A Case for Short Stories

When people think of “literature”, they think of one of two things. One: glasses, blanket, cup of tea, rain pattering incessantly, a huge novel in your lap, so absorbing, you no longer register the sound or fury of the rain. Separate worlds dreamed and lived through. Two: pompous assholes reciting a line from the same ten poems by Shakespeare or T.S.Eliot or Rilke every chance they get (or don't get). When people think of “literature”, they first either think of novels or poetry. 

If you couldn’t tell by the title, I wanna make a case for the short story as a quintessential literary form, maybe one that is even cooler and more interesting than all the others. 

First, let me introduce a new image. You, toiling all day at work or at university, the haze of routine swirling around you, dragging your steps back home. You’re too tired for anything that requires much focus. You drink a glass of water and collapse on the nearest couch (probably your only one if you’re a student). In this vision, you grab a short story collection, and read the first story that your fingers stumble upon. It takes you 10, maybe 15 minutes. The haze clears. You’ve wrenched yourself briefly into a separate world so total it charges you, animates you. 

Try the same with a novel, and you’ll end up with a fragment of a whole story, often nothing cathartic or thought-provoking in a 15-minute stretch of reading. Try the same with a poem, and your eyes will start grabbing at your temples, gaze runny like eggs as you try to peel the layers of meaning off the text stubbornly still in front of you. 

Edgar Allan Poe had a famous essay where he called the short story a superior literary form because it could be “read in one sitting”. This fact becomes much more relevant in modern times. Attention spans decreasing, work bleeding into home life, taking away personal time, etc. etc… All these factors make the short story perfect for people who want to experience the catharsis and subtle profundity of literature without having to invest much time in it. The key here is that the time mulling over a short story, thinking about it afterwards is as valuable and insightful, at least for me, as the act of reading it is. That’s something you can do without much free time. 

I also can’t avoid mentioning the insane creativity that the short story form allows for. I recently went to the Rotterdam University Library and picked up a random short story collection. I found one by Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize and Booker Prize winner. Her novel The Conservationist is brilliant, but serious and difficult to digest. The first three stories of the collection were about: Beethoven being 1/16th black, the narrator being a tapeworm, and a hallucination of famous dead people. Point is: short stories can be canvasses for the craziest ideas an author has that would not work if they dragged on into long novel format. For writers seeking inspiration, or just anyone seeking to expand their perception of what is possible on the page, short stories are the way to go. 

There are short story podcasts, like Ursa Short Fiction, that I can listen to, finishing a short story on a round trip to uni and back, and having something to think about for days afterwards. There are fun, accessible short stories, short stories about parts of the human experience no-one has written about before, crazy creative short stories. It feels like they allow for greater variety. There’s something there to be said about slipping out from the creative constraints of the literary market - a weird, super-original novel is more of a risk to a publisher than an insane short story, and thus weird short stories are probably more likely to be available. There is something for everyone in the short story, a form perfect for modern times. 

I wanna end with some recommendations for my favorite short story collections to get you started: 

• If you want mind-blowing, I recommend J.G. Ballard’s collections of short fiction. 

• If you want classically masterful, I recommend Charles D’Ambrosio’s “Dead Fish Museum”, or Jennifer Eagan’s “Emerald City and Other Stories” (Also in the Rotterdam uni library). 

• For a balance of cool and insane and masterful, try “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and other stories” by Jamil Jan Kochai. 

• Finally, for the really unpinnable and strange, try Clarice Lispector’s or Julio Cortázar’s stuff (the latter a real classic).