The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.
It's really important to me not to be a snob about age division or about genre or whatever. The story needs to be what the story needs to be.
The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.
The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.
I often think of the novel as a form that celebrates social groups, and the short story being a form that is capable of celebrating an individual or a sort of insular little pair of people.
It's a very, very fascinating story for me, cause it's about a man who's been doing bad; bad things. And he's a father of four children in parochial school, he's a lieutenant of detectives, but he's in conflict with himself and with trying to do what's right.
I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.
I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.
The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up in the crucible of their days and certainly not always - if ever - capable of articulating their condition.
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.