IT WASN'T so very long ago that the death of the short story was being proclaimed.

Literary supplements across the land were printing memoria to short-form fiction, with proclamations that the readership just wasn't there and they were too hard to market.

But, as with many things culturally, the wheel is turning again, with the short (and even micro-short) form gaining plaudits once more.

Which brings us to two recent anthologies of short tales with a rich Cornish flavour.

Lucy Wood's Diving Belles works to reinvent the shorter form, within another genre which has been out of fashion for a good long while – folklore. Hailing from Bude, like most if not all, of us Cornish folk, she had grown tired of the tacky commodification of local folk totems – the piskie tea towel, the knocker keyring.

The eponymous story, Diving Belles, subtly retreads the Cornish mermaid legend, with a lexicography full of sea colour tones and barnacles, wherein our heroine employs the service of Diving Belles, an eccentric, aquatic drowned-husband locating service, to find her long-lost husband – "Seventeen thousand, six hundred and thirty-two" days lost in a wreck.

In Endless Stones, Rita wakes up on a quotidian, any-other day, takes her ex-boyfriend to see a house for rent, sorts through the junk mail, and with a resigned inevitability, begins to turn to stone, ready to take her place as a menhir at the nearby stone circle.

And in Lights In Other People's Houses, Maddy and Russell's workaday relationship is irrevocably altered by the sudden appearance of the shade of a wrecker, who restlessly packs and unpacks Maddy's mother's spare possessions, brings his own micro-climate of damp and salty tang, and bleeds into Maddy's consciousness, as Russell departs for a stay at a friend's, retreating to the safety of the other end of the phone line.

Ms Woods has done her research, in interview quoting William Bottrell's late 19th-century Traditions And Hearthside Stories Of West Cornwall: tales gathered from a fading, oral culture.

And in the dozen tales herein, in the tradition of the best stories of what we could loosely term the supernatural, from Henry James's The Turn Of The Screw to Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger, these occurrences just are – there is no attempt to rationalise.

With a beautiful simplicity of style and the lightness of touch of Ali Smith or Jon McGregor, her tales lead the reader, and her characters, into oddly surreal parallel realities – this 'other' Cornwall, which exists when you scratch just below the surface of the everyday.

A different but equally enjoyable prospect is Thus Es Et, overseen by one of Cornwall's foremost men of letters, bard Les Merton. It collects the best of Cornish dialect writing, in prose and poetry, for the Francis Boutle imprint, which has done so much work in recent times to revitalise the canon of Cornish literature.

Mr Merton has gathered writing from the beginning of the 19th century, through to the present day – from esteemed writers such as Simon Parker, Q, and DM Thomas to other writers deemed worthy of renewed interest, such as JG Jolly, of Stithians, and Clara Rogers, of Trelowarren.

Being dialect, necessarily, the text is rendered phonetically, the better to express the broad vowels and fluid contractions of the deep dialect – one which, unfortunately, is on the retreat in its spoken form, away from the second-home-ridden coasts and into the heartlands, following a pattern perhaps not unlike the pure Brythonic tongue centuries before.

This excerpt from Bryan Teague's Flickrun Memories gives a flavour:

"Doan git me wrong, I baint maaken a fuss.

Me new flat's centrel aytun works vitty.

Tharr's naw smuts flawtun bout the plaace un naw

Ashes ta tip, naw black-lead stawve ta clayne ..."

To the unfamiliar eye, the style looks primitive, but is a faithful rendering of a form which I still hear at family gatherings.

What this anthology does is provide a strong platform for the Cornish dialect literary tradition as living form.

Indeed, some of the pieces not only give narrative voice to the hidden experiences of the county, but are distinctly political in flavour.

Is there a valid case for such writing in our culture of the printed word?

One only has to look at Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, or Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, to see there most firmly is a strong tradition of giving voice to other Englishes.

Both books reassess Cornish culture and bring new life to forms often used as dismissive, touristy emblems of the duchy. And for that, they are more than worthy of your attention.

Lucy Wood's Diving Belles is published by Bloomsbury at £14.99, and Thus Es Et: An Anthology Of Cornish Dialect is published by Francis Boutle at £12.99.