"In fact, the opposite is the case. You can’t read a short story properly online. Every word counts...."

“In fact, the opposite is the case. You can’t read a short story properly online. Every word counts. You can’t drift. You have to surrender to “a beginning, a middle and end” that takes you “across the universe and back”, as Gaiman puts it. For all his joy in the tumble of Twitter and Google, these stories also express his ability to do the obverse – to switch off and concentrate. They demand all of your attention, something that our one-click world cries out to you never to give. So, to read a short story is a countercultural act, a little rebellion. The genre is at its best when it deals with discomfort, with feelings and people you don’t want to think about: the gaze in the street that you try to avoid, the noise in the night you pretend not to hear. That’s why it’s important – more so now than ever.”

- Frank Cottrell Boyce on the stop-what-you’re-doing-and-read power of neil-gaiman's new collection of short stories, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances. (via newstatesman)