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.
There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?
Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing
Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely
All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.
One of my biggest peeves is when the writer hasn't given you enough information to figure everything out. You should be able to go back to the beginning of 'Gone Girl,' after you've already read it and you know everything, and say, 'Check - check - yes, she gave us that information.'
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.
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