Should Literary Awards Do More to Recognize Short Stories? | Electric Literature

Some people might say that this doesn't matter, since no one reads short stories anyway. But if we only gave awards to popular categories we'd scrap the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in favor of the Pulitzer Prize in Adult Coloring Books. We give awards to poetry because the literary world thinks it is important to promote poetry. And short stories do get read. Short story-publishing magazines like the New Yorker and Harper's have circulations that dwarf the sales of most literary novels, and two of the best-selling books of last year were collections by Stephen King and George R. R. Martin. Sure, short stories are not as popular as novels and it is rare for a short story collection to be a bestseller, but it is worth asking to what degree this is due to audience preference, and to what degree the literary world's lack of story promotion hurts the sales.