by way of an introduction

Rumours of the short story's imminent demise have been in perpetual circulation in recent times. People don't want to read them, we hear; publishers don't want to publish them, we're told. Yet certain facts stack up against the doom-and-gloom merchants. Take, for example, the recent success of writers like Kevin Barry, Claire Keegan and Philip Ó Ceallaigh; or the arrival of new short story collections from writers such as Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín; or the ongoing exemplary output of contemporary masters of the form, Alice Munro and William Trevor.

The publication of this second anthology of stories from the Stinging Fly Press can be seen as further proof that the short story is, in fact, in robust good health. We received more than four hundred stories from around two hundred and eighty writers in response to our call for submissions late last year. Reading through all the submitted stories, it quickly became clear that a) we would have more than enough good stories to fill a second book and that b) there were enough good stories by new writers to allow us to choose an entirely new line-up of authors this time.

In Let's Be Alone Together, twenty different writers give us twenty very different short stories-reading them all together, we get a sense of just how versatile the form is. Yes, it makes serious demands on the writer, but equally it allows great freedoms. In the writing of a good short story, fortune favours the brave.

The greatest pleasure in working as editor of The Stinging Fly comes from the excitement of finding new work by new writers and being able to share that new work with our readers. I had already put the stories for the anthology in order when I discovered that Jim O'Donoghue and D. Gleeson, the authors of the first and the last story respectively, were having their fiction published for the first time. I was pleased to learn that a third writer, Helena Nolan, was making her fiction debut here as well.

In working with these newcomers and with all the other writers in preparing their stories for publication, it was heartening to see the level of commitment each one of them had. It's not the word count that matters, we said in our original call for submissions, it's making the words count. So long as so many fine writers are drawn to the challenges of writing short stories, and so long as they give such great care to getting it right, then readers, I'm sure, will willingly take up the invitation in this book's title.

Declan Meade
Editor