Finding The
big in the Little:
Henry James: “a
story is a tiny nugget with a hard latent value.”
Bernard Malamud:
The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime. A short story is a way of indicating the
complexity of life in a few pages, producing the surprise and effect of a
profound knowledge in a short time. A
short story is a way of indicating the complexity of life in a few pages,
producing the surprise and effect of a profound knowledge in a short time. There’s,
among other things, a drama, a resonance, of the reconciliation of opposites:
much to say, little time to say it, something like the effect of a poem.
Chekhov: once told a writer that his works "lack the compactness that makes short
things alive."
Donald
Barthelme: “Fragments are the only forms I trust.”
Richard
Bausch: The short story is such a
persistent form, for the fact is that there are matters of the spirit the short
story addresses better than any other literary art.
Clare
Boylan: “I love the feeling with the
short story of the world is in the detail and that small random acts can set
ordinary lives alight or consume them to ash.”
Richard
Ford: “Short stories want to give us
something big but want to do it in precious little time and space. “Short
stories feel as though they arise out of some fierce schism that by their very
existence they mean to reconcile. And
fascination edging on to mystery does exist in the discrepancy between the
ingenious capacity of great stories to penetrate us and our ineludible
awareness of their brevity.”
Amy Hempel,
1988: “The trick is to find a tiny way
into a huge subject.”
Stephen
Millhauser: “I imagine the short story saying to the novel: You can have
everything — everything — all I ask is a single grain of sand. The novel, with
a careless shrug, a shrug both cheerful and contemptuous, grants the wish. But that grain of sand is the story’s way
out. That grain of sand is the story’s salvation. I take my cue from William
Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand.” Think of it: the world in a grain
of sand; which is to say, every part of the world, however small, contains the
world entirely. Or to put it another way: if you concentrate your attention on
some apparently insignificant portion of the world, you will find, deep within
it, nothing less than the world itself. The short story concentrates on its
grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of
its hand — lies the universe.”
1 comment:
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