The State of the Short Story Collection Part 1

In 2025, there were only 20 new English-language short story collections¹ published in hardcover by the Big Five Publishers and their imprints.

Of these 20 collections, 15 include stories that were published beforehand. Across these 15 collections, stories were first released in 56 unique publications. Of these 56 publications, 9 featured stories by 2 or more of the 15 authors. The data set is below:

“Total” refers to the total number of stories across these 15 collections that were published in the designated magazine. “Unique” refers to the number of different collections that had at least one story published in the designated magazine. There were a total of 103 stories across the 15 collections that were published elsewhere beforehand; 49 (48%) of the stories were published in one of the 9 magazines above (leaving 54 magazines with exactly one story each²); 25 (24%) were published in The New Yorker alone.

A few gleanings:

1. If publication in The New Yorker was not quite a prerequisite for a big press collection, it was nonetheless a major predictive factor (40% of total collections; 53% of collections that had previously published stories). Of the 8 collections with New Yorker connections, 7 published multiple stories in that magazine.

2. The Paris Review is a distant but significant secondary “feeder,” but its influence seems more additive with The New Yorker than as an alternative. Of the 5 collections with stories published in The Paris Review, 4 were collections that also had stories published in The New Yorker.

3. Of the “big 9” publications above, 2 are essentially defunct. Tin House was discontinued in 2019, while Audible Original Stories seems to have been a temporary initiative.

4. The 5 collections that did not contain previously published stories are a motley crew. Torrey Peters and Lydia Millet can be grouped as authors who probably got collection deals thanks largely to recent success in the novel form. Peters is a particularly interesting case because she actually self-published (but has since removed) two of her collection’s stories on her personal website. The other three authors: Rupert Everett, a famous British actor whose collection had been published in England in 2024; Fannie Flagg, a best-selling author of domestic fiction, whose collection of interlinked “fictions” is inconsistently advertised as a collection in its presentation and marketing (there is no mention on its cover); and Fenmi Fetto, a British-Nigerian journalist and style editor at British Vogue.

5. If you’re wondering how this aligns with Jacob Savage’s thesis on the vanishing of the white male (Millennial) writer: of the 20, 4 are published by white men: Rupert Everett (b. 1959); Richard Bausch (b. 1945); Paul Theroux (b. 1941); and Thomas McGuane (b. 1939). Three of these are elder statesmen; Everett is a famous actor.

6. If you’re wondering how this looks generationally more generally: 5 (Aysegul Savas, Elaine Hsieh Chou, Jared Lemus, Mariah Rigg, and Kanza Javed) were born in the 1980s or 1990s. The other 10 are older and have been publishing for 20+ years. Three are first books (Chou, Lemus, Rigg).

I have not yet tried to determine some important additional factors: the number of novels published by Big Five presses in 2025; the number of story collections published by Big Five presses in previous years; the number of story collections published by small presses. My working hunch is that both the total and relative number of story collections to novels is in decline over the past 20-30 years, both among Big Five presses and, at the risk of paradox, the bigger small presses. I do know that 2025 was a low point in a prolonged decline of prestige for the story collection at least by one significant measure (more on that in a future post).

This post is a presentation of evidence; I will forgo commentary until I’ve established a more concrete picture of things.

1. A few explanations of my criteria: I am not counting translations, nor am I counting collections that are partly or entirely “selected” stories (this excludes Jonathan Lethem’s collection).

2. Here is an unorganized block text of these publications for the curious/sickos:
Southern Review Colorado Review Dublin Review 212 Magazine RA Magazine Yale Review The Pinch Journal Sewanee Review The Common Puerta del Sol Carve Magazine Cincinnati Review Joyland Oprah Magazine The Cut Amazon Original Financial Times Subtropics Scribd Narrative New Letters Idaho Review Missouri Review Harper’s Redbook American Literary Review The Punch Salamander Malahat Review Greensboro Review The Baffler Open City Columbia Magazine Pioneer Works Broadcast Vice Columbia: A Journal of Arts and Letters Virgin Fiction Alaska Quarterly Review One Story Glimmer Train Conjunctions Boulevard Iowa Review Glamour Crazyhorse GQ A Public Space. Some of these no longer exist (Tin House, Glimmer Train, Carve Magazine) or have largely stopped publishing fiction (Redbook, GQ).