STORIES

When the subject comes up I often find myself saying that I don’t like short stories, but that blunt statement is misleading. It is not really short stories themselves that I have a problem with, it is collections of short stories. Yet even the use of the term collections is a poor choice, because there are certain kinds of short story books that I do like. The ones that I have enjoyed have, to my mind anyway, certain things in common that are absent from most collections. The first thing that unites them is that they were put together by the author specifically to stand as a complete work. I have very little interest in what I call random collections, which are those put together by a publisher, translator or other writer. These collections will, in most cases, span the author’s career and include stories dealing with a multitude of themes or ideas. My aversion to these types of books is not really about quality; a collection such as this might, on a story to story basis, be more consistently excellent than one put together by the author, but, I dunno, they bore me or rankle me. Reading them is like listening to a best of or greatest hits album, i.e. someone’s lazy, subjective idea of what are an artist’s finest moments.

First published January 1, 1885