lots of meaning in a short space

As a writer, I like the short story for the challenge it provides in crafting a good one.It's no easy task to say something meaningful in a relatively short time;kind of like patting one's head and rubbing your stomach at the same time.
As a reader,I admit there is something very American about "getting to the point." I like that.Most of us do. We've become a country on the run--- always anxious to get somewhere else.It often doesn't matter where. There is something about movement itself that appeals to us.Europeans(and others) are amazed at how hard we work. I think we play as hard, too.
While I disagree with the modern trend that sends a story that does not begin with action to the slush pile,I can understand it.Poor Faulkner would take a drink and turn in his grave.

Harley, I'll really be interested in your group's response to Olive Kittridge. I read it recently, completed it only because it was a Pulitzer winner.

Andrew: Thanks for the Ford excerpt. What he says about flawed novels feels right to me (without making me second guess what I said, perhaps paradoxically).

Our neighborhood bookstore reading group just met to nominate and select the books for 9 months of reading. Two books with short stories made the cut -- Olive Kittrridge (a novel in linked short stories), and Say You're One of Them (short stories about children in Africa). As long as I've been in that group, this is the first time I've seen short stories nominated. Okay, one's a Pulitzer and the other is an Oprah pick, but is this a resurgence?

I'm glad you enjoyed it, Harley! And thanks for that interview excerpt, Andrew. I definitely can't agree with Geoff. A novel may be long, but that doesn't make it harder. It just makes it a different task. After all, many of our most celebrated poems are quite short -- does that mean they were easy to write? Was Pound's tiny poem "In a Station of the Metro" easy just because it was short? He started with thirty lines and ended with two (aside from the title), not because he wanted to write an easier poem or couldn't sustain an idea, but because the content called out for extreme economy -- the kind of economy that an acclaimed and prolific novelist, a person for whom plots and subplots and elaborate structure and slow-developing ideas come easily, might find impossibly difficult to attain.

Successful writing, I think, is writing that allows content to take on its most appropriate form, whatever that form is. Sometimes it's a novel, sometimes a short story, sometimes a sonnet. Producing successful writing of any kind is plenty hard, hard enough to make it pretty pointless to worry too much about what's harder than what.

Well, I've only read one story in the new Best American (edited by Alice Sebold) but I'm not sure Geoff's popularity contest judgement will play out this time. I think I have the names of a huge number of anthologized people in my computer database (yes, I'm a nut) and half of the authors in this one are new names to me.

Theoretically, the guest editors are supposed to read the stories blind, by the way. How possible that is in reality, I don't know.

Thanks David for that blog article link -- I thoroughly enjoyed it!

From an interview with Richard Ford:
What about the novel compared to short stories?

Well, novels are harder to write and more important if you get them right.

More easy to mess up?

No, short stories are more easy to mess up. Novels are very forgiving forms, because they have so many formal elements about them that forgive the other formal elements about them. I mean, whereas with short stories... I mean, a messed-up short story or a short story that’s unsuccessful – it really isn’t a short story. It isn’t really anything.

But a novel can be busted in some way and still be a successful novel. You think about The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. You think about The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. You think about Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald. Those novels all have serious misfeasances in them – all three of them do – and yet, they’re thought of as elegant, wonderful, plausible novels. They get past it because they have many other formal features beside their structure to forgive their structural inadequacies.

I agree with Carol about the 'New Yorker' and 'Best American Short Stories.' I've basically quit reading both (though I usually give the NY stories a column or so to lose me, which they almost always do). It's become pretty clear to me that inclusion in either has more to do with popularity/ability to sell books than with strictly-defined quality.

I disagree that a (good) story is harder to write than a (good) novel. That's not to say that a good novel is necessarily worth more (culturally or artistically or personally) than a good story, just that it's easier for style, atmosphere, ellipsis, and other forms of pretty indirection to carry something that's 15 pages long than it is for the same qualities to carry something the size of a book, where weaknesses are soon exposed. Having spent a fair amount of time writing both, I can say that--and this is only my experience--you have to have a much broader, sturdier, and more abiding artistic vision to pull off a literary novel than to pull off a literary short story. (Please don't take this to mean that I've successfully done either.) It's something like the difference between having a fulfilling first month of a marriage and being fulfillingly married for ten years--do you have what it takes to engage with reality for the long haul? Great short stories don't have to prove an understanding (or advance a philosophy) of reality; they only have to convince you, through various forms of shorthand, that the author has one.

Partly it's my own limitation: time or character or both. I find myself impatiently taking big gulps of novels, where with short stories I slow down and taste. Also what Carol said -- the knock-out punch. Also, the period after reading a good story where you can bring something back to your world is more frequent with short stories. Oh yeah, and the opportunity to be touched by the minds of so many more and different writers. Am I talking about speed dating here? I hope not.

Hey -- for those of you who might be interested, I just wrote a guest post for a blog about writing, and the theme of the post is short stories -- specifically, why some people should write (and read) them instead of novels!

Here's the link:
http://christinabakerkline.wordpress.com...

I admire a good short story even more than I do a good novel. I think they're harder. I also think they can deliver a clean knock-out punch in a way a novel usually cannot.

I'm picky about short stories, though. I usually have a hard time getting through a whole collection by one author, but I also tend to be annoyed by about 25-40% of the picks in any given "Best Short Stories" collection. I faithfully read all the short stories in The New Yorker, but I like even fewer of those.

For me it's the author's ability to write succinctly. I imagine it is difficutlt to develop an idea in a limited amount of space, versus the unlimited volume available when writing a novel.

Here's another question: for those of you who love short stories a lot in a literary era when novels are much more widely read, what is it about the short story that especially appeals to you? What does it offer that a novel can't or usually doesn't?