Dan Sinykin in Substack:
In May I was invited to write an essay on the short story. I said yes and then asked myself what I know about the genre. I made my most serious inquiries as an undergrad, when I was an aspiring short story writer myself. I read almost all of Hemingway, Kafka, and Flannery O’Connor. I read Chekhov and Barthelme and Coover. I read Rick Moody and George Saunders and David Foster Wallace. “Octet” seemed like the pinnacle of something. Like every other serious writer I knew I had my head blown off by Jesus’ Son.
…I used Claude Code to build a spreadsheet with every story (with its date, its author, their gender, their MFA if they have one) in Granta, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares. That worked. I gathered more. I got The Drift and Ecotone and Hobart and n+1 and Wigleaf. I got Argosy and Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post. I now have 191 magazines, with more than 57,000 writers and more than 264,000 stories.
…Two things. (1) It’s clear that Joyce Carol Oates is the GOAT. She blows the rest out of the water, even Munro and Updike. I did not know her lore. (2) HUGE CAVEAT!!
More here.
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