Preface to The Long Short Story: A Portfolio
by Kasey Peters
Our Winter 2025 issue features a portfolio on The Long Short Story, with fiction by Priyam Goel, Micah Dean Hicks, Kate Shannon Jenkins, Dominic Russ-Combs, and Eric C. Wat. Read Assistant Fiction Editor Kasey Peters’ preface to the portfolio below.
The Long Short Story
Short stories have gotten, and continue getting, shorter. We’re in the age of the Great Shortening.
This is a goofy analogy that compares the long short story to the butter and lard of traditional pastry making, and the shorter short story to modern, shelf-stable vegetable oil solids. The analogy is weak and narrow if you think about the long scale of human storytelling traditions, not to mention the diversity of foodways; don’t think about it too hard. What the analogy reveals, more than anything, is my personal resistance to the trend.
Here are the (redundant) talking points with which I might decry the shortening of the contemporary short story: the attention economy; the TikTokification of all media; kids these days (*shakes fist*). And here are the (legitimate but not terribly impassioned) talking points with which I might steel-man an argument in favor of a shorter short story: the democratization of writing; more writers published per issue of every magazine; accessibility for busy readers.
Rather than disparage the normalization of shorter short stories, I want to say simply that my love of the longer short story is a positive love. It is a desire for connection with the writer, for trust. It is the love of texture, of depth, of cosmically expanding nuance. It is that pure feeling of surrender I love. The way the small world becomes the whole world.
The long short story says, There is room here. It says, Come on in, the water’s fine. In the long short story, there is time to encounter unexpected turbulence, to discover that a narrative arc cannot represent what happens—what really happens—in a story. Long stories can glide smoothly and still find rocks over which to whitewater; they can fall off cliffs and pool at the bottom, and fork, and deviate, and encompass bits of the world we didn’t realize mattered. They can bear the strain of simultaneous metaphors. They can draw together forces so disparate we didn’t yet know they had been braided all along. There is time here.
And a good long short story—in all its wild diversity—ought to have learned from the greats of the short(ening) game: the quick immediacy of voice and world, the tangled discoveries of interpersonal tension, the ending that both arrives and opens out into an even bigger cosmos.
The long short story is a pact not only between writer and reader but between editor and reader.
The promise is this: it’s worth it.
Kasey Peters is a queer writer from Nebraska. A 2025 recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant; the winner of the Porter House Review 2023-2024 Editor’s Prize judged by Elisa Gabbert; and a winner of a 2022 AWP Intro Journals Award, their writing is in Pinch, Grist, South Carolina Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and others. Their work has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts and the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences. Before this, Peters farmed for a decade.