Is 2013 the year of the short story?

“Alice Munro is such a good writer,” James Wood wrote in the LRB in 1997, that “nobody bothers anymore to judge her goodness.” If Munro has long staked out her "Chekhovian" literary territory, the Nobel Prize is confirmation of her cultural legacy. A writer’s writer, Munro inspires fierce loyalty in her readers and critics alike. Effusive tributes laud her elegantly-crafted sentences, her economic insights and her keen eye for comic detail in her descriptions of the solitary figures that populate her mythical Huron County.

But the accolade is also a stamp of approval for the short story more generally. The New Republic literary critic Ruth Franklin writes in Prospect that short fiction has reemerged in recent years as a newly invigorated form. Gone are the days when magazines were cutting back on publishing fiction and McSweeney’s affectless, nihilistic story ruled the roost. Publications are once again pushing the boundaries and short story writers are responding accordingly. Franklin does, however, lament the paucity of female authors and “domestic” scenes in contemporary fiction, a trend which Munro’s achievement will hopefully go some way to amend.

Below is a selection of Prospect's fiction that finds the short story to be in good health across the globe:

1. Nate’s pain is now: Sam Lipyste’s darkly comic, hysterically freewheeling tale from his latest collection, The Fun Parts, stands out from the stripped down style typical of much of the current American scene.

2. Monstress:Lysley Tenorio’s B-movie-inspired story splices together a Filipino caveman and an American sci-fi flick.

3. Pavilion: Diriye Osman’s Somali trans nurse-narrator struts up and down a hospital ward, issuing zany remarks and fending off transphobic comments.

4. Raising Whales: Xiang Zuotie’s pithy, allegorical take on the contradictions of modern China is proof that good things come in small packages.

5. Debi: Mariam Bekauri, a young Georgian writer, describes a series of minor childhood losses to evoke the greater loss of childhood itself.