Beginning in the 1950s, the American short storys popularity began to wane when the reading public turned its attention to a new form of entertainment: television. Today, short stories are beginning to reemerge as a viable literary genre. The forty short-story writers presented in DLB 130 demonstrate an expanding diversity of writings, which can be divided into three major categories: realists or neorealists; postmodernists or metafictionists; and outsiders. One writer may fit into more than one group, depending on an authors literary approach to their subject matter and thematic concerns, and the geographic location or social class of their characters.

40 ENTRIES INCLUDE: Walter Abish, Richard Bausch, Gina Berriault, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, Guy Davenport, Fielding Dawson, Coleman Dowell, Ellen Gilchrist, Paul Goodman, Joyce Carol Oates, Breece DJPancake, Mary Robison, Tobias Wolff.