The separation of a book lover from his books is a sorry sight. Unfortunately, college students often feel too busy for any reading beyond their course syllabi. Having suffered this type of withdrawal myself, I’d like to propose a solution: the vastly underappreciated short story.
One should never forget the importance of judging quality over quantity. Short stories often prove capable of holding real substance. The most recent Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Canadian author Alice Munro, a short story guru. Munro has a reputation for putting entire lifetimes into only two dozen pages.
“The novel is so much considered the most significant form for literary prose that it’s become almost a cliché to praise Munro by saying that her stories fit entire novels into a handful of pages,” English Prof. Victoria Olwell said.
Rather than judging a book by its word count, Olwell said short stories allow the reader to appreciate the work’s “compression and narrative rhythms,” all consumed in the time it takes to watch the latest episode of “Scandal.” Put the remote away and try something new.
Besides Munro, Olwell recommends the collections of William Faulkner, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway and Nadine Gordimer’s — or even a subscription to The New Yorker.
“We are readers whose lives are short — and our lives can change in an instant,” English faculty member Ashley Faulkner said. “Short stories accommodate and remind us of all that, showing us characters in dramatic encounters that can teach us new ways to live out our own limited time.”
Among Ashley Faulkner’s “not-to-be-missed” reads are Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “Manuscript Found in a Bottle,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” W.B. Yeats’s “Out of the Rose,” and, as she said, “absolutely anything by Zora Neale Hurston.”
Assoc. English Prof. Sydney Blair, who teaches “Modern American Story,” attests to the merits of short stories. “In less time than it takes to watch a mediocre movie or catch up on Facebook and Twitter — or read a novel, a moving experience of an altogether different sort — you’re invited to bring your full attention and imagination to what’s on the page and to lose yourself there” she said. “In that intimate hour, reader and writer are united in a brief, thrilling adventure, the pleasure and power of which is limited only by your willingness to dive in and be undone by it.”
Blair recommends James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” Grace Paley’s “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,” ZZ Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” and Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.”
But beware of getting sucked into the worlds these stories create — Assoc. English Prof. Victor Luftig said short stories are often some of an author’s best works.
“Short fiction spares nothing: ‘Dubliners’ is the hardest book [James] Joyce ever wrote, and [Joyce Carol] Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ is way scarier than ‘Dracula,’” he said. “The busy student who wants to sneak in a story here and there had better watch out —the stuff is habit-forming: a little Hemingway or Hurston and the next thing you know your homework’s all to heck.”
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