10.05.2008 | Blog : Anne Stameshkin, Blog, short stories, Stephen Millhauser, writers on writing
length matters
By Anne Stameshkin
In this week’s NY Times Book Review, Stephen Millhauser waxes succinctly on the short story — its virtues and titanic ambitions:
The short story — how modest in bearing! How unassuming in manner! It sits there quietly, eyes lowered, almost as if trying not to be noticed. And if it should somehow attract your attention, it says quickly, in a brave little self-deprecating voice alive to all the possibilities of disappointment: “I’m not a novel, you know. Not even a short one. If that’s what you’re looking for, you don’t want me.”
Read the rest (and see what cut of the cow a short story is) here.
“The short story apologizes for nothing. It exults in its shortness. It wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar.”
What a beautiful defense of the short story, which is so often considered a lesser form (or even worse, just a “five-finger exercise” to warm up for a novel).