Short is beautiful

On the Writers' Guild website, Elizabeth Baines charts the return of the short story.

Stories need to be read in a different way from novels, with a different, more studied kind of concentration. For this reason I think it’s a mistake – one I admit I made myself when I was publishing the short story magazine Metropolitan – to try and sell short stories as suitable for a rushed age. Most short story authors I have talked to recently believe that it’s that very rushed nature of our contemporary world, along with the superficiality of its commercial orientation, which has militated against the kind of focused attention which it takes to both write a story and to appreciate it as a reader.