Themes and Images, and Stories that Make Some Folks Cry: Best American Short Stories, 2015--Part II

"Bride," Julia Elliott

This seems to me to be primarily a theme-story based on the medieval concept of the basic evil of the female body.  It begins with a nun whipping herself in order to "chastise" her "animal body.  She has subdued her body to the extent that her menstrual flow  is no longer a flow, but a dribble. She thinks of her body as a "bundle of polluted flesh."  Just the night before the Abbot has said women are by "nature carnal"—that they have an "opening that the Devil may slip through unless she fiercely barricade against such entry."

In an interview in Fiction Writers Review, Julia Elliott said:  "In grad school I read a lot of Renaissance gynecology and obstetrics works and discovered that they are insane; they are like magic realism or something: monstrous births, weird reproductive theories, melancholy, all that stuff. When barber surgeons started to do anatomy theatres, it all got a little more 'scientific,' as we think of it today, but was still brutal and culturally loaded. If they had a woman out on the anatomy table, for example, you could pay admission and go and watch, and the anatomist would say things like 'Behold, here is the uterus, the origin of sin and death,' and then he would dissect it. Here, cultural ideas about femininity are obviously mixed in with the supposed science."

The notion that the uterus is the origin of sin and death is the basic thematic concept that energizes the story, but the story does not create it or explore it; it simply embodies or illustrates this preexisting cultural/religious idea.

"Big Cat," Louise Erdrich

Whereas Julia Elliott's story seems obviously the embodiment of a thematic idea, Louise Erdrich insists that her story is somewhat of a mystery to her and to those who read it. She said in her "Contributor's Notes" that when people mention this story to her their mouths open and their hands flap, and they laugh an odd laugh.  As a consequence, she says this story became a favorite of hers because it seemed to make people uncomfortable.

In her interview with New Yorker editor Deborah Treisman, Erdrich said that when she was writing the story, the character Elida "seemed to thwart my narrator at every turn, yet she exuded a scholarly ascetic quality that was irresistible to him. I decided to give in to her perhaps unconscious malevolence, and after many revisions I wrote the ending. I was genuinely disturbed by this ending and have no idea how to account for it." When Treisman said she thought "The Big Cat” reads a little like a fairy tale or a fable, asking Erdrich there was a moral to this story, Erdrich said she liked the idea that "this story reads like a fairy tale, but there is no moral at all... Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional."

The plot of this story focuses on a man married to a woman named Elida who snores. Not only Elida, but also her mother and her sisters are terrible snorers that no remedy seems to alleviate. After he divorces and marries someone else, he and his first wife become sexually involved again. This is less important than the significance Erdrich seems to develop out of the snoring and a short film Elida, edits together about the man's life, made up of snippets of bit parts he has played in movies.

The story ends with the man's recognition that the 30 minute film Elida has made which she entitled "Man of a Thousand Glimpses," makes a sort of narrative that has its own thematic significance.  From heroic acts to images of  being a good father, to infidelity, to criminal behavior, to multiple images of his death--the narrative is a "dark" one that makes the man feel he has wasted his life and acted ignobly. He realizes that the film reflects the way Elida really felt about him.

The story ends with them spending the night in Elida's parents' house. The snoring of the whole female side of the family hits him with "abrupt ferocity.  It is like a pack of wolves snarling over a kill and then lions driving off the wolves, gnawing off a leg and fending off a male. Elida sounds like a big cat ( thus the title of the story) digesting her prey, and he dreams he is the hunted animal being eaten alive.

Despite Erdrich's claim that she herself was not sure what to make of the ending of the story, it seems rather clear it evokes what Treisman recognizes as the fairy tale motif of the female revenging herself on the male for his treachery, for failing to be the good husband and good father that he promised to be, and finally devouring him like a wild animal—a big cat.

"The Fugue," Arna Bontemps Hemenway

Like Erdrich, Hemenway also disavows that he really knows how this story came about, as if the story somehow took control of the writing process.  He says, "I am embarrassed to admit that I don't remember actually writing this story," Suffering from sleep deprivation from having to wake up all though the night to feed a new baby who is having trouble eating, and feeling the pressure of having to turn a story in to a graduate workshop or risk failing began to get mixed up in his mind in an hallucinatory way.

The story seems to derive from Hemenway's research into the Iraq War, specifically about soldiers allegedly involved in atrocities.  He says in his "Contributor's Notes" that in his research, he learned  about the  U.S. military's strategy of re-creating whole Iraqi villages in the Mojave desert and hiring real Iraqi expatriates to "play out complex psychological behavioral profiles faked by various intelligence training units." The thematic concept that drives the story is the blurring of reality and fantasy as the central character, a soldier referred to as Wild Turkey, gets his memory of actual events and pretend events confused. It is all a bit too obvious for me.  Thom Jones did this war and fugue state theme several years ago with more style and energy than Hemenway does here.

"M&L," Sarah Kokernot

Kokernot says this story began with the image of a man picking up a woman's dress shoes as he followed her into the woods.  This is the image that the story moves toward and concludes with.  It has two separate points of view—one by Miriam, the ""M of the title, who was sexually attacked when she was thirteen and then sees the man years later at the time of this story at a wedding, and the second pov by Liam, the "L" of the title, who loves her.  It's a slim narrative striving for a kind of romantic, painful lyricism, but the language is not strong enough to support the delicacy the circumstance demands, for example: "He saws from her face that she'd gone to a place deep inside herself, and he knew she would never allow him to go there."  That's just too easy, isn't it?

"Jack, July," Victor Lodato

Lodata says the story started with body language—the way he pictured the central character's way of moving down the street. This is a story of a meth addict on the streets of Tucson, Arizona, on a journey across town in search of more drugs. Lodato, who once lived in Tucson, says he never really knows where he is going when he begins a story and that the character in this story perfectly mirrored his own state of mind.  He adds that the central character's heightened state of mind made him feel free to "go a little crazy, to edit myself less as I wrote—and in doing so, I ended up in in some unlikely places."

Maybe it is just my impatience with stories about guys on drugs, wandering about that makes me unimpressed with this story.  Maybe it is just the loose and lost sense of movement and style of this story that makes me lose any interest in what happens to Jack or in what that means, if anything. Maybe a little more editing might have been a good idea.

"Madame Lazarus," Maile Meloy

T. C. Boyle says in his Introduction that he felt this story was the most moving one in the collection.  He says he read it out doors and found himself in the "mortifying position" of sitting there exposed and sobbing in public, concluding that what Meloy has accomplished here is evoking "true emotion" over the ties that bind us to the world and how they are cruelly broken forever.

This is the story of an elderly gay man living in Paris with a younger man, who brings home a small terrier to keep the older man company after he retired. The story focuses on the man's fears that the young man will grow tired of him; it also centers around his memory of the first boy he loved and a tragedy that marked that love.

The story moves to a conclusion when the dog seems to have died and then revives, leading the vet to refer to the animal as "Madame Lazarus." A few months later, the dog becomes much more ill and must be taken to the animal hospital to be euthanized. And this is what makes T. C. Boyle cry.  Of course it does.  I cried when our dog of fifteen years died.  Everybody cries when a dog dies.  But this story is a fairly simple account that unfairly evokes an emotion that no one, at least no one who has ever had a dog, can resist.

"Mr. Voice," Jess Walter

In his "Contributor's Notes," Jess Walter says this story began with the first line that just popped into his head like a song lyric, "Mother was a stunner."  Calling it a story that kept surprising him as he discovered more about it every day, when he got to the end of the first draft and wrote the line the mother says to her daughter,("Nobody gets to tell you what you look like, or who you are"), he realized that's what he wanted to say to his own daughters concluding, "sentimental goof that I am, I started crying."

I can understand Walter's response, but I am not sure the story is what T. S. Eliot would call an "objective correlative" of the emotion.  It deals with a young girl whose mother is a beauty who goes out with lots of men, and then marries one who does commercials and announcements on the radio—earning the nickname "Mr. Voice."  When the narrator is age twelve, her mother leaves Mr. Voice and her for another man, and Mr. Voice becomes her guardian—and a good guardian and protector he is—not merely a stepfather, but, by the end of the story her "father."  It's a nice story, but a bit too easy in the emotion it evokes. "Thunderstruck," by Elizabeth McCracken, is, it seems to me, a more complex father/daughter story. (More about this story next time)

My favorite three stories in this year's Bass collection (which for me means they are the "best" of the "Best") are Denis Johnson's "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden," Elizabeth McCracken's "Thunderstruck," and Colum McCann's "Sh'khol." They all made me feel a strong emotion--not because they evoked anything personal or purposely played on my feelings, but because they were so damned well-written. More about that next week. For me, the "best" stories are always the best-written stories.

Junot Diaz, Michael Byers, Charles Baxter, Joan Wickersham--Best American Short Stories 2013

I love a good love story.  I don’t mean those faux romantic fictional fluffs that you often see at the movies or on television.  I mean a story that explores the mysterious complexity of love.

When I started this blog, almost five years ago, the profile program asked me what my favorite book was. I wrote, without hesitation, The Great Gatsby.  I was reminded what a classic love story it was when I saw the recent film version, which was just frothy cinematic display, until Gatsby came face to face again with Daisy, and from that point, it was all about that boyish look on his face and his effort, Tom Sawyer-like, to impress Daisy. It didn’t matter that she was not worthy of his adoration; that wasn’t the point. That’s never the point. For example, there is only one moment in Wuthering Heights when Cathy is worthy of the mad passion of Heathcliff—when she says “I am Heathcliff.”  The love object is not the result of evaluation but rather obsession.

When the profile program asked me my favorite movie, without hesitation, I wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which is, to my mind, a brilliant exploration of the fiction/reality complexity of being in love. The character Jeremy Irons plays is no match for the magically mysterious fictional construct that Meryl Streep creates so brilliantly that one never knows when the French Lieutenant’s woman is acting and when she is….what? Well, when love is concerned what else is there but acting?

What’s all this preamble about love stories about?  I want to talk a bit about four love stories of sorts in the 2013 Best American Short Story collection. And since one of those stories is Junot Diaz’s “Miss Lora,” for which I have expressed my distaste in an earlier blog this year, I thought it would give me one more chance to try to explain why I thought it was an inferior story—certainly not a story deserving of all the awards that Diaz has received this past year for it and the collection in which it appears. So far in my reading of the 2013 BASS, it is the only Elizabeth Strout selection that disappoints me. And she doesn’t give me any clue in her introduction why she chose it except to praise the vividness of the character Lora. However, since I respect Strout’s work, the fact that she chose it as one of the “Best” has forced me to go back and read the damned thing one more time—the sixth time.

The other three stories I want to talk a bit about, are Charles Baxter’s “Bravery,” Michael Byers’ “Malaria,” and Joan Wickersham’s “The Tunnel, or The News from Spain.”

I think the basic problem I have with “Miss Lora” is that the central character, a sixteen-year-old Dominican Republic male, has no depth of feeling.  He just wants to have sex.  Nothing wrong with that, of course.  But if it is the only motivating force of a piece of fiction, we are apt to call it “pornography.” Nothing wrong with that either--except when the work is parading as something better than that, something meaningful or culturally relevant.

And Miss Lora herself, although we do get a bit of a backstory about her past sad life, is primarily just an older woman that Yunior can have sex with—what more about her do we really know than that? So what really happens in this story? A sixteen-year-old boy admires his older brother, who has recently died of cancer, because he was such a successful sexual predator. The boy’s girlfriend will not have sex with him, so he is delighted to hook up with an older woman who will. What sixteen-year-old horny boy wouldn’t? They have sex for a time; he graduates from high school, becomes involved with another woman and then graduates from college. Miss Lora disappears. It means nothing.

I have been accused of having a blind spot about this story, but so far, no one has told me why they think it is such a great piece of fiction. I assure I am no prude and am not put off by the explicitness of some of the sexual description. It’s just that the story offers me nothing complexly human.

  If Elizabeth Strout happens to read this, I hope she will tell me why she thinks it is one of the “Best.” Yes, the “voice” is an interesting mix of educated jargon and street patois.  But the story is so hollow, so cynical, so meaningless. Nuff said.  Never for the rest of my life will I say another word about “Miss Lora.” I hope Diaz is laughing all the way to the bank.

Diaz’s Yunior may be just the kind of guy that Susan, the central character of Charles Baxter’s “Bravery,” secretly desires.  Although she goes out with the kind ones, the considerate ones, what her roommate calls the “humane” ones, what she really seems to wants is a bit of a ”troublemaker.” She meets and marries a kind and considerate man, Elijah.  When they go to Prague on their honeymoon, they encounter on the street a madwoman, who Susan imagines tells her that in the future she will be terribly jealous of her good-hearted husband “because of the woman in him.” And this announces the story’s theme.

When they have a son they name him Raphael, the name of another angel. Soon after they bring him home from the hospital, Susan comes into the nursery and finds Elijah holding a bottle of her breast milk in his left hand with the boy cradled in his right arm. Baxter says, “A small twig snapped inside her” and, finding it hard to breathe, Susan tells her husband there is something about this she cannot stand, insisting that she is the mother here, and that she does not want him to feed the boy. “With one part of her mind, she saw this impulse as animal truth, not unique to her, but true for all women.” She shouts at him that this is her territory and that he must put the child down immediately.

Elijah angrily leaves, and Susan falls asleep watching television, dreaming about her experience in Prague. When she wakes up, Elijah is standing over her with blood on the side of his mouth, but he is jubilant, telling her a story about seeing two men attacking a young woman and him charging in to rescue her by beating the men off, breaking the jaw of one of them. When she wipes the blood off his face and knuckles, she cannot believe his story. She tells him she loves him and then tucks him in bed as she would a child. The story ends with her looking in the mirror as she brushes her teeth. She does not recognize her own face, but she does recognize her milk-swollen breasts and her smile when she thinks of ”sweet Elijah bravely fighting someone, somewhere.”

This is not a highly complex story, for it seems a little too governed by its theme—the puzzling conflict women perhaps experience about nice guys vs. somewhat dangerous characters. Baxter explores several aspects of this conflict. Whether it is an “animal truth” deriving from the primitive need a woman had for a strong masculine male to protect her and her child or a socially instilled bit of claptrap, I like the way Baxter carefully sets the situation up. If you read it, please let me know if you think the story is true, or false, to a basic human truth.

I have to admit right up front that I was predisposed to like Michael Byer’s “Malaria” before I read it because I loved his first collection of stories, The Coast of Good Intentions, published in 1998 when he was only 28 years old.  I especially liked “Dirigibles,” which is a wonderful love story about a couple much too old for Byers to understand, except by the wondrous magic of authorial empathy. And indeed authorial empathy is what the story is really about.

I can understand why Elizabeth Strout was drawn to the first-person pov voice of this story, for Byers creates convincingly the rhythm of mind of the central character, Orlando, who is twenty and, as he says, unadventurous. The story focuses on his short relationship with a girl named Nora and her older brother George. The title comes from the fact that George tells Orlando that he caught malaria while in Ecuador, although Orlando knows that George has never been to Ecuador. “Everything changes" when George is arrested naked in the middle of the high school athletic field. Nora says he is hearing voices and she begins to worry that she is hearing voices also. Orlando admits that he does not know what to do about all this, since he has little experience with women and believes that “frictionless amiability” is his best way of handling things.

Orlando’s grappling with his relationship with Nora and Nora’s relationship with George makes him feel that for the first time he has an idea of ambition, that he could “be something in particular, rather than just me in general.”  But he does not know what to say to anyone about George’s delusions and Nora’s fears that “wouldn’t sound hollow and ridiculous.” He knows that his own life up to this point has been “featureless,” “free of pain,” and thus he has no training in delivering sympathy. The primary focus of the story ends with Nora trying to reassure Orlando that there was nothing they could have done about George.

But the story does not end until a final section some years later, after Orlando has married, and he is at home alone with the flu; in his fevered condition, he feels he is in a different world and senses a “hideous estrangement from the plain objects of everyday life.” He says he feels not only alone, but as if he were the only human left in the world. He knows his problem is that he does not know what he was supposed to do about George, asking: “What is George Vardon to me?”  He wonders if one is supposed to do anything; he thinks maybe what he is telling is just a story of something that happened to him or to George, concluding, “It’s really George’s story, that is, but naturally he can’t tell it, and neither can I.”

I like this story because it is such a conscientious and thoughtful exploration of our relationship to the “other.” Maybe I am prejudiced in its favor because it reaffirms much of the argument in my recent book about what Frank O’Connor saw years ago as a basic thematic impulse in the short story. The answer to Orlando’s question “What is George Vardon to me? is perhaps the answer that O’Connor says Gogol poses in”The Overcoat”: “I am your brother.”

I have to confess that I am not familiar with Joan Wickersham, although the Contributors’ Notes say that her work has appeared before in Best American Short Stories. Her most recent book, from which “The Tunnel or the News from Spain” is taken, is entitled The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story. I liked this story so much (and since I am such a sucker for a love story), I just ordered a copy). Wickersham says that the book is a “suite of asymmetrical, thwarted love stories” in which the title “the news from Spain” means something different in each story, but “acquires more resonance” (hate that overused word) as the book goes along.  I will talk more about that when I get the book and read it.  As for “The Tunnel,” there are multiple love stories involved here, although the primary one is the love story between Rebecca, age 45, and her mother Harriet, who is living, unhappily, in a nursing home.

The narrator of the story sums up the relationship between Harriet and Rebecca as one in which Harriet needs attention and Rebecca needs to feel like a hero. But more than this, they have discovered that they like each other and are having a good time together. Now that her mother is dying, “in some unexpected way she and Harreit had fallen in love.” Almost on the periphery of this love affair is the ten-year relationship Rebecca has with Peter and a short new relationship she has with Benjamin, who comes into her bookstore and buys a set of Chekhov stories.

This story is more “novelistic” that I usually like, lacking the language-based poetic focus and economy that make for a great short story, but it is so intelligent and sensitive about the various complex aspects of love that I find I can’t resist it.  It is not a story I will read over and over, but I did enjoy the experience of reading it the two times I did.

Authors on the Short Story--Part V--Best American Short Stories Introductions

The Best American Short Story collection has been around now for almost 100 years. It was started in 1915 by Edward J. O’Brien, who also wrote two pretty good history/discussions of the form: The Dance of the Machines: The American Short Story and the Industrial Age (1929) rants against machine-like standardization of the industrial age and argues that the short story of his time shares with the machine the characteristics of being impersonal, standardized, speeded-up and cheap. The Advance of the American Short Story (1931) surveys the development of the American short story from Washington Irving to Sherwood Anderson. O’Brien edited what was then called Best Short Stories of, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story for a quarter of a century.

Volume 7 of Critical Survey of Short Fiction, which I edited for Salem Press in 2001, includes the table of contents of all the Best American Short Stories volumes from 1915 up through 1999. It is interesting to note how few writers in the early volumes are still remembered, or are remembered as popular rather than literary writers, e.g. in the 1915 volume, Ben Hecht, Fannie Hurst, Wilbur Daniel Steele. But who today remembers Walter Muilenburg or Will Livingston Comfort?

Martha Foley took over the editorship in 1941 and continued in that position until 1977, sometimes co-editing with Joyce F. Hartman or David Burnett. In 1978, Shannon Ravenel took over, but that year also started the tradition of having someone else, most often a fiction writer, making the final choice. Usually, Ravenel would choose 120 stories and then send them to the guest editor who chose the final twenty. The titles of the remaining 100 were listed in the back.

Over the years, guest editors have included Joyce Carol Oates, John Gardner, Anne Tyler, John Updike, Gail Godwin, Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie, Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, Annie Proulx, and Amy Tan. However, in the last few years, Houghton Mifflin has chosen guest editors who are not short-story writers and do not seem to appreciate the form, for example, Alice Sebold in 2009, who does not write short stories at all, and Richard Russo in 2010 who does not write them well. Their introductions are rambling generalities and personal anecdotes that add nothing to our understanding and appreciation of the short story. However, many of the other authors who have guest edited over the years have made interesting and helpful comments on the short story, the best of which I include below with the dates of the volume.

I hope these five sets of authorial comments have been helpful to you. Over 100 different authors are represented. I have organized many of the comments in what I think are significant categories and tried to show their relationship to each other for my presentation in Angers, France later this month entitled “Why Many Authors Like Short Stories and Many Readers Do Not.”

I have raided my own copies of Best American Short Stories for the following authorial comments on the form to complete this series. Any comments or additions are appreciated. Not all volumes are represented because not all authors commented on the short story as a form.

1981, Hortense Calisher: “If poetry has the direct line to the highest laurel—or the noblest life—and the novel is sometimes cock-of-the-walk conversationally, then the short story, somehow frozen or immured between them, is everybody’s prize orphan, of whom one speaks tenderly, if not for long. It’s the chamber music of literature and has the same kind of devotee. Besides, it doesn’t sell well. There’s often that confusion between the commercial fact and the Parnassian one.”

1984, John Updike: “The suspicion persists that short fiction, like poetry since Kipling and Bridges, has gone from being a popular to a fine art, an art preserved in a kind of floating museum made up of many little superfluous magazines.”

1985, Gail Godwin: “The paradox I have discovered, in writing and in reading the writing of others, is that the more you respect and focus on the singular and strange, the more you become aware of the universal and the infinite.”

1990, Richard Ford: “Short stories, like lyrics, are invented new each time they’re tried, becoming attached to the name-made-form only as a convenience for would-be-students and syllabus makers.”
“Unarguably, writing short stories is something most people can’t do very well. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s harder than it looks, and wonderful stories do seem like little miracles.”
“Abstractable standards of form will not very reliably predict or often inspire a first-rate short story…a good short story is not good because it conforms to or rejects doggishly some pre-existing conceit.”
“Good stories perform what wonders they do using wise standards all their own, discovered often in the private vicissitudes of being written.”

1993, Louise Erdrich: “The best short stories contain novels. Either they are densely plotted, with each line an insight, or they distill emotions that could easily spread on for pages, chapters.”

1995, Jane Smiley: “The short story is an elusive, paradoxical form, not easily mastered, yet some of the best are written by beginning writers.”

1996, John Edgar Wideman: “Stories that don’t acknowledge the mystery at the center of things, don’t challenge the vision f reality most consenting adults rely upon day by day, are stories that disappear swiftly into the ever-present buzz of entertainment.”

1997, Annie Proulx: “The short story is a difficult literary form, demanding more attention to control and balance than the novel.”
“In the short story there lingers a faint sense of example, a trimmed, useful tautness implying a function for the reader beyond entertainment… The reader comes to the short story subliminally expecting enlightenment, that is, we accept the idea that there is some nugget of embedded truth in a short story, and this acceptance partially sponges off the label of fiction in a way that does not occur with the novel in its detailed examination of character.”

1999, Amy Tan: “For me the rhythm is in the beats of the first sentence, in the way the story’s pulse quickens or evens, lulls, or leaps. And by the end the story breaches and exhales with a certain tempo and force…. Disruptions can cause me to lose the story’s focus or its essence, and at the very least its momentum. For that reason, I feel the short story is more akin to a poem than a novel in how it should be read.”

2000, E. L Doctorow:”The story as a particular kind of fiction may not be definable by its construction or its length, but what is critical is its scale. Smaller in its overall dimensions than the novel, it is a fiction in which society is surmised as the darkness around the narrative circle of light. In other words, the scale of the short story predisposes it to the isolation of the self.”
“Here in the year 2000 we lack a proprietary critic of the short story as, for example, Professor Helen Vendler is a proprietary critic of the lyric poem.”

2001, Barbara Kingsolver: “I have often wondered why short stories are not more popular in this country. We Americans are such busy people you’d think we’d jump at the chance to have our literary wisdom served in doses that fit handily between taking the trash to the curb and waiting for the carpool…. Most Americans would sooner read a five-hundred-page book about a boy attending wizard school or how to make home décor from roadside trash or anything than pick up a book offering them a dozen tales of the world complete in twenty pages apiece…. It may be that most Americans don’t read short stories because…a good short story cannot be Lit Lite; it is the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces.”

2004, Lorrie Moore: “There is no thoroughly convincing theory of the short story—it is technically a genre, not a form, but resists the definitions that usually cluster around both…in lieu of a truly winning overriding theory, we should rely perhaps on simple descriptions, in which case the more the merrier.”
“As for their oft stated affinity with poetry, short stories do have in common with poems an interest in how language completes one’s understanding of the world.”
“Unlike novels or poems, but more akin to a play, the short story is also an end-oriented form, and in the best ones the endings shine a light back upon the story illumining its meaning with both surprise and inevitability.”

2006, Anne Patchett: “The first thing the short story needs to think about is casting off the role of The Novel’s Little Sidekick, the practice run, the warm-up act.”
“Short stories are often better written and make fewer demands on our time than novels. Why haven’t we made a deeper commitment to them? I am afraid it has something to do with the story’s inability to cause a stir…. It doesn’t really matter what the short story chooses to do, but it needs to do something. Fast. The story needs hype. It needs a publicist. Fast

2007, Stephen King: “The American short story is alive and well. Do you like the sound of that? Me too. I only wish it were actually true. The art form is still alive…. But well? That’s a different story.”