Rediscovering the (American) Short Story

Back into the world of blogging after a few years of not publishing and this time starting with something that should be easy – the short story.

Though probably more accurate to say something that should be short, because some of them are definitely not easy, and this is what I’m trying to work through over the next few weeks, to organise my thoughts on fiction, short fiction, and to try and begin to recapture my sense of aesthetic.

So this is the first story in The Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford.

43 stories covering 50 years.

An ecletic mix of styles, lengths and authorial voices, tied together by, well, according to Ford in the introduction, nothing much. A story, he says, might come about for three reasons:

• it’s all the writer has the concentration for
• to satisfy a “rage for order”
• to deliver a moral lesson

But ultimately he comes to the conclusion that they are all different and the ones in the volume are “the stories I’ve included are finally simply ones I like”.

So I’m looking forward to spending the next few weeks having a conversation with myself comparing what he likes with what I like, maybe even discovering how to put in words what I like.