When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
Every decade, we get a stunning collection of dynamic, heartbreaking short stories. In the past, those collections came from Barry Hannah, Mark Richard, and Thom Jones.
I'm only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else they are books that have an overall structure but are composed of various texts.
'The Blade Itself' was my first book. Probably I should've tried a few short stories first, but for some reason I decided to begin with Everest.
Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.
I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.
A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.
Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile.
Had Elizabeth Bennet known how wildly Darcy's heart beat for her, 'Pride and Prejudice' would barely have made it into a short story. Their torturously slow-burning romance is a classic example of how men and women still struggle to communicate the m...
Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it's over, and that's kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two.
Written by the ancient Chinese philosopher of the same name, the 'Zhuangzi' is one long perplexing puzzle of a rambling collection of enigmatic short stories. It's a strange feeling to laugh at a joke written by someone in the 4th century B.C.
After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.
Running has always been hard for me, as I have abnormally short legs and tiny feet. I am Bigfoot’s nemesis. And I’ll be the first to tell you I’ll be the last to tell you I want to go running.
Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, des...
It is natural to speak of hymns as "poems," indiscriminately, for they have the same structure. But a hymn is not necessarily a poem, while a poem that can be sung as a hymn is something more than a poem. Imagination makes poems; devotion makes hymns...
Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: '...
It is not in vain that the strategic criterion of placing only short runs on the market prevails in order simultaneously to create a feeling of scarcity and avoid an appearance of uniformity, both of which encourage consumer demand. This is such a po...
It is the illusion of magic and the magic of illusion that we are primarily interested in- not the privy tricks or the key to the secrets themselves. We seek the bafflement, the contradictions, the amusements, and the innumerable emotions that ripple...
Sometimes a short cut is just a short cut to disaster.
The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who became his wife and left her money to him is a very curious story. It is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Winesburg. In the fall one walks in ...
