When a short story is successful, a reader ends it feeling certain that it could not have been a novel or novella; feeling certain that, though it might have been better if it were a bit longer, it should not have been more than a page or two longer than it is. One of the pleasures of reading a short story lies in beginning … Continue reading 114. (Joy Williams)
Eudora Welty is as inaccessible a writer of short fiction as any. Like Hawthorne, she writes short stories that sit at a distance from realism. It is not the supernatural, per se, that sets her stories apart from realism; it is instead their being stubbornly captivated by a gravitational pull towards allegory. In the hands of Hawthorne and Welty, the short story forces before the … Continue reading 61. (Eudora Welty)
The short story is the most resistant of literary puzzles: what it is, or what it does, or why people write them at all seem, to me, questions that deserve more of an answer than “what is a poem?” or “what is a novel?” though perhaps the best way to answer these questions would be the same way to answer the questions about the novel … Continue reading 60. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Irony, so common, sets her apart. She is ironic without archness, without super-subtlety, without glib or coy superiority, without contempt, without cynicism, even without skepticism, and without self-satisfaction. Her irony does not flash out from of history’s tragedies; neither does it peek from life’s more curious byways. It is neither tragic nor comic. Even accepting that irony is everywhere in literature, hers is unlike that … Continue reading 53. (Flannery O’Connor)
V.S. Pritchett, introducing his edition of the Oxford Book of Short Stories, admits that he admires D.H. Lawrence most as a master of that form–short narrative–rather than as a novelist or poet ( a claim he makes elsewhere, in his 1980 review of a Lawrence biography for the NYRB). For fine criticism of the stories, we can turn to R.P. Blackmur–an ironic place to look, since … Continue reading 5. (D.H. Lawrence)
