I write personal essays (creative nonfiction, if you like) in my other life as well, which I think is actually (and quite clearly) the ascending literary form.

But yeah, I’ve all but given up on novels. Contemporary novels seem to either be mainstream pap (with the ensuent dumbing-down that comes with trying to reach a wider audience) or starting to go the way of poetry, writing to a smaller and smaller audience, becoming more and more insular as a form.

Short stories, however, are as vibrant as ever, and actually there’s a fair bit of innovation happening in the form (flash fiction springs to mind, prose poems, collaborative serial fiction, etc.). I’ve found that I’ve migrated to anthologies for both my short stories and creative nonfiction. I get restless reading most single-author collections, even if the author in question is very good, but something about the Best American series or the Pushcart Prizes or any number of “specialized” anthologies can keep my attention cover to cover.

There has not yet been a truly great online lit journal, I don’t think, and I think that has more to do with our online reading habits than anything (hence my joke at the beginning of the post), but I suspect that will change too, and when it does, it will change big. We’re kind of in the middle of the plates shifting between people doing their everday reading online but still turning to hard copies for their literary reading. Maybe the Kindle or similar will change that, or maybe it will never change (both are about equally likely in my book), but I think we’re set to see a resurgence of the lit rag (in online form) as if not popular entertainment than at least more than an incredibly narrow niche market.