Short Shorts

Rating:
Summary: A celebration of a fascinating literary genre
Review: "Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories" is edited by Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe. With a copyright date of 1982, this is, I believe, one of the granddaddies of all the short short anthologies. This book brings together 38 stories that range in length from barely 2 to 8 pages. It's truly international in scope, with authors from Russia, Germany, Switzerland, the U.S., Zimbabwe, Guatemala, and other countries. The stories chosen also span the 19th and 20th centuries, and cover a wide range of topics: religion, war, family, crime, magic, death, censorship, and more. A number of Nobel Prize winners are included among the chosen authors.

In the Introduction, Irving Howe discusses the short short story, speculating that it is "a separate literary genre, or subgenre." He discusses differences between the short story and the short short. My only complaint is that Howe commits what I consider the cardinal sin of anthology introductions: he reveals too much about the content of some of the tales, thus threatening to spoil the readers' enjoyment. Perhaps he should have divided his material into an introduction and an afterword.

I'd like to mention some of the many highlights in this fine anthology. "The Three Hermits," by Leo Tolstoy: a fable-like story with a theological aspect. "The Third Bank of the River," by Joao Guimaraes Rosa: a haunting father/son tale about a family affected by one member's bizarre behavior. "The Bathhouse," by Mikhail Zoschenko: a humorous vignette that focuses on little indignities and annoyances of life. "The Use of Force," by William Carlos Williams: a vividly written story about a house call that taxes a doctor's bedside manner. "The Blue Bouquet," by Octavio Paz: a truly disturbing horror story. And "The Laugher," by Heinrich Boll: a first person narrative by a man employed as a professional laugher.

This powerful and fascinating anthology successfully champions the short short as a vital, flexible, and intriguing literary genre. The stories show a great variety in tone and setting. I highly recommend this book for both literature courses and for individual reading.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Anthology of this Challenging, Unique Genre
Review: An excellent short short story that is less than 2500 words but more likely around 1500 words or less (as all of the stories in this collection are) is one of the most difficult things in the world to write.
Here, we have a collection of masterpieces of the short-short. While there is not time for character development, these stories are substantive masterpieces, usually boiling down to a single, profoundly revealing action.
Franz Kafka and Leo Tolstoy are just two of the great writers represented here. All of the stories are great. Most of the authors respresented are famous for longer works.
The odd events that occur in these stories stay with the reader, for good.
These short-short stories are very poetic, though they are not musical, or lyrical, or possessed of song, in any substantive way. They are more fiction than poetry, but they have much poetry in them. They are exquisite, little, literary jewels.
I highly recommend this book to everybody.

Rating:
Summary: Not artistically representing for having too many translated
Review: Disappointing since 1/3 of the book is dedicated to foreign authors' translated versions. In the sense of making an anthology of super-short, the selection might come directly from original English instead of any translated, seemingly storytelling-only stories since the brightness of diction is far more important than a "short-short" story itself.

Rating:
Summary: Highs & lows of the Shorts anthology
Review: Less is more in this anthology of short stories edited by Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe. In this book the couple of editors gave more attention to the size of the texts rather than its content. While on one hand it is an interesting attempt, on the other is to reductionism to pick great writers' works only because of its size.

There are stories from writers everywhere, some very very famous, others not so much, but all texts are no longer than ten pages, some are really short. Using such device, the editors managed to get an interesting sample of every writer -- which may tease the reader to search for more long and complex texts from an author s/he liked.

Like Mr. Howe states in the introduction, "the usual short stories cannot have a complex plot". And this is the rule for the selected texts in this volume. However it doesn't mean that the shorts are simplistic or even easy. Some of them, like Jorge Luis Borges's, Joyce's, Tolstoy's, Guimarães Rosa's among others are more complex and difficult to read than a whole novel by another writer.

But while we have great texts to discover, there are also some flops --or minor works from great writers -- that are grouped in this book only to make the book longer --at least this was the feeling I got after reading all of them. Not that this strategy is a problem, but not all the shorts keep up the same high level.

All in all, this is a good beginning to find 'new' writers, to discover styles and to see how one great author can gamble with the size and format of his/her text --and most of them still win. Not many people are able to do that.