Short Stories

One great thing about short stories is how quickly they can ruin your life. Sounds pretty dark, but maybe you start reading one over lunch break and, if its the right one, maybe that peanut butter cup you brought for dessert even has a chance to finish its melting shape-shift into that sugary cement, the whole world around you has been destroyed and rebuilt, and nothing is quite the same again.

This happens whether you like it or not. Great stories practice this violent beauty on you in a variety of ways: some by making a absurd world familiar (or vice versa) some with a slow burn, some with a voice that colonizes your thoughts. Some do it silently, sometimes without you even noticing it, and some do it with high wire acts of imagination or intellect that eventually make you a breathless witness.

Tastes differ, of course, and it can be confusing spotting the small boat on a great story on a wide sea of fiction.