She writes:
The British attitude to the short story - that it is somehow lesser, a practice space for the real thing, which is, of course, the novel; that you can perhaps start out writing a collection of stories, but you have somehow failed if you don't graduate to a minimum of 200 pages - has always baffled me.
Instead, she sees the short story as:
... a test of prose-writing in a way a novel often isn't, or isn't necessarily.
You can read the whole thing here.
And if you feel inspired to begin reading the best short fiction (and remember - you are what you read!), here's list of the best by short story writer Peter Ho Davies to get you started. Who else would you add to it?
And if you have a little time and a few ringgit to spare, you might like to pop into a branch of Payless Books which always seems to have multiple copies of the Best American Short Stories from down the years. (I've collected most of the set.) These books contain some of the best short story writing from the country that feels most at home in this genre. But the books would be worth buying for their introductory essays about the state of the short story alone.
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