With the pace of modern life being what it is, you'd think that short stories would be more popular than novels. Surely, most of us haven't got time for things like 'character development', 'sub-plots' and so forth. And the fact is, I do know many people who really love short stories. Whenever I say to a real human being that publishers are not keen on short stories they scratch their heads in bewilderment and suggest that publishers should get out more. (Perhaps this would be a good place to note that anyone who publishes my stuff – to the extent that they do publish it – obviously gets out with sufficient frequency, and is a worthy human being.) The fact remains, however, that this prejudice against short stories in the world of publishing is so pronounced that one cannot find a literary agent unless it is with a novel. Short stories simply will not do. The reasons for this are unclear, although it's quite possible that they have their roots in the traditional Western attitude that short stories are, unlike a certain chocolate bar produced by the cunts at Nestle, for girls.
I think I would like to promote short stories, here on my blog, because there does seem to be this prejudice against them, and because they're great. One way in which they are great is the following – they are a reminder that little things can make life worthwhile. I think, as a writer, you often dream about having a huge canon of work which people will annotate and examine for centuries to come, studying the way that you have developed your themes over the grand sweep of your career. But is writing really about the grand sweep of the career? Isn't it – or shouldn't it be – more about the observations and insights that make even a single moment precious?
It's not the size of someone's oeuvre that counts, surely? It's that magical moment that at some point they reached, perhaps in a single scene or line, that makes you feel, for a moment, not alone, that you will never forget, which gives a writer's real worth. Writers with slender oeuvres whose work I adore include: H. P. Lovecraft, Higuchi Ichiyo, Philip Larkin, Mark Samuels (still alive, so I'm hoping his oeuvre is going to put on weight significantly), Kaneko Misuzu, Bruno Schulz and John Kennedy Toole. There are, of course, many more.
There are in this world short stories (and poems) that make one feel it is enough to have read just this, it is enough that someone has written just this. My life has been validated in reading it, and the life of the writer in writing it. And I would like, at intervals, perhaps even regular, but more likely irregular, to post on this blog links to such short stories (and perharps poems, too) with a few words of commentary from me. And this will be a bit like Richard and Judy's Book Club, only with short stories, and less likely to make you want to rip out your own intestines with an awning hook.
Here are some short stories, off the top of my head, which have made the writers in question immediately worthwhile to me, and which I might feature in this series, for the enormous boons that they bestow upon the reader:
'Separate Ways', by Higuchi Ichiyo
'Egnaro', by M. John Harrison
'Madam Crowl's Ghost', by Sheridan LeFanu
'Patriotism', by Mishima Yukio
'The Wendigo', by Algernon Blackwood
'Something Childish But Very Natural', by Katherine Mansfield
And others.
Please anticipate the first in this series excitedly.
(By the way, how to ruin a good poem.)
Peter A Leonard writes:
Not a new trend. Please follow the link to the New York Times, and then the further link to an article from 1908 which asks are short stories unpopular?http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9805E0DB1539E733A25753C2A9659C946897D6CFShort stories are an artform very separate from the longer form of the novel (obviously). Traditionally the world and its wife have dipped their toes in the “short story” lake. Not surprisingly a very large percentage of these efforts are (being kind) poor.Throughout the fifties and sixties magazines and periodicals financed mediocrity via the short story output of a range of talentless wannabes; at year’s end there’d even be a collection of this crap called the BEST OF. I’m not sure this situation has improved much over the intervening years? In fact I’m certain it has grown worse.Let’s throw a few names in the pot: Hemingway – poor, poor novels ( excepting perhaps The Old Man and the Sea) but some stylistically startling short stories (for the time). H E Bates had a way with the short form, as did Katherine Mansfield. Chekhov wasn’t too bad, either, was he? Ambrose Bierce could tell a tale or two. As could Damon Runyon. And that’s without touching on the genius of Jorge Luis Borges and his blind output. So, what about Yukio Mishima, or Tadeusz Borowski? Or Yuri Markovich Nagibin –“We lived in the same house, on the same stairway, but we did not know each other.” Which could act as a subtext to most of his work. Nagibin determined: “Within [the short story’s] tiny frame must be accommodated the entire boundless world in which we live: the limitless sky and the expanses of the earth, the inner infinity of man and the very spirit of our time and country. Indeed, the short story, too, reflects the writer’s conception of the world. That is why the short story is primarily about everything and only secondarily about something. More precisely, through something the writer must show everything.Which is why most short stories fail, and why most publishers won’t touch ‘em with a ten foot barge pole. In turn this is sad ( a tragedy) for those one or two good practioners of the art. Of course the same is true for those of us who chose to specialize in the one act play!
Peter A Leonard writes:
Not a new trend. Please follow the link to the New York Times, and then the further link to an article from 1908 which asks are short stories unpopular?http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9805E0DB1539E733A25753C2A9659C946897D6CFShort stories are an artform very separate from the longer form of the novel (obviously). Traditionally the world and its wife have dipped their toes in the “short story” lake. Not surprisingly a very large percentage of these efforts are (being kind) poor.Throughout the fifties and sixties magazines and periodicals financed mediocrity via the short story output of a range of talentless wannabes; at year’s end there’d even be a collection of this crap called the BEST OF. I’m not sure this situation has improved much over the intervening years? In fact I’m certain it has grown worse.Let’s throw a few names in the pot: Hemingway – poor, poor novels ( excepting perhaps The Old Man and the Sea) but some stylistically startling short stories (for the time). H E Bates had a way with the short form, as did Katherine Mansfield. Chekhov wasn’t too bad, either, was he? Ambrose Bierce could tell a tale or two. As could Damon Runyon. And that’s without touching on the genius of Jorge Luis Borges and his blind output. So, what about Yukio Mishima, or Tadeusz Borowski? Or Yuri Markovich Nagibin –“We lived in the same house, on the same stairway, but we did not know each other.” Which could act as a subtext to most of his work. Nagibin determined: “Within [the short story’s] tiny frame must be accommodated the entire boundless world in which we live: the limitless sky and the expanses of the earth, the inner infinity of man and the very spirit of our time and country. Indeed, the short story, too, reflects the writer’s conception of the world. That is why the short story is primarily about everything and only secondarily about something. More precisely, through something the writer must show everything.Which is why most short stories fail, and why most publishers won’t touch ‘em with a ten foot barge pole. In turn this is sad ( a tragedy) for those one or two good practioners of the art. Of course the same is true for those of us who chose to specialize in the one act play!
Peter A Leonard writes:Sorry all, this was so good it seems to have duplicted itself…which is frankly quite frightening!
“H E Bates had a way with the short form, as did Katherine Mansfield. Chekhov wasn’t too bad, either, was he? Ambrose Bierce could tell a tale or two. As could Damon Runyon. And that’s without touching on the genius of Jorge Luis Borges and his blind output. So, what about Yukio Mishima, or Tadeusz Borowski? Or Yuri Markovich Nagibin –”You’re anticipating half of the people I want to include in this ‘series’. Of course, I did mention Mansfield and Mishima, anyway, but I didn’t mention Borges, and should have. I’ve been considering his inclusion. Oh, and though I haven’t read very much Chekhov at all, I was very impressed with ‘The Black Monk’. “That is why the short story is primarily about everything and only secondarily about something. More precisely, through something the writer must show everything.”Yes, this is very true. I’m conscious of at least attempting this every time I write a short story. My short stories tend to sprawl towards novella length, however, so perhaps my art needs more honing. Or perhaps I’m simply a bit anomalous. Or bloviated.Interestingly, perhaps, in Japan, the short story has never suffered from the kind of image problems it’s had over here, and many of the most famous writers are best known for their short stories rather than their novels. It might be glib of me to say that this is in part the result of a culture that gave rise to the economy of the haiku poem. So I won’t. Oh, I just have. But yes, I think I’d prefer a similar literary climate over here, and, in my own minuscule way hope to encourage it by posting links to what I think are the very best short stories that happen to be available free online. I don’t intend to be strict about length and the definition of the form, and, as I said, may even include poems in the series, too.
Robin Davies writes:
>My short stories tend to sprawl towards novella length, however, so perhaps my art needs more honing.A critic (I can’t remember if it was S. T. Joshi or Mike Ashley)suggested that the novelette or novella length was ideal for weird tales. This certainly seems to be the case with Algernon Blackwood, Robert Aickman, T. E. D Klein and maybe Lovecraft. This length gives the writer sufficient time to build up atmosphere but this would become difficult to sustain over the length of a full novel.
“A critic (I can’t remember if it was S. T. Joshi or Mike Ashley)suggested that the novelette or novella length was ideal for weird tales.”I think that’s true. A ghost story can be very short, but if you’re making the distinction of the weird, it often implies a richness of atmosphere that requires elaborate prose and the slow, carefully orchestrated revealing of details. I think in my own case that might be part of the… problem? But there’s something else, as well. I seem to need to put myself in the scene that I’m describing, so scene is ‘everything’, or almost. This means that I also feel the need to reconstruct the experience of the scene on the page pretty much from the bottom up, where most writers just take certain things as common knowledge, which there’s no need to mention. I actually think that this is one advantage (as well as disadvantage) that I have as a writer, but it does depend on individual taste, of course. Personally, if a writer doesn’t, to some extent, attempt this re-experiencing of reality for the sake of the reader – if reality is, in other words, a given for the writer, something taken for granted – then I tend to find their prose rather thin and lifeless. One way of avoiding this and still having an economical style is to make each line fall heavy as if chiselled into an ancient stone tablet. I suppose there are others.