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August 24, 2005
In Britain, size matters
The British attitude to the short story - that it is somehow lesser, a practice space for the real thing, which is, of course, the novel; that you can perhaps start out writing a collection of stories, but you have somehow failed if you don't graduate to a minimum of 200 pages - has always baffled me. I cannot comprehend the underlying assumption that a particular kind of stamina is somehow better, of more value. It's like privileging the marathon, or the 1,500m, over the 100m.After citing several examples of the form, Edemariam goes on to write: "I know these are North American examples, but it is there where, as (Dave) Eggers points out in his introduction to The Best of McSweeney's Volume I, there 'are probably over a hundred high-quality literary journals,' that the short story is truly alive; disdain for the form is a British phenomenon."
Who knew we had it so good?
- C. Max Magee @ 7:57 AM ~
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