SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: November 30, 2021] “In Praise of the Short Story”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my seventh time reading the Calendar. The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.
As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check the link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.
Manguel introduces this set with a love letter to the short story.
For absurd commercial reasons, publishers have decreed that short stories don’t sell…yet more than ever writers continue to write stories and readers continue to read them.
He continues that we are told that bigger is better. A huge novel much better than a tiny story. But he offers this quote from William James: : Anybody can have a statue; but a statuette–that indeed is immortality.”
He also explains that for this collection he decided to choose a method as good and arbitrary as any other to select these 25 stories: choose stories from twenty-five different countries “(knowing that many a unicorn and mermaid would be left behind).”
In talking about his favorite short stories, he mentions Augusto Monterroso’s microfictions and includes this one (in its entirety): “When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”
I’m pretty excited about the variety of stories in this collection–I enjoy getting exposed to authors I’m unfamiliar with.
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