The 19th-century tale is an altogether different beast than the modern literary short story—different in subject matter and purpose, in style and structure. And yet the tale is the story’s ancestor. Michael Gorra’s highly readable work of literary history and criticism, The Storytellers, seeks to explain the relationship between these two literary forms.
First Gorra sets up the alien unity of the 19th-century tale. The point of the tale was not to illustrate a personality or social type; it was to share an unusual event, as one does in a group of friends regaling each other with gossip, and then to discuss it. Writers back then often relied on frame stories, and the characters in their frame stories would comment on the narratives they shared with each other. The tale did not insist upon realism, but it did insist upon closure. Ghosts, insanity, crime, and adventure were common. By contrast, in modern times, such themes have been cast out of literary fiction and consigned to genre fiction; the standard theme has become everyday life realistically portrayed; and internal commentary has been rejected in favor of purposeful ambiguity.
Most of Gorra’s book is devoted to key turning points in the transition from one kind of fiction to the other. There’s Poe’s theory about unity of effect: the idea that short fiction ought to add up to a single specific sensation received in one sitting. This theory gives short fiction a more integral reason to be short, but it also “sacrifices the kind of multivocal story. . . . in which competing narrators and tonal registers might share the same page.” In other words, Poe killed the frame story. Another example of a key turning point would be Ivan Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album. His innovation was to write fictions that did not seek to dramatize the unusual but to portray typical events. Maupassant called Turgenev’s tales “slices of life,” a now-famous phrase. Eventually, through many waypoints like these, Gorra brings us to Chekhov. In Chekhov, the familiar elements of the modern literary short story first cohere in one body of work: his fictions are realistic, everyday, character-focused, and they climax in epiphanies rather than twists or explanations. After Chekhov, the tale had become the short story.
Considering the erudite and complicated argument Gorra makes in The Storytellers—which I have only sketched, scanting a hundred details and steps of evolution—the book is remarkably readable. It’s composed of short, numbered sections, each focusing upon one idea or tale. Gorra’s paraphrases are a delight to read in their own right, and they are a powerful advertisement for his source texts. This book will send its readers back to Poe, Maupassant, and Turgenev—and also to mostly forgotten writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.
The only problem with Gorra’s argument is his attitude to 20th-century genre fiction. As he rightly notes, many of the thematic contents of the 19th-century tale made their way into genre fiction. But Gorra betrays a prejudice. At one point he defines literary stories in contrast to genre stories this way: literary stories are “stories that [are] not replicable, not conventional, not done in series, a fiction in which each story is in theory unique and entire unto itself, as unique as the people who read them.” This is surprisingly inaccurate. Modern literary short stories have plenty of replication and convention, and they are sometimes written in series; meanwhile, many great works of genre fiction are unique and stand alone, and both kinds of story are read by unique people. This prejudice is odd in light of passages like the following, which could just as easily be mourning the exclusion of genre from the world of literary fiction as the loss to that world of the 19th-century tale:
What’s lost [in 20th-century literary fiction] is the madness and the fantasy, the elaborate and polyvocal framing and the sheer range of formal invention, the case histories and the horror, the shockingly extreme effects, the sense of the peculiar and the unprecedented, the mysteries around the corner, the tales that come from far away, and perhaps also the magic of storytelling itself, of a voice that speaks in the dark and asks us to believe.
Ultimately the world of 19th-century tale that this book mourns was never truly lost, but socially bifurcated by market segmentation between the literary fiction to which it gave birth and the genre fiction that continued its mainstream traditions. This separation is now, in the 21st century, itself eroding. That the “19th-century synthesis” appeared to be lost is more a social problem than a literary one—it speaks to the self-isolation of groups of writers and readers from each other. It should now be much easier to see the post-Chekhovian literary short story as a new genre that sprang into being in the 20th century—beautiful and elegant, but part of a panoply and not its replacement. Gorra’s book should be taken as a call for us to continue reintegrating the worlds of short fiction.
NONFICTION
The Storytellers
By Michael Gorra
University of Chicago Press
Published September 21, 2026
