In response to the comment that anthologies are so often patchy...

three thoughts

Firstly, that a reader's own tastes differ, so doesnt one 'like' some stories more than others?

Secondly, whatever the reason, I agree that they are patchy.

Thirdly. One that wasn't (to my mind) was David Constantine's collection 'Under the Dam'... Comma Press.

This website also contains some good info about the short story market. (although mostly competitions).

I should add (which sort of backs up nessie's point) that once you sign a contract it becomes much harder to place your stories. You can't really enter comps any more (apart from the Nesta one) and when magazines do want your short pieces, they tend not to want one you've got stashed away on your hard drive.

Yes, I'm coming to realise that. So it's writing ones from scratch for commissions (complete with fitting their length and tastes), or becoming so successful that your agent can twist your publisher's arm into publishing something that will make a loss.

Maybe I'll stick to novels.

Emma

Nessie - hi! - just saw that you mentioned Alice Muno way back when. I finished her last but one collection, Runaway last week and, dear Lord, it made me feel so inadequate as a writer. What dignity and control and wisdom, she has.

I seem to prefer short stories that have a running theme, like the Munro. I'm a Rohinton Mistry - another Canadian writer - nut and his first published piece was a short story collection called, Tales From Firozha Baag set in an apartment block in Bombay. Interestingly, his output since then has been three very big - Booker shortlisted - novels.

I also loved Jhumpa Lahiri's first book - the short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies. It bagged the Pulitzer and the opening story, A Temporary Matter is, in my opinion, as good as Chekov's, The Kiss. Her only book since then has also been a - very good - novel, The Namesake.

I had hoped, when I joined this site, that there may have been more women's magazine short story writers, but I appear to be the only one. I write for this market because it pays well, primarily, and I can sell my work. The downside is that once you're published you're often blocked from entering competitions - e.g Good Housekeeping; Woman and Home and The Lady have competitions but I can't enter them. I think I'm naturally more of a short story writer than a novelist. Can't bear the thought of devoting my time to a novel that might not even get published, but with a short story you've spent two weeks on it doesn't matter so much, particularly if you get feedback and can improve it.

Does anyone on this site outside the UK know of any commercial women's mags that buy stories? I've resold stories in Australia and did have an agent who sold them in Scandinavia, but he retired and now I can no longer submit them. Very cleverly he never sent me any of the mags my stories appeared in, knowing, i guess, that if I knew the address I'd cut him out and sent them myself. One of these was Hjemmet - I think (The Home) but I have no contacts there so can no longer send them myself. Any contacts would be gratefully received and the favour returned if at all in my power.

I love short stories.

I think it's fair to say that when I read short stories I experience more moments of contemplation and reflection about the story or about myself and more moments of admiration for the writing, than when I read novel-length fiction.

Don't know if that resonates with anyone else.

Pete

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i.e. more of those moments when you are conscious that you are enjoying reading.

it does depend on the novel, but yes, generally, I am made to think, made to see things in a slightly different way far more fequently by really good short stories.

Horses for courses, I guess.

And I like the way you put it...

"I experience more moments of contemplation and reflection about the story or about myself..."

that's the ultimate, for me. If a story manages to hold up a mirror so that I see something I had never noticed before about myself, my life.

When that hapens it is amazing.

But dont you think that we read short stories in a different way to novels? (if we are reading 'properly'? Maybe you can afford to read a short piece with more intensity?

vanessa

Horses for courses, I guess. - indeed. It does annoy me when people try and set forms of writing up against each other, in a false opposition. There's so much to be gained by reading all types of texts - cross-fertilisation, if you like.

What a short story does is deliver a message or image and then step back, leaving the substance to resonate with the reader. Its power is in what's left unsaid.

A novel is a different dynamic where you have, in effect, a series of short stories linked by theme and character, to contrast or compare, and several widths of story-arc in operation from the microcosmic to the over-reaching. So the exploration of a theme happens on the page rather than off it (which is not to say that the effects on a reader can't be highly personal and resonant).

There are short stories that have blown me away, but there are passages of novels that have had the same effect, and that I can quote by heart. Sections of Middlemarch, for example, which stand alone as powerful observations on the nature of human frustration and courage and the operation of sympathy - but are all the more resonant for being anchored in a larger structure where other aspects of the theme are being considered.

I agree... all forms of writing are important... looking back over my post, Im coming over all evangelical, pro-short story against all others. Not intended!

maybe it's because I have tried to write a novel and haven't been able to, and I'm subliminally jealous!

Its such a long time since I read Middlemarch... but novels that have made me stop in mid page because they were such mines of thought...Austerlitz, Being Dead, Disgrace, just off the top of my head.

vanessa

Disgrace didn't so much make me stop and think as make me pause to turn on the gas oven, the quicker to leave the world as soon as I'd finished the book. I've never read a book so completely soaked in lacrimae rerum. (Sorry - if there was English for that concept, I'd use it.)

Emma

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And yes, I know you can't kill yourself with North Sea gas really;)

cor, I only got O level Latin, a zillion years ago, lowest grade possible. tears something and 'of things'?

)I said it was lowest grade...)

I found the book inspiring on many levels.

just goes to show the 'horses for courses' bit, really!

vanessa

soaked in lacrimae rerum. (Sorry - if there was English for that concept, I'd use it.)

No such luck. See: http://whenhernameyouwriteyoublot.blogspot.com/2006/11/thou-majestic-in-thy-sadness-at.html

Pete

I always had it as meaning: 'Misery's everywhere you look, in absolutely everything' - or to put it in modern language, Life's a bitch and then you die.

Tears for the sorrows of mankind?