There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.
Interpretation
Short stories offer distinct experiences that should be appreciated individually rather than in succession.
Mavis Gallant emphasizes the unique nature of short stories, suggesting that each story provides a standalone experience that deserves focused attention. Rather than treating them as parts of a continuous narrative, readers are encouraged to savor each story independently, allowing for reflection and a deeper connection to the distinct themes and characters within.
In practice
During a book club meeting to discuss the value of short stories in literature.
No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of sadness, looking around for them, as if the half-empty cafe were a place I had once come to with friends who had all moved away.
All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.
Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.
I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.
There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.
The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles - for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are.
'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.
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