Short Story

I INTRODUCTION

Short Story, fictional work depicting one character's inner conflict or conflict with others, usually having one thematic focus. Short stories generally produce a single, focused emotional and intellectual response in the reader. Novels, by contrast, usually depict conflicts among many characters developed through a variety of episodes, stimulating a complexity of responses in the reader. The short story form ranges from “short shorts,” which run in length from a sentence to four pages, to novellas that can easily be 100 pages long and exhibit characteristics of both the short story and the novel. Because some works straddle the definitional lines of these three forms of fiction—short story, novella, and novel—the terms should be regarded as approximate rather than absolute.

Distinctions should be made between short tales and the modern short story as it is usually regarded. Short tales go back to the origins of human speech, and some were written down by the Egyptians as long ago as 2000 bc. They usually dramatize a simple subject and theme and emphasize narrative over characterization; the opposite is true of the modern short story, where characterization, mood, style, and language are often more important than the narrative itself. Distinctions should also be made between commercial and literary fiction within the short story genre. From O. Henry to Stephen King, commercial short fiction has traditionally featured predictable plot formulas, stock characters and conflicts, and superficial treatment of themes. Literary short fiction employs complex techniques to depict the often-unresolvable dilemmas of the human predicament.

II ELEMENTS OF THE SHORT STORY

The basic elements of the short story include setting (time and place), conflict, character, and theme. Most stories are set in present day, but settings of place vary from rural to urban and exotic to mundane. The reader follows the main character (or protagonist) in a conflict with another character (or antagonist) or in an internal conflict with some antagonistic psychological or spiritual force. Characters range from familiar stereotypes, such as the aggressive businessman and the lonely housewife, to archetypal characters, such as the rebel, the scapegoat, the alter ego, and those engaged in some sort of search.

The subject of a short story is often mistaken for its theme. Common subjects for modern short fiction include race, ethnic status, gender, class, and social issues such as poverty, drugs, violence, and divorce. These subjects allow the writer to comment upon the larger theme that is the heart of the fictional work. Some of the major themes of 20th-century short stories, as well as longer forms of fiction, are human isolation, alienation, and personal trauma, such as anxiety; love and hate; male-female relationships; family and the conflict of generations; initiation from innocence to experience; friendship and brotherhood; illusion and reality; self-delusion and self-discovery; the individual in conflict with society's institutions; mortality; spiritual struggles; and even the relationship between life and art.

III ART OF THE SHORT STORY

The art of the short story employs the techniques of point of view, style, plot and structure, and a wide range of devices that stimulate emotional, imaginative, and intellectual responses in the reader. The writer's choice and control of these techniques determines the reader's overall experience.

A Point of View

The three basic point-of-view techniques are omniscient (the all-knowing author narrates), first person (the author lets one of his characters narrate), and central intelligence (the author filters the narrative through the perceptions of a single character). A seldom-used point-of-view technique is the objective (the author poses as a purely objective observer, never giving the reader access to a character's thoughts), as in “The Secret Room” (1962) by French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, in which the author grimly describes a painting that depicts a murder.

American expatriate writer Henry James developed a number of theories about fiction that influenced generations of short-story writers, including Irish writer James Joyce, British short-story specialist Katherine Mansfield, and Americans John O'Hara, Katherine Anne Porter, John Updike, and John Cheever. In “The Art of Fiction,” a magazine article published in 1884, James described a new type of point of view, third-person central intelligence, in which all the elements of a story are filtered through the perceptions, emotions, imagination, and thoughts of the main character. This view conveys a sense of immediacy and psychological realism, as in James's own brilliant story, “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903). Joyce's innovations with point of view and style helped change the course of literature in the 20th century with a single book of short stories, Dubliners (1914). These stories offer painfully truthful representations of life in Joyce's native city using a technique from painting called impressionism, which conveys a fleeting emotional or intellectual perception of the world.

Among early forms of first-person point-of-view narration are epistolary (letters), diary, and memoir (another first-person format—the journal entry—is relatively recent). In the 1879 story “A Bundle of Letters,” Henry James experimented with the epistolary point of view by presenting the story through a series of letters written by six persons living in a French boarding house. Interior monologue (author focuses on a character's thoughts) and dramatic monologue (author lets the character speak to one or more identified or unidentified listeners) are other forms of first-person point of view, although these are not very common. The first-person narrator is usually identified but can be anonymous, and even ambiguous as to gender, as in the story “Termitary” (1974) by South African writer Nadine Gordimer. Usually a single character narrates, but sometimes there are as many as ten (as in “Just Like a Tree” by Ernest Gaines, 1962), or even nonhuman characters (as in Walter Van Tilburg Clark's “Hook,” 1941). Readers often mistake the statements of a first-person narrator for those of the author, who frequently creates an unreliable narrator with ironic results.

B Style

Style is the author's careful choice of words and arrangement of words, sentences, and paragraphs to produce a specific effect on the reader. An author's style evolves out of the chosen point-of-view technique. The omniscient point of view produces a relatively complex style; the first-person point of view results in a simple style if it is recorded as “spoken,” more complex if written; and central intelligence generates a style that typically is slightly elevated above the intelligence level of the focal character. The simple, economical style of American Ernest Hemingway and his selection of images reveal subtle shifts in his characters' psychological states. Hemingway's style was particularly effective first-person narration, as in the famous opening paragraph of the 1927 story “In Another Country”:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

C Plot and Structure

There is a wide range of plot forms and structures found in the short story. A traditional plot has a beginning (introduction of the problem), middle (development of the problem), and an end (resolution of the problem). Some writers venture into less predictable plots, such as Canadian Margaret Atwood in her “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” (1983) which is seemingly plotless but deliberately divided into 13 brief episodes. Some authors complicate the structure of their plots with the use of flashbacks and flash-forwards; with a frame that encloses the story (a story within a story); or with subplots (secondary storylines) or double plots (two or more equally important narratives progressing simultaneously, usually converging at the end). Among other devices that enhance plot structure are foreshadowing, reversals of fortune, digressions, abrupt transitions, and juxtapositions of contrasting characters or settings.

Deliberate ambiguity (open-endedness), as opposed to unambiguous resolutions (closed-endedness), is a plot feature of many modern stories. The surprise endings of French author Guy de Maupassant, as in his 1884 story “The Necklace,” influenced many commercial writers but also some literary ones. At the turn of the century, American author O. Henry became famous for his paradoxical style and surprise endings, such as in “A Gift of the Magi” (1905). American writer William Faulkner used the surprise ending to complex and serious effect in “A Rose for Emily” (1931).

D Devices

Writers employ a wide range of rhetorical devices for contrast and emphasis, including paradox, metaphor, patterns of imagery, repeated motifs, symbolism, and irony. The power of Katherine Anne Porter's “Flowering Judas” (1930) derives in part from her overt use of symbolism. Irony provides the reader with a contrast between reality and the fallibility of human perception, which is at the heart of most modern fiction. American writer Flannery O'Connor is a master of irony, as in the story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953) in which a manipulative grandmother imposes her will on a situation, with the ironic result that she and her family are killed by escaped convicts.

IV STORY TYPES

Among the ways of looking at the subjects, themes, and art of the short story is to review the astonishing range and varieties of types of stories. These include tales, fantasies, humor and satire, character studies, confession, biography, history, education, religion, and local color types.

The ancient form of the tale can retain its power when used for the modern short story, as in “The She-Wolf” (1880) by Italian writer Giovanni Verga and “Mrs. Li's Hair,” by Chinese writer Yeh Shao-Chun. Fantasy stories often combine the old tales tradition with supernatural details, as in the horror fantasy of British writer John Collier (for example, “Bottle Party,” 1939), Irish author Elizabeth Bowen (“The Demon Lover,” 1941), and British writer Saki (“Tobermory,” 1911). Other notable fantasies are “The Sailor-Boy's Tale” (1942) by Danish author Isak Dinesen, “The Door” (1939) by American E. B. White, and “The Celestial Omnibus” (1908) by British writer E. M. Forster.

Another short story type is the humor story, intended to surprise, delight, and entertain; a related type of story, the satire, is designed to attack the ills of society. Some of the more famous humorous tall tales and animal fables were written by Americans Mark Twain (“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” 1865) and Joel Chandler Harris (“The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,” 1894). Modern small towns are the setting for the sardonic humor of stories by American James Thurber (“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” 1942, among many others) and Anglo-American P. G. Wodehouse (the Wooster and Jeeves stories, first appearing in 1914). More serious humor is at work in stories by Americans Eudora Welty (such as “Petrified Man,” 1939) and Dorothy Parker (“The Custard Heart,” 1939). Good examples of writers who produced stories of sober satire include Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler (“Fate of the Baron,” 1923) and American Mary McCarthy (“The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” 1941).

Some short stories are character studies, such as “The Gentleman from San Francisco” (1921) by Russian writer Ivan Bunin. Others are lyrical expressions of a character's emotional state as in “First Love” (originally “Colette,” 1948) by Russian American author Vladimir Nabokov. Another type is the confession story, often done without the narrator's awareness, as in “First Confession” (1944) by Irish writer Frank O'Connor. Still other stories fall under biography or history types, in which a life story or historical event is used for a work of fiction; Welty's “A Still Moment” (a 1943 story about naturalist John James Audubon) falls into both categories.

The education story is set in academia or is concerned with the education of the main character, as in “Of This Time, of That Place” (1944) by American educator Lionel Trilling. The religion story can be either faithful to and supportive of organized religion or critical of it; “God Sees the Truth but Waits” (1872) by Russian Leo Tolstoy is of the faithful variety, but “The Sin of Jesus” (1955) by fellow Russian Isaac Babel is critical and questioning. There are also religious fantasies, such as “The Gardener” (1926) by British author Rudyard Kipling. Most of the stories of Americans Flannery O'Connor and J. F. Powers emerge out of a Catholic religious context.

Local color stories examine the mores and customs of rural and small-town life, sometimes sentimentally, as with the stories of Maria Edgeworth, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and George Washington Cable. The hardboiled first-person narrators of stories set in the big cities are often tough guys, as in James M. Cain's “Dead Man” (1936), the many wisecracking stories of Dashiell Hammett and Damon Runyon, the more serious tough stories of Ring Lardner, and the literary stories of John O'Hara.

The short story was once a common publishing staple; many women's, men's, and family magazines and some newspapers regularly published the form from the 1840s to the 1960s. During this time the most popular mainstream genres were Western, crime, and romance, with science fiction, fantasy, horror, and occult stories a cut below. The most famous short-story writer of this period was O. Henry, just as Stephen King's bestselling stories of the occult are the most well-known today. But literary writers have always published stories within the commercial genres. Such writers include American Edgar Allan Poe (horror), Britons Aldous Huxley and H. G. Wells (science fiction), Briton C. S. Lewis and American Ray Bradbury (science fiction and fantasy), and Americans Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Stephen Crane (Westerns).

The short story cycle, a series of stories unified not by plot but by the reappearance of a central character or characters in the same locale, was developed by Sherwood Anderson in his collection Winesburg, Ohio (1919), by Hemingway in his Nick Adams stories, by Faulkner in his Quentin Compson stories, and by American writer John Steinbeck in The Long Valley (1938). Russian author Mikhail Lermontov focuses on character study in his cycle of stories A Hero of Our Time (1840). A Sportsman's Sketches (1852) is a cycle of tales by Russian Ivan Turgenev in which a huntsman's visits to various rural locales are used to paint a picture of Russian life during that time. The American author J. D. Salinger also produced a story cycle about the adventures of the eccentric Glass family, collected in books such as Nine Stories (1953) and Franny and Zooey (1961).

V CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

The critical approaches that scholars and teachers use to analyze the short story include both traditional and new perspectives, which are sometimes similar in name to the various story types. Among the traditional ways in which scholars can approach and analyze short stories are naturalism (as in “Paul's Case,” 1905, by American Willa Cather), philosophical (“One of the Missing,” 1891, by American Ambrose Bierce), social criticism (“Early Sorrow,” 1929, by German writer Thomas Mann), war (“Patriotism,” 1961, by Japan's Mishima Yukio and American Tim O'Brien's “The Things They Carried,” 1986), impressionistic (Katherine Mansfield's “Bliss,” 1920), and symbolic (“The Destructors,” 1954, by British writer Graham Greene).

Scholars have applied the terms Southern gothic and Southern grotesque to the short stories of the American South, which has a rich literary history. The term Gothic derives from 19th-century novels, mostly by British novelists, that are set in castles or huge houses in an atmosphere of menace and the supernatural. The term grotesque derives from 19th-century French fiction such as Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame and from Sherwood Anderson's characters in Winesburg, Ohio (1919). These settings and characters are often echoed in Southern fiction, with Civil War-era mansions and characters who are physically or mentally grotesque. Faulkner's stories often fall under this category, as they probe the deep recesses of the human psyche while experimenting with fictional forms. In one piece, “That Evening Sun” (1931), Faulkner traces a surface story about a black woman's fear of a violent death and, simultaneously, a submerged psychological process in the young male narrator, who begins with a very complex literary style and lapses into a childlike state as he recalls witnessing his family's reactions to the black woman's behavior.

Intriguing comparisons have sometimes been made between Southern gothic and Southern grotesque stories and the South American style of magic realism, which thrives on the bizarre, mingling realism and fantasy. Writers who have contributed to the development of this mode include Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cort?zar, both from Argentina; Clarice Lispector, a Brazilian writer; and especially Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez of Colombia (“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” 1955).

Some of the critical perspectives of more recent origin are race and ethnicity, gender, class, psychology, politics, and colonialism. The psychological or Freudian perspective might be used to look at “The Interior Castle” (1947) by Jean Stafford; “Going to Meet the Man,” (1965) by American James Baldwin, is about racial identity; “The Rocking Horse Winner,” (1926), by American D. H. Lawrence, mingles fantasy with implications about class. Tillie Olsen and Doris Lessing are only two of many short-story writers whose work is studied from a feminist perspective. A radical political, Marxist perspective might illuminate Frank O'Connor's “Guests of the Nation” (1931) and “The Guest” (1958) by French writer Albert Camus. Topical social problems, such as drugs, violence, and child and spousal abuse, are also often related to race, gender, and class concerns.

In the United States focus upon ethnic short stories began in the 1950s with attention to Jewish life: Saul Bellow (“Looking for Mr. Green,” 1951), Bernard Malamud (“The Magic Barrel,” 1955), and Philip Roth (“Defender of the Faith,” 1960) are all Americans known for their depiction of modern Jewish life in the United States. Polish-born American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, on the other hand, reaches back to Jewish experiences in the old country as well, as in “Gimpel the Fool” (1953). Amos Oz, one of the major Israeli writers, renders the Jewish experience as it interacts with that of Muslims in the story “Nomad and Viper” (1965).

The ethnic perspective in the United States became much sharper in the mid-1960s, with African American writers receiving the most attention. However, there have been brilliant African American writers working since the Civil War (1861-1865), including Charles Chesnutt (“The Wife of His Youth,” 1898), Zora Neal Hurston (“The Gilded Six-Bits,” 1933-1934), Richard Wright (“Almo's a Man,” 1936), and Ralph Ellison (“King of the Bingo Game,” 1944). Important African American voices since the 1960s include Ernest Gaines (“The Sky Is Gray,” 1963), Ann Petry (“The Witness,” 1971), Toni Morrison (“The Bluest Eye,” story which became the 1970 novel), and Alice Walker (“Everyday Use,” 1973). New voices in this tradition continue to emerge.

The proliferation of Chicano and Mexican short stories is a literary phenomenon dating to the 1970s, and includes writers such as Rudolfo Anaya (“The Silence of the Llano,” 1982), Denise Chavez (“Willow Game,” 1980), Raymond Barrio (“The Campesinos”), and Richard Vasquez (“Angelina Sandoval”). Generally, less attention is given to the Native American short story, whose authors are fewer; two of note are Leslie Marmon Silko (“Yellow Woman,” 1974) and Louise Erdrich (“The Red Convertible,” 1984). Asian American writers such as Frank Chin (“Food for All His Dead,” 1962) and Maxine Hong Kingston (“No Name Woman,” 1975) also have emerged as an ethnic focus of study.

Outside the United States, Ireland has a strong tradition of ethnic short stories. Top Irish short-story writers include Se?n O'Faol?in (“Innocence,” 1948), Mary Lavin (“The Great Wave,” 1961), William Trevor (“The Ballroom of Romance,” 1972), and Edna O'Brien (“A Journey,” 1975).

Interest in short stories from the various nations and cultures of Africa has been growing since the late 1950s. Stories from sub-Saharan Africa often combine wild fancy, stark realism, and, often, political commentary. One of the most famous African writers is Nigerian Chinua Achebe, whose “Civil Peace” (1972) depicts the turbulent aftermath of civil war. Doris Lessing, raised in what is now Zimbabwe, is known for her African Stories (1964). From South Africa, Nadine Gordimer has written many disturbing stories of family and race relationships that examine the social and political tensions in her country, as in the collection Something Out There (1984).

VI HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SHORT STORY

A Early Forms

The term short story usually refers to the modern short story, which evolved out of earlier types of fiction in prose and verse. The earliest ancestors of short stories are ancient tales, simple stories that date back to Egyptian writings that are 6,000 years old. Another early form was the fable, such as those of the 6th-century-bc Greek slave Aesop, each with a lesson to be expressed. There were also popular Greek and Asian stories of magical transformations, many with moralistic, satirical, and pure entertainment aims, which were gathered and retold by the Roman writers Ovid and Lucius Apuleius in the first several centuries ad. The book Arabian Nights, a famous collection of stories from Persia, Arabia, India, and Egypt, was compiled over hundreds of years. In it, the beautiful queen Scheherazade entrances her husband, the sultan, with a new tale every evening, leaving the suspenseful ending for the next day so he will not carry out his vow to kill her.

Tales in great variety flourished in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. Romance tales, in prose or verse, were common in France. Many of the best stories of the Middle Ages were preserved and refined in two 14th-century works, The Decameron by Italian prose writer Giovanni Boccaccio and The Canterbury Tales by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. They retold fables, epics about beasts, exempla (religious tales), romances, fabliaux (ribald tales), and legends.

Although these types of tales continued to appear in the centuries that followed, there was a considerable drop in the number published. One source of such stories was the 18th-century English magazine The Spectator, where editors Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele published many semi-fictional sketches of contemporary character types. A popular tale from the early 19th century was “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) by American writer Washington Irving.

B New Literary Genre

When the short story emerged as a genre in the 19th century, it was seen as something totally new and modern. Popular and literary magazines began increasingly to publish short stories that often reflected the dominant literary trends of the day. Up to that point, the primary focus of most stories had been on the plot.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the most important early writers in the shaping of the modern short story. His pieces probed character and the moral significance of events, leaving their physical reality ambiguous. In “Young Goodman Brown” (1846), for example, the dark meetings in the woods of the Salem townspeople are less important than the spiritual changes in Brown himself. In his 1842 review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1837), Edgar Allan Poe became the first writer to define the short story as the attempt to achieve a single, focused effect. Poe demonstrated his artistic theory in “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), manipulating the setting, character, and dialogue to lead the reader inexorably toward the emotional state most appropriate for the “perfect” murder.

During the 19th century a variety of conflicting visions of life emerged that affected the way short-story writers viewed human experience. There is brooding romanticism—seen and heard also in painting, drama, and music—in the short fictions of Heinrich von Kleist (as in “The Earthquake in Chile,” 1810) and E. T. A. Hoffmann (“The Cremona Violin,” 1818) in Germany; Hawthorne (“The Minister's Black Veil,” 1836) and Poe (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” 1839) in the United States; Nikolay Gogol (“The Nose,” 1836), Ivan Turgenev (“Byezhin Meadow,” 1852), and Anton Chekhov (“The Darling,” 1899) in Russia; and Honoré de Balzac (“A Passion in the Desert,” 1830) in France. Traditional tales were put to new uses, such as transmitting the folklore and history of a region or a nation, while other stories frankly and realistically depicted everyday life. Regionalism is mingled with psychological realism in the New England short stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (as in “The White Heron,” 1886), the deep South stories of Kate Chopin (“The Story of an Hour,” 1894), and the New York stories of Edith Wharton (“After Holbein,” 1930).

In 1868 French novelist-playwright Emile Zola began to develop the theory of naturalism in literature, viewing human motivation and behavior as scientifically predictable and determined by heredity and environment. The most highly regarded of the naturalistic writers was Guy de Maupassant, also a Frenchman, who wrote nearly 300 short stories in the last half of the 1800s. Determinism and pessimism form the vision of life expressed in Ambrose Bierce's American Civil War stories (such as “In the Midst of Life,” 1891). A contrasting view was expressed in the symbolist movement in poetry, which mingled universal symbolism with private symbolism to explore psychological states and the potentials of the imagination. Naturalists and symbolists influenced many short-story authors throughout the world. Stephen Crane was one of the first American naturalists but he was also a symbolist (as demonstrated in “The Open Boat,” 1898).

By the early 20th century the short story had matured as a form. The stories of James Joyce (“A Little Cloud,” 1914) and Katherine Mansfield (“Miss Brill,” 1920) show the influence of Chekhov and Henry James but with other elements added, such as impressionism and ironic epiphany. In turn, Joyce and Mansfield were a major influence on the so-called New Yorker magazine story, exemplified in the work of the three Johns, O'Hara (“Do You Like It Here?” 1939), Updike (“Pigeon Feathers,” 1961), and Cheever (“The Swimmer,” 1964). These writers are noted for their dispassionate stories about the ironies of suburban life, reflecting the major shift in American living patterns following World War II (1939-1945). Other major authors of the modern story include Irwin Shaw (“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” 1939), J. D. Salinger (“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” 1948), Anne Beattie (“A Vintage Thunderbird,” 1978), Tobias Wolff (“The Rich Brother,” 1985), Alice Munro (“Meneseteung,” 1989), and Lorrie Moore (“You're Ugly, Too,” 1990).

C Innovations

The innovative short story—also known as avant-garde, experimental, or unconventional fiction—has a long history, although its most vital period is the second half of the 20th century into the present. Unlike mainstream short fiction, innovative stories do not rely upon conventional character, conflicts, plots, or other standard elements. They are anti-story—typically lacking realism, plot, a focused subject, or a clear meaning—and they explore events through chaos, randomness, arbitrariness, and fragments.

The modern short story itself was once considered an innovation in fiction, and since the 19th century certain writers have pushed the edges of the form. Gogol fused dream and reality in “The Overcoat” (1842), a story about an insignificant clerk who dies of heartbreak after his new overcoat is stolen but who returns as a ghost to seek justice. The stories of Austro-Czech writer Franz Kafka so uniquely mesh the fantastic with the realistic that the adjective Kafkaesque was created to describe stories that echo his. One of the finest of Kafka's innovative, fable-like stories is “In the Penal Colony” (1919), which deals with imprisonment and torture. British author Virginia Woolf makes extreme use of the omniscient point of view in the story “Kew Gardens” (1919), in which insects, plants, wind, light, and noise are as important as human beings.

Unconventional short fiction became even more widespread after World War II. In his collection Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), American Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., included several stories that make satirical use of the science fiction genre. One such story is “Harrison Bergeron,” which begins, “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.” “The Joker's Greatest Triumph,” a 1965 work by American Donald Barthelme, relates the ordinary home life of Batman and is an example of the pop story. Italian author Tommaso Landolfi makes use of the biographical form to satirize men's misuse of women in “Gogol's Wife” (1954). “Blowup” (1956), by Argentine writer Julio Cort?zar, uses the development process of photography to reveal aspects of bizarre events.

The story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (1981) by American Raymond Carver is an example of minimalism, relying on simple, brief narrative passages woven into seemingly banal dialog to imply deeper layers of meaning. Surrealism, which attempts to represent the subconscious, is at work in French writer Anais Nin's dream story “Ragtime” (1944). In “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My life Over Again” (1969), American writer Joyce Carol Oates makes bizarre use of the common essay outline to express the psychic damage done to a teenage girl. One of the strangest forms of innovative fiction is metafiction (fiction that comments upon the act of writing the story the reader is reading), as in the stories “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968) by American John Barth and “The Birds” (1969) by American Ronald Sukenick.

Contributed By:

David Madden

Katherine Anne Porter

American author Katherine Anne Porter—noted for her short stories—wrote only one novel, Ship of Fools (1962), which she completed over a period of 20 years. In this recording she discusses the gradual process by which the novel took shape. She won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her Collected Stories (1965).

Courtesy of Gordon Skene Sound Collection/Corbis