If Novels Seem Too Daunting, Try Short Stories
The joys of reading and rereading a great short story are vast
Novels tend to be the brunt of anyone’s to-be-read pile, but sometimes the seven hundred page hardback tomes or the lyrical navel-gazing makes for a really unsatisfactory story. Literary fiction novels often meander and play with tangential characters and themes. The author takes his or her time and makes a meal of the writing. It is epidemic that many readers feel ashamed if they didn’t love this treatise on agrarians who fear change or a city dweller who fears change. There’s only one cure for this common paper weight, and that is the short story.
Short stories offer a diverse array of authors, topics, genres and lengths. The plots are wrapped up within a few pages and are easily reread for future pleasure. The problem, of course, is finding them. Most commonly, contemporary short stories can be found in the large selection of literary magazines that exist on newsstands or on the internet and spread far and wide. There are yearly anthologies as well, but that may not be enough to satiate any voracious reader for long. So, what to do?
The short stories of the 20th and early 21st centuries are easily accessible for today’s readers. There are many publications and prolific authors whose work has been widely…
