They did not induce the usual droopy eyes and heavy neck that reading in general unfortunately tends to cause me. I read these stories wide-eyed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. After finishing the compilation, I knew I preferred the puncture wounds of a lethal short story to the blunt force trauma of a novel. The stories in the 2016 edition of the BASS series haunted and dazed me and left my mind reeling. As a newcomer to the BASS series and a first-time reader of short stories in general, I was unprepared for what came ahead. Díaz does a fine job as a literary hype man in his introduction, but what really confirms his conviction that the short story form remains a formidable player in the literary game is his selection of stories. It’s up to the reader to believe the words of the guest editor. Variants of this vindication of the short story have no doubt peppered the introductions of all the preceding BASS books in all sorts of pithy and eloquent wordings. … And in the right hands there’s more oomph in a gram of short story than in almost any literary form.īig/little dynamics aside, it seems to Díaz (and to me) that critics should ask not how short stories bewitch readers despite their size, but how they bewitch readers precisely because of it.
If the novel is our culture’s favorite literary form, upon which we heap all our desiccated literary laurels, if the novel is, say, our Jaime Lannister, then the short story is our very own Tyrion: the disdained little brother, the perennial underdog. Amid the contemporary references to Game of Thrones, even Díaz embeds his defense of the form in terms of big versus small: The power imbalance between the big and the little is ineluctable. But as a dedicated reader will tell you, there’s nothing miniature or dollhouse-like about a masterful short story’s effect. For so long short stories have existed under the shadow of novels, as though the novel were the mansion to the short story’s dollhouse. Nor do we extend to the short story the same tolerance we show to the novel. Clearly, we do not extend to the short story our tolerance for tweets displaying these same characteristics. Those who attempt to write short stories know the difficulty of crafting a plot that begins in one’s mind as an intricately carved miniature dollhouse and all too often ends up as a sloppy popsicle-stick bungalow: clumsy, rushed, derivative.
Even in the era of tweet-happy presidents and millimeter-thin phones, the short story genre remains maligned for its seeming incompleteness, its hastiness, its unforgivingness. Two elements which, according to The Best American Short Stories 2016 (BASS) guest editor Junot Díaz, make short stories one of the most impactful literary forms out there.
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