A very nice piece on the art of the short story if you have a bit of time. She makes some good points-especially how nice it is that you can carry the entirety of a short story in your head.
I read and write short stories for the love of words, for enlightenment and insight into a character or situation, because I can finish reading it in one sitting and thus mull it over when it is fresh in my mind. I don't read them to be entertained really. I am happy when that occurs but I don't really expect it. I don't think many crime short stories work well because the plot is so important in a crime story. My favorite crime short is, of course, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor.
Although ones about a crime's affect on a victim or villain can be powerful.
Why do you read short stories? Can you choose a favorite?
26 comments:
I have never really thought about it as I have always just done it. Most of my reading comes from crime and mystery anthologies. Back in the 70s when I was teen most of my short story reading came from science fiction and fantasy anthologies.
Regardless of the length of the work, I expect to be entertained. At least a little bit.
I like short stories because they are compressed and because they can give an indication of the author's true talent. Most short stories are trivial and do not require the broader canvas of a novel, but some just come right out and smack you on the head when you least expect it, such as Stanley Ellin's "The Specialty of the House." Offhand (and the list would be added on to repeatedly as I think about it) my favorite short stories include Joe R. Lansdale's "Night They Missed the Horror Show," Charlotte Armstrong's "The Enemy," and virtually anything by P. G. Wodehouse. I also have a strong liking for Fritz Leiber's little scrap of a tale, "The Rats of Limbo."
Reading to me is like breathing. It's something I have to do. I love short stories because they can deliver delight in small bites. Novels can deliver delight, too, but it just takes longer.
Specialty of the House is a masterpiece. I have a short story idea in my head most of the time but now I seldom write them. I think fantasy produces better short stories than crime because it is often a concept or idea rather than plot driven.
Short stories are a real art form, Patti, and I always appreciate an author who does them well. I read them because a good short story can give a whole world and the people in it in a few pages (well, compared to a novel).
So true, Margot.
Yes, "Specialty of the House" was certainly one. "The Lottery." A bunch of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories - "Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted River." Some Raymond Carver.
I've also found that reading short stories is a great way to discover writers new to you.
Oh, Lots of fantasy short stories, from awful to transcendentally brilliant, are plot-driven as well, even as they have to suggest/fill in how their world differs from the readers'...
No few novels, and too many examples of all work from vignettes to endless novel series/multi-volume novels, are trivial. As blues musicians have been wont to call out to their fellow artists, "Tell the truth!"...good short stories, along with all other good art, at some level do that.
Nick Adams stories are among the best. FItzgerald can be disappointing at times.
Do you find yourself analyzing short stories more often than longer prose works, hence your lack of expectation of entertainment? (and who are the young dancers?).
As with a number of the above respondents, I've been reading short stories all my literate life, and I'm not sure there's too much that can be done in a novel that can't at very least be implied or otherwise encouraged in the reader by a short story, in terms of character or worldview or other sorts of statement or implication. What Are My Favorites tends to cause a brain-lock as hundreds of more clamor from memory, but among them, certainly, are the likes of "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles" by Margaret St. Clair, "The Distributor" by Richard Matheson, "Decision" by Wilma Shore, "You're Another" by Damon Knight, "My Boat" by Joanna Russ, "Tonto Woman" by Elmore Leonard, "Pelt" by Carol Emshwiller, "Watch For It" by Joe Gores, "Don Brown's Body" by Jean Kerr (which I definitely loved at the time...).
That is a hard question to answer. I remember reading short stories when I was college age, and most of those were science fiction or fantasy, although most of my novel reading was mysteries. After that I did not read many short stories until about 2015. And even after that I had to learn to enjoy them enough to seek out more and more anthologies.
I do read short stories for entertainment, but I often also find enlightenment. I don't think mystery short stories that are puzzles work very well, but I do like crime fiction short stories that are more studies of character or behavior.
I think I have an approach / avoidance problem with short stories. If you read an anthology of stories by different authors, or sometimes even a number of stories by one author, a good number of them may be less interesting, but when I find a really good one, it is thrilling.
I sometimes find when I like the novels of an author, I don't care that much for their short fiction, and vice versa.
https://thrillingdetective.com/2021/10/21/its-hammer-time/
The young dancers are my two kids and I can't remember why they are dressed like that. Perhaps it was Halloween but I doubt it. Great list of stories, Todd, I am going to try and track them down. There are a few authors who seem to write equally well with short and long length but not many. Maybe Joyce Carol Oates would be one although I don't like all of her work in either but some of it. Claire Keegan perhaps too. Although her longer work is not very long.
There might be more who at least occasionally do so more than you give them credit for. Robert Bloch comes to mind, and Fritz Leiber, and Russ and Emshwiller cited above, along with Bill Pronzini, and his collaborator (the recently late, very sadly) Barry Malzberg, a classmate of Oates, John Cheever, the cited Elmore Leonard, Joe R. Lansdale, our missing friend Bill Crider, Tanith Lee, William Kotzwinkle, Octavia Butler, Kate Wilhelm (and her husband, Damon Knight, though it took till his last years to write several novels in the same league as his shorter work), Shirley Jackson, Atwood, Le Guin, Alice Walker, I think George's frequent reckoning of Currently Underrated definitely applies to Katherine Anne Porter, hard to overlook Patricia Highsmith here, or her on/off partner Marijane Meaker, Elizabeth Hand, Ms. Lee Hoffman, albeit a few, such as Alice Sola Kim, seemed to be blocked in trying to get out a novels to match their short fiction.
And I obviously should've mentioned Pronzini's other collaborator, Ms. Muller. And Donald Westlake, while we're at it...
Among too many missing friends, also Ed Gorman...I'd better stop this line and get some sleep...
I suspect I meant, and might even have typed, "hundreds or more" above, but I might (or might not) have been Spell-"Corrected"--a fact, this laptop's software just tried to do it again. Fun.
And then decided "in fact" should be "a fact"...hmm.
It's a fine photo...I have no idea where (if anywhere) my parents' home movie footage of my sister or me at similar ages might be. Perhaps she has them...we did differing "shifts" of emptying their house after they began to inarguably need 24-hour care. I took the last rental van of stuff out, put the last remnants of the refrigerator food in the rolling can, left my keys on the counter.
And Ed's "The Face" is one of the best stories that I have read. Ever. Hands down.
I'll have to find that one. Lansdale's "The Night They Missed the Horror Show" is, in its compass, all too relevant to the current perplex. Unfortunately for us, not fantasticated enough to be a supernatural horror story...as opposed to all too possible. A nice rundown of Spillane parodies, etc.: https://thrillingdetective.com/2021/10/21/its-hammer-time/
If anyone finds a pdf of THE FACE. please share.
Patti, it first appeared in the April 1993 issue of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION. Here is the link:
https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v084n04_1993-04_Lenny_Silv3r-dtsg0318-SLiV/page/n2/mode/1up
Thanks!
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