Dispatch from Jon Sealy: June 2025

Monthly update from your host at The Speakeasy

Greetings from Glen Allen!

I hope your summer is off to a good start. Over here it’s business as usual. I’ve been a little stalled on a detective novel but have been tinkering with a couple of short stories, which might have been inevitable given how much short fiction I’m reading these days.

Below are some links to my latest short story craft essays, some news from around the web, and a few thoughts on syntax in mid-century vs. contemporary fiction.

Until next month.

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From the Speakeasy: Jon’s Craft Essays

• Good Endings — analyzing stories by George Saunders and Jhumpa Lahiri

• Elmore Leonard Breaks the Rules — on his novel Riding the Rap

• The Jamesian Story — Adam Haslett’s “Devotion”

• Julie Orringer’s “The Stars of Motown Shining Bright” — What are stories for, anyway?

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Around the Web

• AI-hallucinated Novels
  You probably saw the news a few weeks ago where the Chicago Sun-Times published an AI-generated article “recommending” several novels that don’t exist. In case you missed it, Lincoln Michel had what I saw as the first write-up.

• Romantasy in the WSJ
  Are women ok? I’ve seen a few articles about this wild, vaguely NSFW genre. Maybe it’s no different from Twilight a decade ago, Peyton Place a generation ago, or what Jane Austen satirized in Northanger Abbey, but good grief.

• Isaac Asimov, “The Last Question”
  I stumbled onto this short story the other week and recommend it. I went through a phase about 10 years ago where I took seriously the idea that the world is a computer simulation. It’s not, but Asimov’s story is a nice gloss on the theory.

• Mesha Maren on the “Serialization” of Publishing
  Nothing new here (it’s bleak, bleak, bleak in the business), but book people are continuing to try to diagnose what’s wrong with the industry. My own view is that trying to recapture the glory days of publishing is like trying to recapture the farming and small-town world of your great-grandparents. It’s gone and not coming back.

• “A Guy Reads His Electric Bill in the Style of Faulkner”
  Thanks to my pal Ben for sending this short video along.

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On My Mind: Shorter Sentences

At this point in the year, I’ve read scores of short stories published between 1950 and 2000. I recently dipped into a recent Best American Short Stories (BASS) and wondered: What happened to complex sentences?

Take a look at a few opening sentences from widely anthologized fiction from the 1950s:

When the train from Chicago left Albany and began to pound down the river valley toward New York, the Malloys, who had already experienced many phases of excitement, felt their breathing quicken, as if there were not enough air in the coach.

—John Cheever, “O City of Broken Dreams”

Not long ago there lived in uptown New York, in a small, almost meager room, though crowded with books, Leon Finkle, a rabbinical student in the Yeshivah University.

—Bernard Malamud, “The Magic Barrel”

Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings.

—Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”

Each sentence has a big omniscient perspective, syntax rich with subordination, and a personality to the voice that draws you in. By contrast, the majority of stories in a recent BASS anthology have narrower points of view (first person or close third), shorter sentences, simpler language.

What gives? I know there’s some selection bias here — i.e., maybe the 10 best stories from 2015-2025 are every bit as complex as the anthologized stories from 1950-1960 — but it feels like writers’ worldviews in general have gotten smaller in parallel with the changes in publishing Maren writes about in the link above. I’m sure plenty of Cheever-esque stories are still being written, but like the proverbial tree falling in the woods, almost no one is there to read them.

This Less Wrong blog analyzes the broader, centuries-long trend in declining sentence length, concluding that contemporary authors have given up Latinate complexity (hypotaxis) for short simplicity (parataxis):

• Hypotaxis: When the alarm sounded, the firefighters, who had been sleeping, quickly jumped into action.

• Parataxis: The alarm sounded. The firefighters had been sleeping. They quickly jumped into action.

Maybe tastes have changed and I’m just an old man ranting at a cloud, but what you lose in parataxis are shades of nuance: Subordination provides a sense of causality (this happened because of that) versus a mere sequence (this happened, then that happened, then this other thing happened).

I know I’m not the only one hungry for a return of nuance. Maybe yesterday’s publishing world is gone, but that doesn’t mean writers have to give up what makes fiction worthwhile.

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