http://slate.msn.com/id/2081102/
McSweeney’s and the short story. McSweeney’s, supposedly an outlet for stories not fitting the mould of the “New Yorker short story” (described by Michael Chabon as a “contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story”), now just as sharply defines a short story genre of its own: the “McSweeney’s short story,” which “substitutes nihilism for epiphany” and rejects “conventional notions of structure, character, or coherence.” (I think another defining (and regrettable) characteristic of the McSweeney’s short story is irrepressible whimsy. A McSweeney’s story can never be too cute, it seems.)
Actually, I’m not very fond of either type of short story. I don’t agree with all of it, but B.R. Meyers’s “A Reader’s Manifesto” goes some way toward explaining my problems with modern fiction.
“More than half a century ago popular storytellers like Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham were ranked among the finest novelists of their time, and were considered no less literary, in their own way, than Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be ‘genre fiction’—at best an excellent ‘read’ or a ‘page turner,’ but never literature with a capital L.”