Friday, January 12, 2007

Making Short Work of It

While visiting some blogs that I hadn’t seen for a while, I stumbled across Nasty. Brutish. Short., billed as offering “[s]hort reviews of short stories for those with short attention spans.”

It’s been around since last October, and the five contributors have done an admirable job of writing brief snippets about crime-fiction short stories. Happily, some of the stories discussed have some age on them, so this blog is not exclusively about what’s new.

I love short stories, and don’t read nearly enough of them. Anyone who doubts the skill necessary to write a decent short story would be well advised to listen to advice I once heard: Grand opera is about love, betrayal, longing, sex, happiness, despair, and it often takes three hours to play out. Janis Joplin covered the same ground with Me and Bobby McGee in less than four minutes.

2 comments:

Graham Powell said...

Well if anyone got past unc-prof's doctoral thesis, I'd just like to say thanks to the other guys on the blog, cause I've been slacking like hell lately.

Anonymous said...

Some of the other guys have been slacking as well. I'm not going to mention my name, though.