ATTENTION! a (short) history

Here was April Ayers Lawson, with her sexually tormented evangelicals, and Amie Barrodale, with a story about a doomed romantic weekend that I couldn't get out of my head, and Ottessa Moshfegh, writing about love and lust in rural China — and dozens of other stories equally tough-minded, funny, sophisticated, and beautiful, by writers I'd never heard of. Over the years I had heard, and half believed, that the short story was in decline, when the plain truth was simply that much of the action was happening out of sight — at any rate, out of my sight because I, and my friends, and my favorite critics, simply hadn't been paying close enough attention.

At first glance, there is a simple explanation for why short stories fell off our radar. Once upon a time, stories were a fixture not merely of so-called literary magazines, but of popular interest publications, too.

• Subscriptions.
• Todays Prince … Tomorrows King;
• A (Shockingly) Short History Of 'Hello'.
• Joseph Fouché (Biographies Historiques) (French Edition);

An author could support himself or herself with short fiction, and many — Thurber, Lardner, to say nothing of O. Henry — did just that. But popular entertainments are vulnerable to technological change. Along came the radio serial, the movies, and TV. As readership softened, the big magazines saw that it was easier to attract advertisers by publishing fashion tips -- in general, by featuring products -- than by giving up pages to fiction.

Dispatches from a Land of Distraction

This is part of the answer. But only part -- because if you read the archive of The Paris Review , it's clear that most of our best fiction would never have appeared in GQ or the Saturday Evening Post.

These stories were never intended as mass entertainment, and yet they made a big splash in the world of letters. And this is something else to factor in: Indeed, you could as easily ask, why do so many readers and critics today seem to divide their time between novels and essays — those first cousins of the short story — and leave short fiction alone? I can answer only for myself, but maybe my answer holds true for others too, because it has to do with technological changes that have affected us all. Fifteen years ago my work was conducted mainly over the phone.

The things I read came to me mainly on paper. If I left the house or the office or let the phone ring , I was unaccounted for. This amounted to large stretches of the day. And I read more or less the way my parents read. I read the paper for news. I read short stories when I saw them in magazines — over lunch, or on the subway, the same way I read essays and other longish articles and, for that matter, novels. The first long review I ever wrote was about Ann Beattie, and I remember reading her collections and novels indiscriminately.

There were formal differences between these books, of course, but they occupied the same space in my day.

Attention - A Brief History in Psychology

Gradually my days — and the days of the people around me — changed. We spent less and less time on the phone, and less time unaccounted for, and more and more time online. By day I gravitated toward journalism and the essay, for the sake of hearing a companionable voice in the midst of distraction. By night I read to take myself offline.

And this meant reading novels, history books, travelogues —works designed to immerse me in their world. What dropped out of the equation was short stories, which -- you might say -- are neither of the day nor of the night.

On the one hand, stories demand the focus of bedtime. They're meant to be read straight through from beginning to end. Nightmare stuff, dream stuff. On the other hand, you can't relax and lose yourself in a short story. Short stories bring you up short. They take the subjects of the night and expose them to the bright light of day. Reading groups dive into White Teeth , Middlemarch , or Freedom , when they might find discussions deeper and more specific -- and everyone actually on the same page -- if they read a little magazine, an anthology, or a collection of stories.

Attention - A Brief History in Psychology |

There is a time for multi-tasking and a time for losing yourself. The short story offers something else: Undergraduate essays usually must, rather sadly, follow the classical method: That is a terrible way to educate a young mind. It's a brilliant definition of what writers should want to write, and echoes my own notion of the perfect book I am always failing to produce. He is a little disingenuous about having lacked a subject until now, because the point is that it really doesn't matter what the subject of such a book is.

All good books are about nothing and therefore the possibility of everything, if you write them right. If writing weren't ordered in some way, no one would be able to read it, and all books would be , words in alphabetical order. Cohen sticks to chronology, beginning with attention as he observes it in ancient Sumer , in the language fixing of Babel and the rules of Eden, before moving on to Egypt, memory as attention, and the inability of Orpheus to keep his mind on what mattered. For the most part, attention is about words and what we think and do with them.

The sweep and flow of Cohen's subject and where he takes it from and to are sometimes breakneck, and you race to keep up. By chance, I read a review of a critical biography about St Augustine. It commented on the error of just that assumption, and led me to a paper by Myles Burnyeat that casts doubt on it. Happenstance and following up leads belong comfortably in the realm attention. The unreliable essayist has a good pedigree. Montaigne often got his quotes wrong and was hit and miss about attributing them to sources.