Where is the market for short stories today? Publishers, poring over sales spreadsheets that seem to prove their unpopularity, are loath to commission volumes of them. On this side of the Atlantic, the number of magazines that feature them is dwindling. Writers may still relish the challenges of the format, but readers are assumed to be uninterested. In an age when cultural attention spans are alleged to be shrinking, it’s a curious assumption and one that Oxfam is challenging through a collaboration with Profile Books and the Hay festival, which sees the publication of four paperback collections of stories by well-known British authors including Beryl Bainbridge, Jonathan Coe, Hanif Kureishi and Jeanette Winterson. All 38 authors have donated their work to Oxfam, and every copy bought will contribute at least 50p to the charity’s coffers.

The volumes are called Ox-Tales and each collection is built around one of the four elements — air, earth, fire and water — though there is a pleasing variety to all four books. Some of the stories aren’t really short stories at all but excerpts from works in progress. (Half the pieces in the Water volume are prefaced by acknowledgments that they are extracts from novels due for later publication.) Some are extremely short. Ian Rankin neatly turns a well-known urban myth into a Rebus story that is no more than a few paragraphs. John le Carré offers an enigmatic little fable about “a Boy King who refused to speak”.

What the books do reveal is the unsurprising truth that the best short-story writers are those who practise the art regularly. In The Jester of Astapovo, Rose Tremain needs only 30 pages to create a memorable character in the station­master of an insignificant little

stop on the Russian railway network who, in 1910, finds himself unexpectedly thrust into the limelight when the dying Leo Tolstoy arrives at his station. Ali Smith demonstrates the offbeat wit and the eye for a telling detail that her admirers will recognise in Last, in which the narrator’s encounter with a wheelchair-bound woman accidentally trapped on a train hints at other stories left untold. Hari Kunzru enters Oxfam’s own territory with Kaltes klares Wasser, a bitterly comic portrait of a government minister, a pharmaceutical company executive and aid workers in an African country failing to have a meeting of minds.

Other stories, by writers not noted for their short fiction, also hit the mark. Marina Lewycka’s The Importance of Having Warm Feet seems at first a slightly self-conscious exercise in nostalgia but soon turns into something more poignant and affecting; Mark Haddon brilliantly reworks the story of Ariadne, abandoned on Naxos by the faithless Theseus, in The Island; Zoë Heller provides an unflinching narrative of a teenager learning more than she expected about aggressive male sexuality in What She Did on Her Summer Vacation.

If it did no more than contribute to its own funding, Oxfam’s initiative in launching Ox-Tales would be worth applauding. As a showcase for a fictional form that too often gets pushed to the back of the queue when critical plaudits are being distributed — and one that’s filled with fine exhibits — it deserves support on its own merits.

Ox-Tales: Air, Earth, Fire and Water
Profile £5 each, pp208

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