The other day I sat holding a book in my hands, actually shaking. I had stopped reading twenty minutes before and was now just staring into space, unable to move. This is the sort of experience every true reader has had at least once, a feeling of total transformation after having been graced by a real live-wire intelligence, one bright shock that moves something very deep in you. Writers live for this feeling, hoping that one day at least one person will be moved like this by something we had written. This is why we become writers: rarely violent people, a writer often dreams of shaking another person to the core.

The book? Paris Stories, by Mavis Gallant. But it wasn't a novel that had blasted me--it was a short story in the collection, one called "The Moslem Wife." After I finally got up the nerve to return to the book and begin another story, I found I was having the same reaction. It happened over and over with every story after that: in a word, awe. Breathless, salivating awe.

They're like that, short stories. Really good ones will blow your mind.

Now, I know that the American Short Story is said to be in sorrowful decline, if not actually letting out its last, piteous death-rattle. Thousands of words are written about it every month; blogs wail, newspapers concoct elaborate lamentations in spaces that could be better served by, say, publishing short stories. We are all clad in funeral attire: the sound of keening fills the air.

Oh, wah-wah-wah, as my mother would say when we kids were hurt and there were no bones sticking out anywhere. Now, go outside and play.

I think the stance that the story is dying is, simply, false. I look at Mavis Gallant, alive and well, and think that, really, short stories have never been more robust. True: there are tons of bad short stories in the world. I was a teacher of creative writing at the university level--my friends, the poverty of some of these stories is incontestably true. It's true, too, that there are fewer high-paying places to put any stories, good or bad. Frankly, I think this has more to do with advertising dollars and editorial bias than readers' appetite or any dearth of good stories in the world--if stories were out there, people would read them. In fact, I'd say that today's stories are way, way better than those that used to be published in such glossies as The Saturday Evening Post or the old New Yorkers (pick up a pre-1960s anthology of New Yorker fiction, if you don't believe me). I have a fondness for old O'Henry, as his were the first short stories I'd ever read, but put his best next to Alice Munro's worst. Please, folks: in comparison, there is zero art in O'Henry.

I do have questions about the supposed death of the story, though, based on my own very subjective observation. The question will come later; the observation is this: most of the real contemporary masters of the short story are women. I'd argue that this pantheon includes Deborah Eisenberg, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Lorrie Moore, ZZ Packer (I vote for Grace Paley being included here--she was contemporary until so recently, rest her much-lamented soul). William Trevor is in there, but he's one of the few guys, as are Edward P. Jones and George Saunders. Charles D'Ambrosio comes close but doesn't quite make it for me; Denis Johnson's and Junot Diaz's collections were so very long ago.

Now for the questions: though there are so many beautiful stories in the world, we all agree that there is a real marginalization of short fiction happening at this moment--now, why is it so? Women's art has always been taken less seriously than men's art of the same caliber--take a look at the excellence of almost-forgotten Dawn Powell compared her (now-canonized) male counterparts, and see if that doesn't make you want to weep. Is it possible that with the rise women short story writers to the very pinnacle of excellence that, suddenly, the art itself has lost some luster? That by merely becoming mastered by women, it has become viewed as being intrinsically less artistic than a novel? And, if this is so, isn't it a terrible shame?

Now, I'm not saying I have any answers or that I'm even right--but I do think the questions are good and should be asked. Believe me, as a lover and writer of short stories, I'd be beyond delighted to be proven wrong.