SOURCE: Passaro, Vince. “Unlikely Stories: The Quiet Renaissance of American Short Fiction.” Harper's 299, no. 1791 (August 1999): 80-9.

In the following excerpt, Passaro discusses the development of twentieth-century American short fiction, particularly as defined by the terse realism of Hemingway, and praises the work of talented younger writers, including Moore, whose sophisticated, experimental stories are leading a revitalization of the genre.

The American short story—an expression we can use with some degree of domestic pride, as when referring to jazz or liberty—has entered a strange phase in its history. To examine the record of story collections published over this last decade, of money paid for them, of reviews received by them, and, most particularly, of magazine outlets for them, is to conclude that the form is in a long twilight, that it has descended sharply from the flash, the good money, and the cultural regard it had under...