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[Ya-ta Boy]

�It was the Freudian disciple Wilhelm Reich who realized that extensive dream analysis was not necessary to uncover a patient�s psyche: anywhere you looked�in actions taken, habits of thought, tone of voice, body language�you would find thee typified self. That about describes the working principle of the short story as practiced by James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway.

�Joyce, who brought the modern short story to perfection, showed us that its point of entry can be quite close in time to its denouement�in other words, that the story may look in on someone�s life as it just happens to reach its moment of inexorable moral definition. Hemingway added to that the technique of composing a story whose suspense derives from the withheld mention of its central problem.

�I have read perhaps 140 stories to make this selection of 21 for the year 2000. Here is the news: the writers of today are drifting away from the classic model of the modern short story. They seem more disposed to the episodic than the epiphanic, and so their stores sometimes point to the earlier model of the tale. Stories in this mode tend to be longer, their points of entry can be quite distant from their denouements, and their central problem is made quite explicit.
�But if the twenty-one outstanding stories in this volume are an indication, the art of the story hardly seems to have suffered. Oddly, the reader discerns a nice sense of freedom in what has to be thought of as a conservative tendency, one that glances back to the nineteenth century. It�s as if some literary shackle has been broken�one made of gold, admittedly, but a shackle nevertheless.�

E. L. Doctorow, Introduction to The Best American Short Stories, 2000

All I have to say is, "HURRAY!"

[Ya-ta Boy]

If you are like me, reading takes the place of watching TV. It always has, but here it's even more true than back home.

However, my high school lit teachers ruined short stories for me and it took being isolated in Taiwan, with only one bookstore with a small selection of English books for me to get back into short stories. (It was much more difficult to find English books in Korea and Taiwan back in '95 than it is now.) I will forever be indebted to Conon Doyle, Somerst Maugham and O Henry for getting me hooked again.

For those not familiar with 'The Best American Short Stories', it's a series started in 1915 (?) where the publisher collects all the short stories published in the US and Canada in a year and selects a hundred or so and then calls in an established writer to make the final selection of about 20 stories.

I have started seeing them in bookstores recently, bought one and was wowed by the consistent quality. I ended up buying the eight volumes (1999-2006) available. That's about 2,000 pages of quality writing. For nights when I'm not up to a novel but want an hour or so of good entertainment, they fit the bill.

And I love the idea that the 20th Century style of short story writing is changing. (And yes, I still think cutting down a tree to print anything by Chekhov is a double insult to the tree--that's for the snob who looks down on my beloved O Henry.)