I’ve just finished a short story course with Australian writer, Patrick Holland, and throughout I read some amazing stories. I’ve always had a fondness for the short story, perhaps because, they are distilled. They stay with me, long after I’ve finished them. They are kinder to the memory than the novel. During the course we read from Ernest Hemingway, Anton Chekov, Margaret Atwood, Rudyard Kipling, Jorge Luis Borges, Tobias Wolff, Graham Greene, Patrick Holland, Yasunari Kawabata and Raymond Chandler and it was wonderful. Whether it was the sense of place in works like Greene’s, Across the Bridge, the use of dialogue and sparseness in Hemingway’s, A Clean Well-Lighted Place or the dark playfulness of Wolffe’s, Bullet in the Brain, there is vividness to the short story. It feels indulgent to curl up and read one on a Sunday afternoon in its entirety and know in that time the author is telling us something complete within itself. It’s like a whisper in ear and we can be transported back sometimes to when we were children or taken a world away to someplace else all in the blink of an eye. The short story is enigmatic in its ability to transport us and bring us home again still echoing. I have decided I can’t get enough of them.
2014-11-25