After its culmination during the XIX C the literary genre of the short story subsided to a «minor» prose form and was rather neglected by authors and publishers for quite some time. Yet the new European short story of the XXI C is bringing forward once again major issues of human existence in a specifically penetrating manner. Continuously we become aware how the new short story fights inertness, unsettles preconceived ideas, reveals different approaches to topics and society and coins new formulations. The nine authors included in our project “The Short Story – a «minor» genre” did make a mark on the literary life of their proper countries throughout the past decade and highlighted the genre.In his book of stories «Zapisi o bivsim ljudima» Bosnian writer Goran Simic tells about a war, about life as a slaughterhouse, about the sadness of life in exile. Love is the focus in «J’ai cent ans» by Belgian author Caroline Lamarche. Jiří Kratochvil tells various stories about people of Brno in «Brněnské povídky», where burlesque language mixes with tragic buffonade. «Quand nous serons heureux» by Carole Fives is both a corrosive and humorous look at society and its faults. The twenty stories in «Pertu» by Hungarian writer Edina Szvoren deal with alienation and lost identity. «Śmierć czeskiego psa» by Polish writer Janusz Rudnicki provocatively narrate iconoclastic stories about contemporary ordinary people and renowned writers from the past. «Jocul celor o sută de frunze şi alte povestiri» by Romanian writer Varujan Vosganian consists of six stories treating the anxieties and incertitude of present-day life. «Izgubljen u samoposluzi» by Serbian writer Svetislav Basara equally questions our perception of so called «real» life and the plausibility of its representation in fiction. Bernard Comment’s nine stories in «Tout passe» represent metaphysical meditations on how to articulate life and death.