Introduction

What constitutes a short story? Edgar Allan Poe famously said a short story was one that could be read at a single sitting, but that addresses only the length, and maybe has less to say about what constitutes a story that can be told successfully in a short form, though perhaps this strays into ‘what makes a good short story’ territory. While you need ideas for a novel, you need an idea for a short story. One of the first (long) short stories I thought of for this anthology was E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’, for which I have a great admiration—arising in part, admittedly, from the surprise at finding that someone whose work had led to the Merchant and Ivory frock-fest that was A Room with a View could produce this near-apocalyptic, technocratic dystopian tale, too. I left it out not because it was over twelve thousand words (The Dead is longer) but because it had too many ideas. A short story succeeds when it chooses an idea of the right proportion to be resolved within a limited narrative space.

This anthology is, I think, exploratory, in that my choices seem to reflect stories that hang together not only because I like them (though that word ‘like’ is immediately haunted by those I like just as well or are by authors I like even more than these ones, and are not included) but because there is something about them that added a little more to my understanding of what short stories could, if not should, deliver. It is a way of totalising my ideas about short stories, perhaps each of the dozen contains an ingredient of some Jungian archetype of short story.