Self Taut

We live in an era, after all, when the universal complaint is that we don't have enough free time; in a nation that is full of shortening attention spans, that, as Edward Jones puts it, "lives on instant stuff." Doesn't this mean that there should be growing demand for the kind of fiction that can be started and finished over a lunch hour or on a long subway ride?

Well -- no.

Talk to enough writers, editors and agents and the attention-span argument gets knocked down pretty fast. "Any good story," as Eisenberg puts it, "is going to be compressed and very, very layered," which means it requires more of your attention, not less.

Ann Close, Munro's longtime editor at Knopf, agrees. It takes longer to read a book of well-written stories than it does to read a novel, Close says, because once you get going on a novel you can often just "whip through it," but with short fiction, you're constantly starting over. "You have to enter again into every story."

D'Ambrosio offers a related theory. "The natural home for a short story is probably not the book. It's a magazine," he says. The book "is the container for a novel."

This might not be a problem if only more magazines would publish stories and pay decently for them. But the magazine market for serious fiction has evaporated to the point where it essentially consists of the New Yorker -- which runs about 50 stories a year and buys them for sums that can reach into the five figures -- and a bevy of high-minded, low-budget literary magazines rarely seen by the broad reading public. (Online publishing has the potential to reach short story fans more efficiently, but it, too, generates scarcely any income for its "content providers.")

Even though they can't pay much, magazines such as Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story and McSweeney's remain essential to the literary ecosystem. "They're the doors," explains Margaret Atwood, who, like many well-known writers, is a booster of the little magazines. "They're how young writers get in, how they may attract attention."

But the attention, she says, routinely comes with a thick string attached.

Atwood, whose latest story collection is "Moral Disorder," is at home in multiple forms -- novels, stories, essays, poetry -- and she's long past having to fight with publishers about which she chooses to work in. Not so, she explains, with newcomers to the field:

"With a young writer, they're always going to say: 'Well, this is a lovely book of short stories, dear, have you got a novel?' "

The Lack of 'Upside'

And why shouldn't they? Even the fiercest short-story fans don't dispute that novels are far more likely to attract paying customers.