"This Companion offers students and scholars a comprehensive introduction to the development and the diversity of the American short story as a literary form from its origins in the eighteenth century to the present day. Rather than define what the short story is as a genre, or defend its importance in comparison with the novel, this Companion seeks to understand what the short story does -- how it moves through national space, how it is always related to other genres and media, and how its inherent mobility responds to the literary marketplace and resonates with key critical themes in contemporary literary studies. Essays offer authoritative introductions and reinterpretations of a literary form that has reemerged as a major force in the twenty-first century public sphere dominated by the internet"--

Part I. Contexts: 1. Transatlantic print culture and the emergence of short narratives Oliver Scheiding; 2. The short story and the early magazine Jared Gardner; 3. The short story fad: gender, pleasure, and commodity culture in late-nineteenth century magazines Brad Evans; 4. The best of the best: anthologies, prizes, and the short story canon Alexander Manshel; 5. The story of a semester: short fiction and the program era Loren Glass; 6. The short story in the age of the internet Simone Murray; Part II. Histories: 7. The war story Cody Marrs; 8. Narratives from below: working class short fiction Owen Clayton; 9. The short story and the popular imagination: pulp and crime Will Norman; 10. Love what you do: neoliberalism, emotional labor, and the short story as a service Lee Konstantinou; 11. Local color to multiculturalism: minority writers in the short story and ethnographic markets Long Le-Khac; Part III. People and Places: 12. Native American short stories Hertha D. Sweet Wong; 13. African American short fiction: from reform to renaissance Amina Gautier; 14. Little postage stamps: the short story, the American south, and the world Coleman Hutchison; 15. Regional stories and the environmental imagination Sylvan Goldberg; 16. Concrete illuminations: the short story and/as urban revolution Myka Tucker-Abramson; Part IV. Theories: 17. Short fiction, language learning, and innocent comedy Gabriella Safran; 18. The technology of the short story: from sci fi to cli fi Shelley Streeby; 19. Homelessness: the short story and other media Gavin Jones; 20. The human and the animal: toward posthumanist short fiction Michael Lundblad; 21. The end of the story: grammar, gender, and time in the contemporary short story Lola Boorman; 22. The affordances of mere length: computational approaches to short story analysis Mark Algee-Hewitt, Anna Mukamal and J. D. Porter.