Windows into Life

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Every decade or so someone, somewhere, proclaims short fiction irrelevant and passe. In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories of the Century, out last spring, John Updike lamented the diminished importance of the genre during his lifetime, adding later, in an interview with Amazon.com that Americans turn to celebrity anecdotes instead for narrative lessons on how we live. "In a way," Updike reflected, "you could argue that the National Enquirer is the real successor to Story magazine."

Of course anyone who has spent even 50 seconds pondering cultural habits in the '90s will agree that the decision to pick up the latest profile of Brad and Jennifer before, say, sitting down with the latest from Alice Munro is for many of us one fraught with precious little hesitation. That said, however, the last summer of the millennium seems to be just the wrong moment to adopt a gloomy attitude toward the literary form championed by the likes of Sherwood Anderson and John Cheever, Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie.

In a rare occurrence, a compilation of connected tales, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, published this spring by a new writer, Melissa Bank, made the New York Times best-seller list. Another spring collection, For The Relief of Unbearable Urges, by 29-year-old Nathan Englander, has also done very well, placing among Amazon.com's top books. Older, more established writers have had luck too. Annie Proulx's newest collection of strikingly uncommercial short stories, Close Range, has sold nearly 100,000 copies. Scribner, the book's publisher, would have considered half that number a success. And at Knopf, senior editor Anne Close says short-story collections such as Lorrie Moore's Birds of America have fared very well this year.

This summer brings the release of more than half a dozen new short-story collections by young, promising writers. In the past three decades, short stories have increasingly become the province of female authors; a number of these new voices belong to women who bring a kind of outre comedy to subjects of domestic entanglement.

Marital boredom gets a sly look in Julia Slavin's The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club (Henry Holt; 194 pages; $22) and Elena Lappin's fine collection, Foreign Brides (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 208 pages; $22). In My Date with Satan (Scribner; 223 pages; $22), author Stacey Richter covers female rivalry and the gender wars in a manner that indicates she may be in possession of one of the more outlandishly imaginative minds in contemporary fiction. Richter's book, just out, is being actively promoted by Barnes & Noble and has already far exceeded the retailer's sales expectations. Romantic relationships receive less fantastical treatment in another debut, Ken Foster's The Kind I'm Likely to Get.

Among the best new collections are two that loosely chronicle the immigrant experience: Gish Jen's Who's Irish? (Knopf; 208 pages; $22) and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner; 198 pages; $12). Lahiri has a gift for illuminating the full meaning of brief relationships--with lovers, family friends, those met in travel. A more lasting bond--the one between fathers and daughters--is elegantly explored in Bliss Broyard's My Father, Dancing.

Editors have various theories as to why short stories are enjoying renewed popularity. Some attribute the trend to the increasing number of creative-writing programs that sprang up during the '80s and have left writers with a surplus of short fiction produced as course work. Scribner editor Nan Graham believes "there is a truly distinctive set of voices emerging at the moment." For years, she argues, writers in the genre allowed themselves to be too influenced by the spare style of Carver. "We are just beginning to recover from him," she says. "These writers are not in his grip." Meanwhile, readers, however slowly, may be realizing that stories provide the kind of windows into life not even episodes of Friends can open.