I have chosen to conclude my account of the American short story with Carver, both because of his special distinction and because of the undoubted influence his example has had on the prestige and status of the form in our own time. But other major contemporary writers like John Updike (discussed in Chapter 19) and Joyce Carole Oates have produced several volumes of short stories since the 1950s and 1960s respectively; and since the 1980s, too, the short story has inspired a remarkable fecundity and brilliance among newer writers. Labels are always indadequate, but from among those who have been called ‘the new realists’ one would want to single out the names of Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Bobbie Ann Mason, Mary Robison, Andre Dubus and Richard Bausch. From those writers who have experimented with very short forms two of the most striking are Amy Hempel and Jayne Ann Phillips, and the latter's work often includes a lyrical, visionary element which is notable also in the stories of Denis Johnson. Anne Beattie and Lorrie Moore are two writers who have penetratingly explored the world of a new generation of middle-class professional characters, with a comic and witty emphasis. Annie Proulx has explored the territory of the contemporary rural East and ‘cowboy’ West in stories which have a sharp, grainy sense of landscape, weather and human oddity. African American writing has seen strong recent collections from Jamaica Kincaid and Edward P. Jones.