Reading and appreciating the short short

 Yesterday’s note was about Yukio Mishima’s short story “Swaddling Clothes.”

Decades ago, Irving Howe and his wife, Ilana Wiener Howe, put together an anthology after reading it.

One editor told the other about the story. Both agreed it was wonderful. They wondered if they were onto a subgenre of the short story — the short short. They wondered if they could find other specimens of condensed, explosive stories, enough to make a little book.

Their anthology has 38.

Irving Howe, in the introduction to the collection, says the typical short story is 3,000 to 8,000 words.

The typical short short, by contrast, is 1,500 words. At most, it’s 2,500.

I’m a slow reader. But I can get lost in one of these stories and return to the real world in less time than it’d take to watch a TV comedy.

I’m curious what it would be like to read one a day, in lieu of a dose of mindless TV or scrolling.

You might see some more notes on this topic in the next month or so.

• Source: Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories, ed. by Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe; New York: Bantam Books, 1983.