10 Writers Who Played a Key Role in the Rise of the Short Story

George Saunders (Check out: Tenth of December)
Saunders has been quietly spinning out off-center, darkly layered stories for decades. Now that his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is a number one bestseller, it’s like the wider world is waking up to his talent—but anyone who has read “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” knows that no one turns a preposterous premise on its face into a disturbing and affecting story like him.

Stephen King (Check out: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams)
Stephen King has been writing for so long, he’s practically an American Institution, and while he’s best-known as a novelist, he got his start selling short stories to disreputable magazines and has never lost his love for the form—or his talent for it. King’s stories cover a wide range of genres, but their strength is always in their characterization. No matter what’s happening, you believe it, because the characters feel so real.

Alice Munro (Check out: Dear Life)
Munro has been referred to as the Canadian Chekhov; she won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature after a career spent writing stories that combine a rock-solid sense of place with an omniscient narrator, allowing her to play with time in ways that will influence writers for centuries to come. She’s also known for her habit of publishing variants of her already-published stories, a meta technique that allows her to play with time even after the story is supposedly finished.

Lydia Davis (Check out: The Collected Stories)
The term “flash fiction” refers to extremely short works—often less than 1,000 words. Davis is the form’s modern master, regularly penning powerful stories just a few sentences long. Writing stories that can be reprinted in full in a Tumblr post is much, much harder than it seems, and the effect of reading a collection of her stories can be dizzying—in a good way.

Jennifer Egan (Check out: A Visit from the Goon Squad)
Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book is actually a series of loosely-connected short stories, leading some to argue over whether it’s a novel at all. Since all the stories stand on their own, it’s a collection—but it’s also a revolutionary approach to a longer story. If these stories had been written and published over decades no one would think twice—but having them all together, and reading them one after the other, allows Egan to build something greater than the sum of its parts.

Kelly Link (Check out: Magic for Beginners)
Kelly Link’s work is almost impossible to categorize; while some of her stories are definitively science fiction, most fit any number of genre labels, requiring the employment of more diffuse  like “slipstream” or “magical realism.” All you need to know is that her award-winning work is profoundly inventive and entertaining; the title story in Magic for Beginners, for example, centers on a teenager who is both a huge fan of and a main character on a TV show called “The Library,” with the story being told through various episodes of the series.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Check out: The Thing Around Your Neck)
Born in Nigeria, Adichie might be best-known to most for her novel Americanah, recent winner of the One Book, One New York campaign. But she is also a poet, an essayist, and one of the best short story writers on the planet. The stories in The Thing Around Your Neck beautifully blend issues between the genders, between the United States and Africa, and between members of families. The end result is a dazzling tapestry of life, told from a fresh perspective.

Junot Diaz (Check out: This is How You Lose Her)
Diaz, creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but his short fiction deserves just as much attention. The stories in This is How You Lose Her are simple on the surface: tales of love from various stages of relationships and various points of view. The reason they dig in and stay with you is the sense they convey that there is a line connecting them to each other, and, in a sense, to every other story ever told.

Ted Chiang (Check Out: Stories of Your Life)
Chiang is one of the best writers working in science fiction today, period. He’s won the Nebula, Hugo, and Sturgeon Awards, and his “Story of Your Life” served as the source material for theblockbuster film Arrival. Chiang’s mastery of language allows him to play with reader’s expectations in a way so elegant and powerful, it’s almost magic.

Kevin Barry (Check out: Dark Lies the Island)
Kevin Barry somehow conveys a sense of Kevin Barry-ness to his fiction, imbuing himself into his stories in ways few other writers could pull off without seeming overly forceful. His work sizzles with the overt confidence he exudes in his public appearances, but rather than being off-putting, his surety invites you to come along for the ride, with him as your guide, whispering hilarious things into your ear.