![]() ![]() And yet, the novel is the favored literary form in the US-a nation obsessed with its own greatness-and is often praised as the highest form of literature.įor the past two years, I’ve been drafting a story collection of my own. ![]() No one who’s studied the short story can disagree that it is a challenging form that requires great control and skill. And while novels can dawdle for chapters before sparking into brilliance, the short story needs to be about its business from its opening line. A novel, after all, can absorb a whole lot of slackness and slapdash and still kick massive ass, but a short story can unravel over a pair of injudicious sentences. a form that is unforgiving as fuck, and demands from its acolytes unnerving levels of exactitude. In the introduction to this year’s Best American Short Stories, Junot Díaz describes the short story as: Or Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” which shows the narrator’s life flash before his eyes at the same time that it subverts the life-in-review cliché. Or James Joyce’s “The Dead,” with its stunning appeal to universality at the end. Think of Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl,” which manages to show the narrator’s entire childhood in a just a few paragraphs. It is a delicate balance, and such delicate work requires small hands. They summon entire worlds in just a few pages and then bow out, with startling precision and compression. Much like our lives, short stories are brief and end abruptly.
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