Do contemporary writers still write short stories? Was the popularity

Well, if you read magazines, you would know that they do, all the time.

>I’ve only ever read one Stephen King book. That’s the one set in the hotel—The Shining—with the boy who has the second-sight. And the thing that struck me instantly, about 80 pages in, is I realized that the hotel is alive, that it contains the psychic memory of all the people who’ve died there, committed suicide there, done something destructive there, that the building is sort of seething with dark and negative energy, that it will take some of the characters over and destroy them, and that it will be the result, and probably it will blow up at the end. I suddenly realized “I’ve got to page 80,” because actually it’s 460 before you actually get to that moment. And it came to my mind that King is extending a short story out across 500 pages because his editor has told him “You’ve got to have a novel length, not a short story,”

from Jonathan Bowden's lecture on H.P. Lovecraft.