![]() ![]() I think you’ll like Winesburg, Ohio, she said. Nobody picked Sherwood Anderson, she said. ![]() Salinger but was home sick the day selections were made and when I returned to school, the teacher told me too many people had already picked Fitzgerald and Salinger. We’d been instructed to select an American writer as the subject of the first real research paper any of us would write. I bungled onto the form by accident my junior year of high school. Maybe that’s why I have long been a particularly avid fan of story cycles or collections of linked stories or novels-in-stories-call them by whatever name you like-those books comprised of individual stand-alone short stories, with all the intensity that the form entails, but featuring recurring characters and settings and themes in such a way that the book achieves a kind of aggregate, novelistic force, a collection, in other words, that adds up to something even more potent than the power of its component parts. I’m one of those readers myself some days. I sympathize with those readers who prefer to lose themselves in a work of fiction for a longer haul, who prefer cumulative power to suddenness of effect. I’m not making the claim that one form is better or more meaningful than the other. ![]() The impact of a novel, on the other hand, even a great novel, is almost always more diffuse. Here’s what I love about short stories: A good one a takes a novel’s worth of emotional complexity, strips away all the fat, and compresses what’s left into a much more confined space, which can make for a reading experience that’s hard to match in terms of its intensity. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |