When the Booker Prize Foundation announced last month that it was releasing ‘All Around the World’, a collection of short stories by Booker Prize winners, including Anne Enright, David Szalay and Roddy Doyle, the literary world applauded. Priced at just £1, with thousands of free copies being distributed to prisons, libraries and community centres across Britain, it was an act of genuine democratisation. But it was also, whether intentionally or not, an admission — that the novel, that patient and unhurried baithak of modern literature, may be finding itself slowly deserted.The debate over the novel’s death is not new. And yet the novel has survived, adapting, mutating, occasionally thriving. What feels different this time is that the threat is not coming from a rival medium alone. It is coming from inside the human brain.More than a third of UK adults now find it hard to read a book through to the end; 55 per cent say they read less than they want to. These are not people indifferent to books — they buy them, stack them on bedside tables, begin them with good intentions, and quietly abandon them somewhere around page 40. India tells perhaps a starker story. Between 2019 and 2024, only 4 per cent of Indians reported reading in their free time — down from 5.4 per cent in the years before. Among children aged between eight and 18, fewer than 35 per cent say they enjoy reading at all.The culprit most commonly named is the inability to concentrate. A generation raised on the scroll is finding sustained attention increasingly difficult to summon. Social media has done something more insidious than simply compete with books for time. It has rewired the expectation of narrative itself.A story, in the grammar of Instagram or X, resolves in under a minute. The novel, by contrast, asks you to sit with ambiguity for 300 pages, to defer gratification almost indefinitely. Even newspaper opinion pieces — traditionally the thinking person’s brief indulgence — have grown shorter and punchier, as editors chase readers whose fingers hover perpetually over the scroll button.Cinema is feeling the same pressure. Limited series of six tight episodes outperform sprawling seasons of 12. And then there are reels — 15-to-60-second fragments that have become the enticing stories of our age. The attention economy has declared its preference: it is emphatically not for the long form.It is in this context that the short story’s moment begins to feel less like a revival and more like inevitable. Punjabi literature understood this long ago. The short story — the nikki kahani — was never a minor form here. Gurbakhsh Singh, who founded Preet Lari in 1933 and used its pages to carry a reformist vision deep into Punjabi homes, wrote short fiction that was as much social intervention as literature — stories that spoke plainly to readers who had never been spoken to plainly before. Nanak Singh, who is remembered primarily as a novelist, wrote short fiction of searing emotional precision. Balwant Gargi brought to his stories a playwright’s instinct for the compressed moment. Amrita Pritam’s short fiction distilled landscapes of Partition grief into a few devastating pages. And then there is the qissa — the verse narrative that held Punjab’s oral imagination for centuries, keeping a listener hooked, making the long feel short.The International Booker Prize’s recognition of Banu Mushtaq’s ‘Heart Lamp’ last year — translated from Kannada — was a significant cultural signal. That a collection of stories in a regional Indian language could win a prestigious prize for translated fiction should have been celebrated far more loudly. It pointed to something that Punjabi writers and readers might usefully reflect upon: the short story is not a concession to diminished attention spans. In the right hands, it is the most demanding form there is.But there is a difference between the short story’s literary legitimacy and its mass appeal. What the Booker Foundation’s initiative is really attempting is to use it as a gateway — a door left ajar for those who have forgotten, or never learnt, that their own life might be found somewhere inside a book. The more uncomfortable question is whether the novel will, in the coming decades, complete its migration from mass entertainment to elite pursuit. Publishers increasingly speak of “reluctant readers”.Literary fiction’s commercial base continues to narrow even as its critical prestige remains intact. What we may be witnessing is not the death of the novel but its aristocratisation — its quiet retreat into the company of those with the education, leisure, and crucially the trained attention to sustain it.This need not be mourned without nuance. Poetry moved long ago from the popular to the rarefied without ceasing to matter. The novel may yet find a dignified niche. But those who love it — and in Punjab, many do — would do well to stop pretending that it remains, or will long remain, a democratic form. Shiv Kumar Batalvi wrote poetry that mill workers and farmers knew by heart. Nanak Singh’s novels sold in their hundreds of thousands in a Punjab that read hungrily. That world is not coming back. The question is what we build in its place.The short story is not the future of fiction because it is better than the novel. It is the future because we have made ourselves, collectively, into people for whom the novel requires more patience than we can spare. That is not the novel’s failure. It is ours.— Sukirat Singh Anand publishes under the name Sukirat