By Jess Mehr, Non-Fiction Editor 

There's a great essay entitled "What Ails the Short Story" by Stephen King, which the New York Times has posted on its web site. In it, he details his experience of going into a bookstore searching for good short fiction on the rows of magazine racks, only to discover that he can't reach literary journals like The Iowa Review and Glimmer Train "without going to my knees like a school janitor trying to scrape a particularly stubborn wad of gum off the gym floor." It's an experience I think most of us have had, squatting or kneeling in Border's or Barnes and Noble until finally your legs hurt so much you just sit on the floor right there in periodicals. Stephen King sees a larger significance in this posturing, asking: "What happens when a writer realizes that his or her audience is shrinking almost daily?"

The result, according to King, is stories that feel "show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers." He chalks this problem up directly to the "bottom shelf." He comments: "It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ."

King's final conclusion? While the short story isn't dead, it's certainly ailing.