Quote of the Day | 0721
Novels are easier to read.
People settle into them. You don’t have to be quite so attentive. People are always asking me why more people don’t read short stories, given the press of time we all experience now. It would seem to be the logical form for our culture. And I think the reason is exactly the reason people don’t read poems. Because short stories are very demanding in their way. You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels. They don’t have clear endings; they don’t tell you everything; they work much more through implication. So a lot of people will read a story by Chekhov or Maupassant or Raymond Carver or Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant and they’ll wonder, “Well, what happens then?” They want you to shut the show down the way you do with a novel. And the best short story writers don’t work that way.
Tobias Wolff, ‘The Salon Interview’
[x]#6072 fan dinsdag 21 juli 2009 @ 01:00:00
