I don't agree with everything the author of this post says -- I believe that short stories are brilliant in their own right, and consider myself privileged to have publicized two extraordinary collections thus far in my career, Bulletproof Girl, by Quinn Dalton, and Second Language, by Ronna Wineberg -- the thing I like best is the spectrum that Soundtrack to the Motion Picture envisions, comparing the depths of the reader's involvement with types of fiction to variegations of love:
An short story anthology is a cocktail party -- some guests are enchanting & dynamic, others are insufferable bores, there's usually one or two shining stars that everyone orbits, and someone who gets too embarrassingly drunk & has to be called a cab. But the party eventually ends, and much of what was said -- witty or political or whatever -- is slight, forgetful ephemera.
And a collection of short stories by one author is like a series of one-off blind dates (or speed-dates), a sporadic series of IM sessions. It's the honeymoon phase of a relationship -- everything said is fascinating, both parties pounce on every coincidence and confuse it with fate, everything is only the promise of more fun, and more of the same forever and ever. A short story needs not sustain a tone, or an idea, long enough to see past its own nose. Short stories emit white-heat immediacy & urgency that could, in retrospect, be a one-night stand, or a torrid but fleeting affair.
A novel is the promise of a more substantial relationship. It's the party after all the guests have left, and you are left to live there all the time, instead of visit like everyone else. It's moving in & co-habitating with someone. With the prospect that things may continue along this way for a while, and that you hope they might (marriage? children? house with a yard?). A novel (and novelist's body of work) is a long-term investment. It's a blue-chip stock, not a day trade.
My only question, though: what then, of poems, and poets, and their no-doubt short romances? Do they just flash by in the blink of an eye...
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