I’ve been reading more short stories of late. I find that I often enjoy them more than novels. A good short story contains no fluff, no filler. Short stories, moreover, are well-suited to this era of cell phones and short attention spans.
Short stories used to be almost as popular as novels, back when Americans read middlebrow, general interest magazines. (F. Scott Fitzgerald earned most of his income from short story sales.)
But that was in the distant past. For as long as anyone can remember, every fiction writer has dreamed of being a bestselling novelist. Publishers have been wary of short fiction collections, unless every story in the collection was authored by Stephen King.
I recently picked up The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Amor Towles and Jenny Minton Quigley. I bought the audiobook edition, so I listened to these stories as I mowed my lawn and did my bench press sets in the gym.
This collection contains a strong mix of stories. This isn’t to say that every story is a gem. As is always the case with multi-author anthologies, the reader’s mileage may vary. There were a few stories in this collection that left me cold. But most of them are good, and a handful of the stories are very good.
My favorites were:
“Hiding Spot” by Caroline Kim
“The Paper Artist” by E. K. Ota
“The Dark” by Jess Walter
Recommended reading…especially if you’ve been waiting for the right time to jump back into short-story reading.
While poking around on Amazon this morning, I noticed that the electronic version of Stephen King’s 2018 novel, The Outsider, is now available in Kindle Unlimited (KU). This means that subscribers to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program can read the electronic version of the book for free.
(Note: At least for now. Kindle Unlimited terms run for a period of 90 days. So if you’re reading this post a year from now, The Outsider may or may not be in KU.)
Amazon launched its Kindle Unlimited program more than a decade ago. Since its inception, there have been arguments for and against the program.
On one hand, Kindle Unlimited is to books what Netflix is to movies. KU thereby allows subscribers to discover new books and authors for free (aside from the KU subscription fee).
On the other hand, Kindle Unlimited requires books to be exclusive to the Amazon platform. (More on this shortly.) This creates a “network effect” that arguably disadvantages other stores like Apple Books and Kobo.
Another concern with Kindle Unlimited is that it tends to be skewed toward certain kinds of genre fiction, like romance, urban fantasy, and space opera. In the past, critics of the program (mostly book reviewers) have complained that Kindle Unlimited doesn’t contain enough titles from bestselling, household-name authors.
Well, you can’t get any more household-name than Stephen King. If a Stephen King title is available in Kindle Unlimited, then the program has all the bona fides it needs.
There is one important catch, however. And this quibble comes (mostly) from the perspective of an independent author/publisher like me.
The Outsider is still available on other platforms, like Kobo and Apple Books. (I checked.) Stephen King’s title is not subject to the normal rules of KU exclusivity.
This is an important exception. If I place a book in Kindle Unlimited, I have to agree to make it exclusive to Amazon (not available anywhere else) for a period of 90 days. This means that readers can’t find it on other platforms, and I can’t sell it on other platforms during the Kindle Unlimited enrollment period.
So Stephen King gets different, more preferential treatment at Amazon than I do. I’m neither outraged nor surprised. Having spent many years in the corporate world, I know how the corporate world works.
As someone once told me, many years ago: “Rank and status have perks.” At the time, we were discussing the egalitarian implications of reserved parking spaces for top managers in the company parking lot. The corporate world is far from egalitarian. It would be naive to think that book publishing and retailing are “special” in this regard. Business is business.
On the contrary, I might benefit from this. The placement of The Outsider in Kindle Unlimited will bring new horror fans into the subscription program. After they’re done reading The Outsider, some of them may read one of my horror novels, like 12 Hours of Halloween, Revolutionary Ghosts, or Kuwa 6226. They may even give my historical horror series, The Rockland Horror, a try.
Yes, that was a little self-promotional plug, tongue-in-cheek though it was. Like I said: Business is business.
In the fall of 1984, I was a junior in high school. I had a passion for the novels and short stories of Stephen King.
My high school English teacher, not so much. He was a devotee of two twentieth-century writers: Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. So I read a lot of Hemingway and a lot of Fitzgerald that year.
I was 16 years old, and really two young for either writer. Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote about adult concerns, and concerns of what was already a long-ago, bygone era. As a teenager of the Reagan-era American suburbs, I had little interest in the social conventions of the Jazz Age, or the moody ramblings of World War I veterans.
As an adult, I’ve developed a new appreciation for both writers.
I’ve recently begun digging into The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection. This collection, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, contains all the Fitzgerald short stories I remember as a junior in high school: “Winter Dreams”,“A Diamond As Big As the Ritz”, “Babylon Revisited,” etc.—as well as many that my high school English teacher never assigned.
Fitzgerald wrote his short stories long. Not all of them can be read in a single sitting. Many of his short stories resemble compressed novels more than typical short stories, as they deal with events stretching out over many years, even decades.
Fitzgerald’s writing style is accessible to modern readers, but his subject matter is a hundred years removed from our time. It takes some effort to put oneself in the mindset of an adult living in 1925. (I am soon to turn 57 years old, and that is the era of my great-grandparents. The one great-grandparent I knew was born in 1895, one year before Fitzgerald.)
Still, there are some universal themes in Fitzgerald’s fiction. One of my favorite stories is the aforementioned “Winter Dreams”. This is the tale of a man who, between adolescence and early middle age, mistakenly projects all of his ideals onto a woman with whom he has a fleeting romantic relationship.
1922 magazine illustration for “Winter Dreams”
“Winter Dreams” is basically a story about the pedastalization of femininity. The theme is as relevant in 2025 as it was in 1922, when Fitzgerald wrote the story.
(Note: When I first read “Winter Dreams” in 1984, I “got” what Fitzgerald was trying to say. Some years would pass before I learned the real-life lesson.)
You might be hesitant to dive into a book of century-old stories. I would encourage you, though, to give Fitzgerald a try. Many of his tales, like The Great Gatsby and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, have been adapted for film in the modern era.
There is a reason why Fitzgerald endures, when so many other writers have fallen by the wayside. Fitzgerald was a skilled and insightful storyteller.
I suspect, however, that Lovecraft’s excessive reliance on first-person narration traces to his generally weak sense of character and characterization. As I previously noted, every Lovecraft character is essentially the same person: a solitary male engaged in arcane pursuits, often with the assistance of an uncle who is a professor at Miskatonic University.
But all writers, I should note—me included—have their quirks and habitual crutches. This is not a condemnation of Lovecraft, but merely a literary observation.
