I was just wondering if anyone knew of any short story writers who's careers started in the 1990's to present day that became very popular. I know there are plenty of writer's who do short stories on the side. But novels are their main bread and butter. I was hoping to find some names of recent short story writers who are famous/successful with their short stories alone. I know there are some older writers who's careers' begain before the 1990's who got by with a lot of help from short stories. But it seems that that's not quite as possible to do now. That's why I want some more recent examples. Brightens hopes a little.
Plenty of them: Sebastian Faulks, Kurt Tucholey, Uwe Johnson, Victoria Kuttainen. All good short story writers who do not get enough attention. Stephen King wrote and published short stories from the 90s on wards but this does not mean anything other than the fact they exist, and I think Mark Z. Danielewski published short stories in the mid 90s. My university has a creative writer as lecturer too, who has published a few short stories in the last few years.
I know that there are plenty of unsung heroes. But that seems to be the thing - too few know about their good writing. The only people who seem to have solid short story writing careers are people like King, (who has many novels)and say Harlan Ellison, etc., who started pre-90's. I'd say Danielewski is better known for, "house of leaves", (which is funny because I was put off from reading that novel but am interested in his shorter works). It's like the short story writer's career died as the magazines did and their real hayday was well before the 70's and 80's. I guess I'm just grieving
Junot Diaz, Miranda July, Dave Eggers....those are the only ones who come to mind right now who are famous for their short stories. But Diaz went on to write a Pulitzer winning novel, July is a very acclaimed artist and filmmaker and Dave Eggers founded a literary magazine, wrote some movies, founded a charity, etc....there really aren't many people who only write short stories and have a reputation/a living solely from it.
Yeah. I guess short stories are more my favorite over novels. But the average person doesn't seem to read them anymore, or really read much of anything. You'd think with a, "fast-paced" world that the short story would be very popular. But it's not. Ohwell.
Like arron mentioned, there aren't very many writers today who are known only for their short stories (actually, I can't think of anyone). Alice Munro is known exclusively for her short stories, though she began writing well before 1990. Even so, she has a few collections published after 1990, so that may be useful to look into.
