AustLit

'The short story has consistently suffered from disparagement: concision and contraction have come to signify an intrinsically lesser literary achievement – the form of the immature aspirant novelist, an exercise of limited vision or ambition, or the result of a latent and contained imagination. Yet the persistence of the short story in the face of the cultural power of the novel signals the irrepressible vigour and relevance of the form. No less than the novel, the short story is the inventive repository of subtle ordinariness, grand existential themes and historical knowledge. In academic criticism, however, it is often neglected.'  (Introduction)