To cut a long story short . . . . Kathleen Jones on short fiction
The short list for the BBC National Short Story Award has just been announced and it's a shocker! There are no men on it... ( David Gilmour take note) At £15,000 this is one of the most valuable prizes in literature, and it emphasises the short story's status as a literary art form. The high value we place on the short story is a big contrast with its lack of appeal as a commercial publishing prospect. Fewer and fewer publishers are accepting them and then only as a gesture towards their best-selling authors. Newspaper and magazine outlets have also dwindled. But, readers like short stories and writers like writing them. The result is a flourishing Indie-publishing scene for short fiction - not just in book form, but also in E-zines and blogs and Facebook groups. People are reading Flash fiction on their mobile phones and downloading stories onto their I-pads from sites where you can read any kind of fiction from erotic to murderous, ...