SOURCE: "A Storied Renaissance," in The Chicago Tribune, April 8, 1990, pp. 1, 4.

In the following excerpt, Coates asserts that Dybek's The Coast of Chicago is further proof of the renaissance of the short story.

The market is minuscule and shrinking further under the heat of bottom-line publishing forces—just one weekly magazine, the New Yorker, now regularly publishes short stories, as opposed to more than 50 in the days before TV. Yet the form is booming in both quantity and especially quality, as editor Shannon Ravenel confirms in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties.

I believe the 1980s will be known as another golden age [of the short story], though for reasons very different from those which led to the story's great popularity in the teens and twenties, when writers could live off their work in a way that today's practitioners could not.

Though I not...