Short Stories
For me the short story represents the perfect fictional form. Well written, a short story can resonate in the mind for weeks, months, even years. I'm sure that many people after reading a story by Raymond Carver, or Anton Chekhov, or V.S Pritchett (to name just three of my favourites), feel touched in a way that I suspect is not often achieved by the novel. Perhaps it is because the short story is nearer the fable or the tale, which have their roots the stories our ancesters told to help negotiate a truce with the spirits; or the stories we heard as children at bed-time, which sent us off safe into another world. In each case, the moment demands something that is perfect and complete. I think the novel does something different.
Oddly, though most serious writers of fiction have published collections of short stories, and a few have considered them to be major parts of their work, very little critical attention has been paid to it, and most of what has been said of it has been said in America, or in Ireland. Every now and then efforts are made to reinvigorate interest in it as a major art form, and right now good work is being done to promote serious writing by Prospect magazine in the UK and Narrative Magazine in the USA, to name but two. Yet in spite of VS Pritchett's belief that "It is the glancing form of fiction that seems to be right for the nervousness and restlessness of contemporary life," it has not since the demise of the little magazines of the middle part of the twentieth century (which encouraged the form perhaps because of a shortage of paper during WWII and after) regained the popularity it once had. Thankfully, though down in comparison to the novel it remains far from out, and I will be devoting some pages to it on this site.
Here's one of mine, Hold on Tight and Count to Three! that appeared appeared in the anthology I co-edited, Book of Numbers.