked-up, muses about the romance of the Wild West and how "The West was freedom...just like the internet originally was!" The narrator is skeptical:

"Freedom is the stuff of dreams and nightmares only and our free market doesn't make us free people, but the cowboy doesn't care. Silicon Valley must have burrowed itself deep into his brain underneath that hat. He is probably afraid of blood, or social media, or something stupid. My drink is seventeen dollars."

As the collection progresses, the unique blend of the satirical and the poignant gives way to a more essayistic approach to storytelling. In "Cancel Me," which is about cancel culture, the characters — a young woman and two "Ivy League boys with kitten-sharp teeth and Accutane-skin," all of whom have experienced cancellation for murky reasons — gradually fade into a series of observations about wokeness that aren't much different or more insightful than what one might find on X or Reddit.

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"Z Was For Zoomer," which runs more than 50 pages, seems to be a continuation of "Cancel Me," except the two male "edgelords" — someone on an internet forum who deliberately posts about controversial or taboo topics to appear edgy — are named Gideon and Ivan instead of Jack and Roger. Just as in "Cancel Me," the narrator's relationship with the men is never defined and doesn't progress. Character-driven narrative takes a back seat to dashed-off, inch-deep lines like "Identity is a Swedish prison, comfortable but you still can't leave."

It should also be mentioned that these stories won't pass the most permissive of racial Bechdel tests. The number of non-white references in this 200-page book won't go past one hand, unless you count the few references to anime and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. The milieu of Honor Levy's fiction is undeniably white and privileged, but her best stories exaggerate that milieu to great satirical effect. Perhaps her second book will contain more of them.

Leland Cheuk is an award-winning author of three books of fiction, including the latest No Good Very Bad Asian . His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon , among other outlets.

The Life, Death—And Afterlife—of Literary Fiction

Those of you who are reading this essay, let me ask you, right away—is your smart phone next to you? Or is it in your hand? Are you reading this on your phone, swiping up the paragraphs, swipe , swipe , swipe , wondering how far you're going to have to swipe to actually finish this thing? (Just so you know, it’s gonna take a lot of swiping.) Or are you reading on your computer screen, as I've been writing this on mine? I happen to know you’re not reading this in a print magazine. Ha! And ouch!

As you read, is your smart phone or computer or iPad simultaneously acquiring notifications, texts and emails, along with promotions, advertisements and daily venues of news, opinions and games such as Wordle and Spelling Bee, an altogether constant onslaught of information, incessantly demanding that you spend every waking hour of every day focused on this unrelenting digitality that keeps showing up on the screen in front of you, that screen with which you likely indulge in more back-and-forth than you generally do in person with an actual human being, like, say, your husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister, friend, lover, boss, employee?

Are you multi-tasking as well, working online, Zooming, Googling, communicating with your fellow employees, but also darting off now and then to your favorite venues (like, maybe, this), and then back to your job, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth?

Another question: when you’re reading a short story (on this same site, for instance) or a novel, do you remain immersed in the narrative, able to stay there for quite some time without going anywhere else? As if you were having sex for fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe even half an hour, unwilling to allow any interruptions? Or as if you had dived into a swimming pool or a lake or a sound or a sea and were floating across the water, staring up at the sky?

Can you read anything at all from start to finish, ie. an essay or a short story, without your mind being sliced apart by some digital switchblade? Without your seeking distraction as a form of entertainment, or entertainment as a form of distraction? Or is all of this just ordinary life in the internet era, with your every thought and feeling and perception being diverted or fractured or dissolved or reiterated endlessly with utter normality in a digitalized world to which nearly all of us are fixated, or might we say, addicted? Did you ever even know a different world?

I did know a different world, at least once upon a distant time. I arrived at Esquire in the late eighties to work with the legendary fiction editor Rust Hills , whose passion for literature arose in him every single morning like daylight. He and I would occasionally drink two or three Negronis at lunch, sometimes at the New York Delicatessen on 57 th Street, and talk about the writers and novels and short stories we loved (and hated). Often we met with the writers themselves, and if they were young and didn’t have much money, Rust might slide them across the table a check of his own, just so they could keep scribbling away in their precocious days of writing. Then he and I would happily weave our way back to the office at 1790 Broadway, plop down in our cubicles and make enthusiastic phone calls to writers and agents, our voices probably a little louder than usual. Rust always believed that we could ask anyone for anything. “Let de Gaulle do his own refusing,” he liked to say. Our jobs never felt like work—we played for a living.

The tech world back then seems almost non-existent by comparison to that of this century, even though New York City in the 1980s was economically soaring, having been resurrected from its financial crisis in the mid-Seventies. Yes, cable television had arrived en masse that decade, as had VHSs, Blockbuster movie rentals, dual-cassette answering machines, and far more CDs than the sadly dying vinyl records.

But for all of that, computers were only slowly listing their way into homes and businesses, considered then more like superior typewriters than electronic versions of a personal post office. Back then, we dropped tokens like coins into the subway tolls—no MetroCards to slide through a slot on the turnstile. In those days, rather than staring at their phones, subway riders spent their journey reading books, magazines, and newspapers, with besuited straphangers adept at folding the New York Times broadsheet into an eighth of its original size, and reading the newspaper while holding it in a single hand. Out on the streets, we waved our hands in the air to lure taxi cabs our way. “Uber” would have been considered nothing more or less than an intriguing word from another language. As for “zooming,” well, that just meant we were speeding down the avenue, transported by a wild or exuberant or desperate cabbie. Cell phones had not yet arrived to any significant degree, so pay phones cluttered the sidewalks of the city. At home in our apartments, we still suffered from the expense of long-distance phone calls. And at Esquire , our receptionist, who also worked as the switchboard operator, would connect incoming calls to us. If we missed the calls, she would give us handwritten messages and phone numbers when we came by her front desk. Yes, handwritten.

As for magazines, they were physically everywhere—on our coffee tables at home, in waiting rooms, libraries, airplanes and trains; and being sold at newsstands, bookstores, drugstores and magazine shops that vended only magazines, hundreds of different periodicals, maybe even thousands, including literary journals. Which meant that fiction as a whole, and short stories in particular, were also everywhere to be found. And bought.

Back then, magazines in general, Esquire included, stood rather jauntily in the center of American culture, alongside the towering industries of television, movies, and music. Editors in that era often achieved national renown as editors. And to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s longtime axiom, magazines then were mediums for the message, with literary fiction being one of the prime and abiding messages, as it had been in periodicals for more than a century. In the 1920s, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald made his living not as a writer who had published The Great Gatsby , one of the greatest American novels to this day, but instead as a short story writer, who was paid for 160 stories delivered in various magazines, most frequently the Saturday Evening Post .

“Decades ago,” wrote the tech and media journalist Simon Owens in 2020, “short fiction was a viable business, for publishers and writers alike.” He cites the ideal venues for short stories as the so-called “glossy” magazines (who calls them that now?) such as Esquire , The New Yorker , Playboy, and The Atlantic , along with what were once known as “pulp” magazines, among them Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog , all of which benefited from hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, millions of subscribers. I was always impressed as well by Redbook and McCall’s , two popular monthly women’s magazines, both now departed from the print world, which for close to a century routinely published accomplished fiction, including stories by Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Anne Tyler, and a condensed version of Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon . Even the renewed Vanity Fair , prior to its celebrity obsession when Tina Brown took it over in 1984, devoted itself to extraordinary fiction, at one point buying and printing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold .

For a while in the nineties, it still seemed to Rust and me and many other writers, editors, and marketers that fiction in magazines would last, well, forever. As would magazines themselves. As would literary fiction, period, anywhere and everywhere. Esquire , The Atlantic , Playboy , The New Yorker, and Harper’s published short stories in nearly every one of their issues. Several of those magazines— Esquire , The Atlantic, and The New Yorker —also put out a summer issue solely dedicated to fiction. I even loved using novelists and short story writers to research and compose nonfiction—John Edgar Wideman, for instance, who wrote a rich, imaginative investigation into Michael Jordan and his influence on race in America, and Denis Johnson , who roamed around the world, reporting on multiple catastrophes, including the civil war in Liberia and the take-over of Afghanistan by the Taliban. Another brilliant fiction writer, Joy Williams , Rust’s wife, fired out dazzling and sarcastically ferocious essays, one against hunting entitled “ The Killing Game ” (which infuriated hunters who subscribed to Esquire ), and another in defense of nature, called “ Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp .”

And yet for all of that, a radical change in the structure of literary culture was already approaching. I remember one afternoon in the early-to-mid nineties when the novelist and short story writer Mark Helprin alerted me that tiny computers the size of transistor radios were heading our way. That we would carry them in our hands, stuff them in our pockets, and even pay bills and receive income through these little, unimaginable instruments. That magazines and newspapers and books might even disappear into or pop out of that miniature machine. How could he have known this? I have no idea. Laptop computers in those days seemed at least as big as briefcases, with office computers the size of altars. I recall saying to him with a bit of a laugh and much more astonishment: “Really? The size of a transistor radio?” It struck me as science fiction. Turned out to be science. Helprin was right.

As was the novelist, so-called metafictionalist, and Johns Hopkins professor John Barth, who back in 1993 declared: “I happen to not be optimistic about the future of literature in the electronic global village.” The only thing wrong with his intuition: the word “village.” It’s not a village anymore, if it ever was; it’s a universe.

At times, the digital universe feels to me like the technological equivalent of a black hole, swallowing everything around it, including the un-digital idiosyncrasy of humans, to the point that we are unable to re-emerge from that hole into a freer, more open constellation. In God, Human, Animal, Machine , the writer Meghan O’Gieblyn, who lost her faith after having been raised as a fundamentalist Christian, has created a fascinating inquiry into the nature and power of informational technology, as if that technology might be a new God, in the process of mathematizing uniqueness, and algorithmizing all of us, whether we are religiously faithful, agnostic, or atheistic. She describes how the Israeli intellectual Yuval Noah Harari argues that we already accept “machine wisdom” when it comes to the recommendation of “books, restaurants and potential dates.” He believes that “dataism” is replacing humanism as “a ruling ideology,” invalidating the conviction that an individual’s feelings, ideas, and beliefs make for a “legitimate source of truth.” According to Harari, “Dataism now commands: Listen to the algorithms!”

In the past twenty-five or so years, the magazine industry has shrunk in the midst of this “dataism,” particularly in its rendition of literary fiction. Three years ago, Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic , decided to help devise an online destination for such fiction, short stories in particular, beginning with one by Lauren Groff. “The thinning of print magazines this century,” she writes , “meant a culling of fiction.” The internet, in her estimation (and mine), “makes fairly efficient work of splintering attention and devouring time.” As a result, she concludes that literary reading is “far too easily set aside.”

Simon Owens, the previously mentioned tech and media commentator, could not fathom the economic incentive behind LaFrance’s online venue for fiction. “Short stories don’t generate a lot of traffic,” he writes. In the past, he explains, a writer could make “a middle class living writing nothing but short fiction, and a few did.” Now, he writes, “that’s not the case.”

I often think of how writers, editors, copy-editors, fact-checkers, and even publishers are losing their work just like coal miners in Appalachia have over the last twenty years, with both professions having jobs taken away, seemingly forever, by what has been described in regard to West Virginia, for instance, as “automated technology.”

The power of the internet has not just affected writers economically. It has influenced the very nature of their own creativity. What Will Self, one of my favorite novelists over the last thirty years, calls BDDM—“bi-directional digital media”—is having a severe effect not just on reading, but on writing. Self confesses : “If there are writers out there who have the determination—and concentration—to write on a networked computer without being distracted by the worlds that lie a mere keystroke away, then they’re far steelier and more focused than I.” His vision of the literary future, despite his love for literature (even apparently for e-books), is dark indeed. “If you accept [over the next twenty years] that the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web,” he asks, “do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth.” Writers in this age, he states, are “less imposing” than many of the relatively recent past, which is a “…a reflection of a culture in which literature is no longer centre stage (or screen).”

Given that this new medium is bi-directional and mathematical, and that, to quote Marshall McLuhan once again, “the medium is the message,” literary criticism itself has become dully numerical. Writers and writing tend to be voted upon by readers, who inflict economic power (buy or kill the novel!) rather than deeply examining work the way passionate critics once did in newspapers and magazines. Their “likes” and “dislikes” make for massive rejoinders rather than critical insight. It’s actually a kind of bland politics, as if books and stories are to be elected or defeated. Everyone is apparently a numerical critic now, though not necessarily an astute one. Or even honest. Consider, for instance, Cecilia Rabess’s recent debut novel Everything’s Fine , about a young Black woman employed by Goldman Sachs, who becomes enamored of a racist white co-worker. Six months before the book was even published—and read—members of the digital venue Goodreads , owned by Amazon, blasted the future publication with a flood of one-star reviews, accusing Everything’s Fine of prejudice and racism. Numbers, numbers, numbers, all in attack, rather than a variety of detailed immersions into the actual text, subsequently shared in what we call “writing.”

It’s as if the internet, with its ostensibly forthright venues, has actually turned nearly all of its posters into marketers and up-and-down voters, rather than readers and reviewers. That may be one of the reasons that the publishing and academic world has now become so consumed with propriety in relation to literary writing; otherwise editors, publishers and professors fear that old and new literature, along with themselves, may be treated as viciously as Rabess’s novel.

My perception is that, perhaps because of online mass condemnations, there’s simply too much of an ethical demand in fiction from fearful editors and “sensitivity readers,” whose sensitivity is not unlike that of children raised in religious families who’ve been taught that unless they do everything right, Hell (a longstanding venue of “cancellation”) is their likely destination. That instruction, common in the Protestant South where I grew up, has now—strangely—segued into the secular world of academics and publishing. Too many authors and editors fear that they might write or publish something that to them, at least, is unknowingly “wrong,” narratives that will reveal their ethical ignorance, much to their shame. It’s as if etiquette has become ethics, and blasphemy a sin of secularity.

The power of literary fiction—good literary fiction, anyway—does not come from moral rectitude. Consider, if you will, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was a morally righteous author in the 1850s and whose famous anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, became immensely popular (at least in the North) and in time, a historical version of American sanctimony. Yet, as James Baldwin wrote nearly a century later in his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” it was also “a very bad novel.” For one thing, it praises the enslaved for turning their cheeks, as it were, to be slapped again—or killed—rather than fighting back, a notion of Christian virtue and acceptance that results in brutal suffering and death on an unjust earth that will finally send Uncle Tom out of America to a less violent place known as Heaven. In Baldwin’s words, Stowe “was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong… This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel, and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still with the same constriction.”

And yet constriction has become even more constricted at this point of the 21st century, narrowing the fearless explorations that have been inherent in literature. A new American edition of To the Lighthouse , Virginia Woof’s 1927 British classic, to be published this year by Vintage, opens with an apologetic preface proclaiming that the publication is not an “endorsement” of the novel’s “cultural representations or language.” And just like in the 1850s, there are present-day writers—Sally Rooney, Ben Lerner (I remain a fan of his first two novels, but not his third), Celeste Ng, and Emma Cline, to name a few—composing fiction that Becca Rothfeld, in a brilliant essay appearing in Liberties Magazine , describes as “sanctimony literature,” in which the authors endorse and applaud their pious protagonists for living correctly. In contrast to the four novelists cited above, Rothfeld lauds Jane Austen for creating what she calls “morally mottled characters.” In Rothfeld’s view, political and ethical merit are not inherently identical. The truth is, pretty much all of us are mottled, and to immerse ourselves as readers into the complexity—not the clarity—of existence is illuminating. We can feel as close to the characters as we do to ourselves.

For me, good literature investigates morality. It stares unrelentingly at the behavior of its characters without requiring righteousness. The problem these days with a vast amount of fiction ( and its criticism) is that morality is treated as if it were mathematically precise, obvious, undeniable, and eternal. It is none of those things. Morality evolves, devolves and evolves again. It is not a rule that comes from outside of ourselves, as when the Ten Commandments supposedly floated down to the top of a mountain into the hands of Moses. That’s fiction, too, folks, as if the Bible were a very good book of magical realism, written by Garcia Marquez . Truth does not have to be literal. It can arrive at reality, dressed in a dream. Paradoxically, fiction is often truer than journalism in regard to the nature of life, even though it is largely invented, aka “fiction.” And genuine morality, as opposed to contemporary etiquette, arises from within us, over time, with thought, with feeling, and, crucially… with curiosity. In Buddhist meditation, for example, curiosity leads to a greater and more generous awareness.

Curiosity, in my view, is also what tends to make for far better fiction, and nonfiction as well. Too many publishers and editors these days seem to regard themselves as secular priests, dictating right and wrong, as opposed to focusing on the allure of the mystifying and the excitement of uncertainty. Ethics and aesthetics appear in this era to be intentionally merged, as if their respective “good” is identical. By contrast, the late, brilliant editor Robert Gottlieb, who worked with Toni Morrison , Robert Caro , Cynthia Ozick , Doris Lessing , and Joseph Heller , among many others, blended himself into the prose and intentions of his authors, supporting and allowing the independence of their freestanding literature. He was an editor-in-chief at the The New Yorker for several years, but never a dictator. He could judge and sharpen the distinctive power of an author’s voice without condemning its unique, often defiant point of view.

In their best moments, writers scribble on their pads and type on their keyboards like children playing with their buddies outside on the street or in the woods or at a park, far away in soul, if not place, from their parents. As the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks declares in the book Seduced by Story , a beguiling and recent analysis of the nature of narrative, both fiction writing and children’s play “are about the creation of a space of freedom within the inexorable mechanisms of the real. That play, in the case of the successful fiction, delivers us back to reality changed, enhanced, with a greater wisdom in our stock.” Novelists love novels, he suggests, because such literature doesn’t constrain its creation by rules. “Fiction,” writes Brooks, “is playful precisely in its refusal to accept belief systems, its insistence on the ‘as if.’”

Or, as my friend, the novelist Darcey Steinke, says: “I actually think the best writing has paradox and ambiguity built right in. You can’t write without accepting it. Novels are about people that are f***** up!”

Oh, dear literature! Will you die or shrink or practically disappear into a tiny, elitist realm like opera has into Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan? James Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, has only owned a smart phone for the past year. And yet his literary life has radically altered. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he tells Nathan Heller in a New Yorker piece about the diminishment of English majors in college. “…I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.”

John Guillory, another professor, recently retired from New York University, and the author of Cultural Capital and Professing Criticism , says his fellow academics need to confront “the declining cultural capital of literature in a wildly expanded media universe.”

There’s even anxiety that artificial intelligence might make human writing superfluous. The Italian writer Italo Calvino , one of my favorite novelists (read The Baron in the Trees !), foresaw this in a lecture he gave way back in 1967, entitled “Cybernetics and Ghosts.” He laid out questions that strike me as astonishingly prescient, given the recent attempts of AI at composing literature. “Will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author?” Calvino asked during his speech. “Just as we already have machines that can read, machines that perform a linguistic analysis of literary texts, machines that make translations and summaries, will we also have machines capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels?”

The answer, as Calvino likely already knew, even though he died at the age of 61 in 1985, is: You betcha . A couple of years ago, a former Esquire colleague of mine, Adam Fisher, relayed to me a poem composed by AI. It wasn’t that good, but it wasn’t that bad, either. It probably would have gotten a solid B in an MFA program.

Will readers like us therefore need to become the literary equivalents of the Amish, living peacefully and slightly outside the technological world? Can reading and writing literature become our version of riding in horse-drawn buggies cantering peacefully down a car-jammed highway? Or do we simply need to accept new forms of art, whatever they might be, as when Bibles were first printed by the Gutenberg Press back in 1455, and a new bright vision arose from reading?

Not long ago, I was waiting in a long line to the cashiers at the Barnes & Noble bookstore by Union Square in Manhattan, lugging a stack of books and magazines that I was about to buy. Just ahead of me stood a lovely, dark-haired woman, probably in her forties or fifties, also carrying a stack of books, who pulled a flip phone out of her coat pocket, opened it for a second, then flipped it back shut with seeming delight. I fell in love with her instantly. Yes, she was beautiful, and I didn’t mind that, but it was the flip phone that made me want to ask her out, to sit with her in a bar or coffee shop, discussing the similar nature of our particular universe, and then to subsequently marry and share a digitally-free—or at least digitally-modest—life.

Her flip phone made me believe I already knew her. That she also loved reading literary fiction (the books she was lugging implied that, too, including Haruki Murakami’s short story collection First Person Singular , which I was also buying). That she appreciated direct contact with humans, talking and listening in physical presence, not just staring at a phone in the midst of humanity. That there was a calmness in her, and strength as well. In my view, she had either rebelled against smart phone obsession or never succumbed to it in the first place. I’m reminded of a wonderful line from Lola Shub, a high school senior from Brooklyn, quoted by Alex Vadukul in the New York Times last December in an article about young Luddites: “When I got my flip phone, things instantly changed,” she said. “I started using my brain.”

My own brain decided to hide my intermittently-smart Samsung phone in the back pocket of my jeans and wondered what to say to the flip phone woman. In the end, however, I said nothing. Instead, I smiled at a little kid, also hauling a stack of books, who just came running into the line ahead, and then leaning against that very woman. The boy grinned back at me. I went up, bought my books and magazines, stuffed them in my knapsack, took them home, sat down on my favorite chair, turned off my phone, and began to read.

Outside my window, a big moon sailed slowly across the sky above New York City. It felt like my head was its own moon, albeit somewhat smaller, peacefully floating over Murakami’s story “Cream.” The very process of reading in itself is a generous, enriching form of solitude, meditational in fact, but it is also a calm instigation of independence, and maybe even an ongoing incentive for intellectual revolution. It allows a reader, especially in this digital age, to think more freely rather than being dictated by aggressive algorithms. Murakami’s recently-published stories also made me realize how fiction at large, and short stories in particular, remain as exhilarating as ever, the embodiment of an infinite variety of visions and voices, and powerful alternatives to the standard nature of the current mind, regardless of whether literary fiction is now harder to find, publish, promote, and write in this era of digital dictatorship.

Twenty-five years ago, I wrote and published the following paragraph in the introduction to an anthology I edited called Why I Write , that features original essays by 28 fiction writers, including Denis Johnson , Joy Williams, Darius James, Mary Gaitskill , Ann Patchett , and David Foster Wallace :

The very act of reading literature, the anticommunalism of it, the slow drift into reverie, the immersion into the charismatic black-and-white grids of the page—all of this emphatically unplugs us from that other grid, that beeping, noisome electronic grid that attempts to snare us in a web of reflex, of twitch and spasm. Does this make the pursuit of literature a Luddite maneuver, with all the shadowings of melancholy and futility attendant on such rebellions? I suspect that to the contrary, passionate reading will become a form of permanent opposition…

I feel this way now more than ever. And I suspect I will for the rest of my life. Will you?

Will Blythe is the author of a New York Times bestseller To Hate Like This is To Be Happy Forever . A former literary editor at Esquire , he quit the magazine in protest to a last-minute cancellation of a novella by David Leavitt that included scenes of gay sex.

Alice Munro, Nobel Prize-winning short-story ‘master,’ dies at 92

The Canadian writer’s works of short fiction illuminated seemingly ordinary lives.

Alice Munro, a towering woman of letters for the past half-century whose works of short fiction illuminated the emotional terrain of seemingly ordinary lives, and who was honored at the end of her career with the Nobel Prize in literature, died May 13 in Port Hope, Ontario. She was 92.

The Canadian writer’s death was announced by her publisher, Penguin Random House Canada. The cause was not immediately available. Mrs. Munro had in recent years endured numerous health problems, including heart ailments and cancer, and in 2013 she said publicly that she was “probably not going to write any more.”

Four months later — and after perennial rumors that she might be next in line for the award — she received the Nobel Prize . The announcement described her as a “master of the contemporary short story,” an official pronouncement of what critics and readers around the world had been saying for years.

Sherry Linkon, an English professor at Georgetown University, said Mrs. Munro helped remodel and revitalize the short-story form. “Most of us learn as children that a story has a beginning, a middle and an end,” she said. Mrs. Munro’s stories “help us to understand that the beginning of the story might have been decades ago, and the end of the story might be decades hence, and, really, that’s how life works.”

Brought up to be a farmer’s wife, Mrs. Munro said that she “never intended to be a short-story writer” and that she turned to the form because the demands of motherhood did not permit her to write longer works.

“In 20 years, I’ve never had a day when I didn’t have to think about someone else’s needs,” she once said. “And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.”

Mrs. Munro populated her stories with regular people grinding along in their lives in small towns, in suburbs, on farms and, often, on the margins of society. In short order — the only order permitted by short stories — readers discover that the characters are burdened by discontent, secrets and tragedy. Mrs. Munro’s writing was understated yet unsparing.

In “ Before the Change, ” first published in the New Yorker in 1998, the protagonist discovers that her father is an illegal abortionist. The story “Dimension,” printed in the same magazine in 2006, revolves around Doree, a Comfort Inn chambermaid whose husband has murdered their three children.

“None of the people she worked with knew what had happened. Or, if they did, they didn’t let on,” Mrs. Munro wrote in the third paragraph, before revealing to readers what, exactly, had happened to Doree.

“Her picture had been in the paper,” Mrs. Munro continued, describing the maid, “they’d used the photo he took of her with all three kids, the new baby, Dimitri, in her arms, and Barbara Ann and Sasha on either side, looking on. Her hair had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and color, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft — a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her.”

Mrs. Munro once told the New York Times that her stories hinged on “a kind of primordial moment, an awful revelation, that you can’t do anything about,” and she often held back before unveiling it.

The American short-story writer Cynthia Ozick called Mrs. Munro “our Chekhov,” referring to the turn-of-the-20th-century Russian author regarded as a short-story maestro. Many of her collections — the most recent of which included “The View From Castle Rock” (2006), “Too Much Happiness” (2009) and “ Dear Life ” (2012) — were considered masterpieces of the form.

She was especially known for her exposition of female characters. She titled one of her books “Lives of Girls and Women” (1971).

“Her stories made visible the ways that women’s lives are every bit as important, complex and contested as men’s are,” Linkon said. “And dark. … You get a sense of the ways that people can be cruel to each other and cruel to themselves.”

Mrs. Munro had a particular interest in what she called “a new kind of old woman, women who grew up under one set of rules and then found they could live with another.”

She might have been describing herself.

Alice Ann Laidlaw was born July 10, 1931, in Wingham, Ontario. Many of her stories were set in the bleak environs of rural Canada, a world similar to the one where she spent much of her life.

Her father, a fox breeder and later a foundry worker, wrote a novel about an Ontario pioneer family, and her mother was a teacher.

“We lived outside the whole social structure because we didn’t live in the town and we didn’t live in the country,” Mrs. Munro once told an interviewer . “We lived in this kind of little ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived. Those were the people I knew. It was a community of outcasts. I had that feeling about myself.”

Her mother developed Parkinson’s disease when Mrs. Munro was 12, leaving the girl to become, in a sense, the woman of the house.

“It’s an incurable, slowly deteriorating illness which probably gave me a great sense of fatality. Of things not going well,” she said. “But I wouldn’t say I was unhappy. I didn’t belong to any nice middle class, so I got to know more types of kids. It didn’t seem bleak to me at the time. It seemed full of interest.”

She received a scholarship to attend the University of Western Ontario, where she started out studying journalism — a “coverup,” she said, for her desire to be a writer. Later in college, she studied English and published her first short story. To scrape by, the Ottawa Citizen reported, she picked tobacco and sold pints of her blood.

“My life has been tremendously lucky,” Mrs. Munro told the Los Angeles Times . “If I hadn’t gotten that scholarship to university, I would have dried up in Wingham. You can’t be alone too long with your hopes and ambitions. I would have become a weird spinster.”

In 1951, she married a fellow student, Jim Munro, and moved with him to Victoria, B.C., and opened a bookstore. They had three daughters, Sheila, Andrea and Jenny; another died shortly after birth.

Mrs. Munro’s first book, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was published in 1968 and received the first of her three Governor General’s Literary Awards, one of Canada’s most prestigious artistic honors.

And yet, “there was huge social disapproval for women who listened to the news on the radio, much less would-be writers,” Mrs. Munro said. “I was trying to write all the time. I liked keeping house and being a mother, but it was the expectation that a woman should spend her free time going to coffee klatches and talking about nothing that bothered me.”

In the early 1970s, the Munros divorced. Several years later, she married Gerald Fremlin, an old college classmate.

Mrs. Munro continued writing books, including the collection “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You” (1974). Her first appearance in the New Yorker came in 1977 with “Royal Beatings,” a story infused with violence about the troubled relationship between a girl and her father and stepmother.

Over the years, the New Yorker published many more of Mrs. Munro’s pieces and helped bring her to wide renown in the United States. Three of the stories — most recently “What Is Remembered” (2001) — received National Magazine awards for fiction.

Her books “Who Do You Think You Are?” (1978), “The Progress of Love” (1986), “Friend of My Youth” (1990), “The Love of a Good Woman” (1998) and “Runaway” (2004) were decorated with literary honors in Canada, and Mrs. Munro received the Man Booker International Prize in 2009.

The acclaimed 2006 film “Away From Her,” starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent, was based on Mrs. Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” about an elderly woman afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and her husband’s efforts to reconcile himself to the new attachment she forms at her nursing home, and to his own past.

Fremlin, Mrs. Munro’s husband, died in 2013. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. Sheila Munro wrote “Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro” (2001), a book that transcended the genres of biography and memoir.

Mrs. Munro expressed concern that, through her fiction, she had been misunderstood. “People say I write depressing or pessimistic stories,” she told the New York Times , “and I know that in my own life I’m not a pessimistic person … you should hear me as a mother, the cheerful, trite advice I give.”

But she acknowledged the fundamental impossibility of knowing oneself.

“Everybody’s doing their own novel of their own lives,” she said. “The novel changes — at first we have a romance, a very satisfying novel that has a rather simple technique, and then we grow out of that and we end up with a very discontinuous, discordant, very contemporary kind of novel. I think that what happens to a lot of us in middle age is that we can’t really hang on to our fiction any more.”