Widening the Real

Given their marginal place in today’s publishing world, one wonders if short stories are in danger of becoming an exotic and insular form of literary life. Separated from a larger breeding population in the cultural mainstream their development has begun to take on the characteristics of island biogeography, spawning giants, dwarves, and other freaks. Various labels have been forwarded to describe where this development has brought us. Slipstream, weird, and speculative fiction are among the current favourites for designating a mixture of genres—­predominantly science fiction (SF), fantasy, and supernatural horror—that resists categorization. Today’s weird fiction is even sometimes called the New Weird, as though the Old Weird had a firm enough meaning to have been outgrown.

Where does that leave literary or dramatic fiction? We don’t usually think of literary fiction as being a genre so much as what isn’t genre. It’s what’s left over after you’ve removed all of the...