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| Hearsay: |
Short stories, says one Guardian blogger, don’t belong in short story collections. They’re best when found on there own, shivering in the cold hinterlands of a magazine.
Blame my gnat-like attention span if you like, but I don’t believe that short stories belong in collections. Bundling them together in volumes is convenient for publishers because they can treat them more or less like novels, but it doesn’t do much for the fictions themselves, especially if there’s only one author involved. It’s too easy to see common themes and distinctions get lost in the crowd. A short story works best published in a magazine or newspaper, where it can stand alone in contrast to the writing around it; putting them in collections is a waste.
I don’t know about this. I don’t usually read collections of short stories from cover to cover anyway. I cherry pick and abandon and return several times over several months. It’s true that it’s only the very occasional collection that ropes me in to read straight through, but I don’t know that they’re meant to be read that way anyway.
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June 22nd, 2007 at 11:21 am
“They’re best when found on there [sic] own, shivering in the cold hinterlands of a magazine.”
DUDE!
/copy editor
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:49 am
Doh!
June 22nd, 2007 at 1:00 pm
George: Who Do You Think You Are? … No, I didn’t mean that as a confrontational question, I was simply suggesting the title of a short-story collection that might arguably be “meant” to be read from start to finish.
June 22nd, 2007 at 7:09 pm
“their own” ?
June 23rd, 2007 at 5:55 am
I arranged the stories in my collection carefully, trying to think about tempo, flavour, contrast and themes. But I can’t tell people to read them in order — the book’s out of my hands in that way, ya know?
Ninja, be warned: read my novels the way they’re mapped, or a star may lodge in your neck when next you order a dark roast.
June 23rd, 2007 at 7:49 am
She means it folks. I live in fear daily.
June 23rd, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Reading a collection by a single author is a great way to get perspective on his/her work, because you can quickly see his/her limits as a writer. The story that you originally came across in the “cold hinterlands” of a magazine may no longer appear so special, in the context of the author’s other stories. (George Saunders’ *Civilwarland in Bad Decline* is a good example of this. As I recall, he set each of the stories in historical theme parks over and over, with no variation in tone. This grew quickly tiresome and robbed the first story in this vein of its charm, and inevitably casts a pall over my estimate of his abilities.) Alternatively, in reading a collection you may realize that the story you originally read on its own is the best of the lot, and why.
Then you’ve got not-to-be-missed anthologies like Denis Johnson’s *Jesus’ Son,* or Lisa Moore’s *Open,* whose collected stories may appear initially to suffer from sameness, but which linger buzzing in your brain for weeks until you finally give in and read them, all of them, completely in thrall … If you’d only read one of the stories, rather than the collection, you’d lose out.