The State of the Short Story Collection Part 2

On Lists and Awards

In my first post on the state of the short story collection, I mentioned that not only were very few story collections published by the Big Five presses in 2025¹, but that there was evidence of declining critical prestige for the story collection as well. Here is my elaboration on that hypothesis.

Every year since 2004, the New York Times has published its list of 100 Notable Books, roughly split between fiction (including poetry) and non-fiction. Looking through this past December’s list, I was struck by the absence of a single story collection. 48 novels, 2 poetry collections. This seemed like an anomaly, so I did what spreadsheet freaks like myself do, and gathered the data. Below is a chart of the number of story collections on the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books list across the last 22 years.²

The results surprised me. Not simply that there has been a decline in the number of collections chosen for the list in recent years, but that this decline is rather linear and rather steep. Over the first 7 years of the list (2004-2010), there was only 1 year in which fewer than 8 collections made the list. Since 2010, there has been only 1 year (2015) in which at least 8 collections made the list. In 2009, 12 collections made the list; in the last 6 years, a total of 13 collections have made the list.

You probably know that the New York Times also publishes an annual top 10 books of the year, again roughly split between fiction and non-fiction. The sample size is of course much smaller, but the data does nothing to contradict the above. Between 2008 and 2010, 5 story collections were chosen as Top 10 Books of their year; there have been a total of 4 in the 15 years since, the most recent being in 2019.

We can safely say that, according to the most influential review of books, short story collections have significantly declined in quality and importance over the past 15 years.

There are not many comparable ways to measure prestige. Plenty of other publications release lists, but none have a reach approximate to the New York Times (you don’t often see “A Publishers Weekly Best Book of ____” on a front cover). The other best indicator would be major literary awards, but the sample size is much smaller. Even combining the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and PEN/Faulkner nominees, you only get a maximum of 19 distinct books per year.³ That’s a small sample size.

But I was curious, so I collected the data for the same years (2004-present). The graph below shows what percentage of the nominees for the four major awards each year have been story collections.⁴

As I imagined, the small sample size leads to some messy data, including three separate years of zero nominations of collections. The percentage of nominations that are story collections is trending down marginally over the 21 years, but it’s too small to take much away from. If nothing else, it certainly doesn’t mimic the New York Times trend.

The more interesting secondary data, I think, is what percentage of each award’s nominees are story collections.

The above data set shows that 33% of the books nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction since 2004 have been story collections. That’s 35 collections in 21 years; the other three have, combined, nominated 30⁵ in as many years. On the other end of the spectrum, only 6% of the books nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award have been story collections. That’s a pretty stark difference, with the NBA in the middle, albeit closer to the low end. The NBCC have never nominated more than one collection for the award, whereas PEN/Faulkner have done so 13 of 21 years. As a point of comparison, the total percentage of story collections on the NYT Notable Book lists (from 2004-2025) under the Fiction & Poetry category was 11%.

It is interesting to consider the composition of the bodies that judge these awards as well as their histories. The PEN/Faulkner Award is the only one of the four in which the judges are entirely made up of peers (i.e., fiction writers). The award was established in 1981 in response to the National Book Award’s rebranding as the American Book Awards and its attempt to imitate the commercial allure of the Academy Awards. This restructuring failed and the award returned to its original format by the late 1980s, and the judges of the NBA are generally peers with the token bookseller or academic. Still, the sense of PEN/Faulkner as more of a “writer’s writer” award alternative to the NBA can be seen to persist in the former’s greater elevation of the story collection over the novel.

Is it a coincidence that the National Book Critics Circle Award (overseen by critics, naturally) and the Pulitzer Prize (judged mainly by journalists, academics, insiders, and booksellers) have had significantly fewer story collection nominees than the National Book Award and especially the PEN/Faulkner Award over the same span of time? And that the New York Times Notable Books list (chosen by critics and journalists) reflects a similar preference for novels to story collections as the NBCCA and Pulitzer?

I’d say probably not. I would venture from the above data that writers tend to value story collections more than critics, journalists, industry insiders, academics, and booksellers. I would further suggest that the latter groups’ valuation of story collections has declined over the past decade or two. The fact that the PEN/Faulkner committees’ nomination rate of story collections has remained relatively steady over the past 20 years offers counter-evidence to the explanation that this decline is simply a reflection of fewer story collections being published. That story collections are generally less profitable than novels, that they are considerably less likely to be optioned for a movie or miniseries, that they rarely lead to sequels indicates that the New York Times, NBCCA, and Pulitzer are acting in accordance with the desires of the market and publishing industry; this is not a claim that they are doing so deliberately or cynically (I have no problem with someone preferring novels to story collections), but it is a point of consideration.⁶

My initial post was received as something of a death knell, a bit more than I had intended or expected. To lay my own cards on the table a bit more nakedly, I think that the short story is an intrinsically important form, and that a decline in publication of stories and story collections, even if those were replaced one-for-one with novels, would be a net loss. The evidence I’ve gathered thus far suggests that the market for short fiction has declined, and/or major presses are less willing to publish collections, which are unlikely to blow up the way a novel could (lower-ceiling ROI). Regardless of how we determine the causation, the New York Times, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award have participated in this turn away from story collections (or, in the latter cases, a marginalization of them in general that dates back at least to 2004).

Some lingering questions still remain—data on the total and relative publication of short story collections over time, both by Big Five presses and independents; a longer history of some of this data prior to 2004; analysis of the readership and institutional funding of the magazines and quarterlies that publish short fiction; historical sales data on story collections.

My sense is that a majority of the (“literary”) reading population is sad to hear that short fiction is in decline (even relative to the novel), that Tin House and The White Review and Freeman’s have closed shop, but also rarely ever reads magazine fiction or new story collections. (And it would seem that a significant portion who do are themselves writers.) If that’s the case, it might be worth making intentional decisions about your reading and spending—supporting periodicals that publish fiction and adding collections to your literary diet. But know that the New York Times and many of the literary awards are not going to be of much help in this regard.

1. Mahak pushed me to reconsider limiting my data to hardcovers, which I did for a combination of convenience and to try to capture “literary” fiction by flawed but objective means. There were in fact a handful of paperback-only collections published by Big Five presses in 2025, though a few were more “genre” than “literary.” I think the main conclusions still stand from that analysis (rather few collections published, a narrowing of the journals from which stories received prior publication), but there’s definitely more research to be done on the numbers of collections published over time and the hardcover-paperback ratio.

2. A brief note on “operationalization.” I counted a handful of “novels in stories” and “inter-linked stories” in cases where the books were explicit and up-front about the story element of their genre identification. I did not count David Szalay’s All That Man Is, the cover of which merely calls it “a novel,” for instance. The number of these borderline cases is statistically negligible, ultimately.

3. Usually fewer—the Pulitzer typically nominates three books rather than four, and there is of course the possibility of overlap among the awards, resulting in fewer total books. The NBA and NBCCA have in more recent years begun releasing longlists that extend the number of recognized books to ten, but that has been in effect for too brief a time to be useful here.

4. For 2025, only the NBA and NBCCA shortlists have been released; neither included any story collections.

5. Note again that it’s actually fewer than 30 distinct collections due to overlap. It’s really in the low 20s, or roughly one distinct collection per year.

6. Counterargument: story collections are a legitimately dying form, not only in terms of market but also quality and relevance, and their natural decline is being “artificially” slowed by professional writers invested in the MFA form par excellence.