"The Short Story Today: A Mug's Game."

Bates, followed by Alan Sillitoe and Paul Gallico, addresses the topic of the short story.

Noting that "prophecy, like lending money to friends, is a mug's game," he says he was wrong in predicting that "war's aftermath would surely lead new writers to find in the short story the essential medium for what they had to say." He discusses changes to magazine publishing, including the importance of women's magazines to the short story form, but only speculates as to possible causes of the decline of the genre.

In Books and Bookmen (May 1962, 7:8, pp. 15-17, attached).