Re: RARA-AVIS: Why books are over 200 pagesand no short stories

RMINOT@aol.com
Sat, 5 Sep 1998 16:06:39 EDT Re Anthony "From the Monastery".
Please name and date the last short story not written by Stephen King or
Ludlum or Ellroy that you read in ANY magazine. The New Yorker publishes ROth
and Updyke Book excerpts, but not short stories. Harper's and The Atlantic
pay shit and don't publish short fiction anymore. Writers today, unlike
yesterday, don't "learn their craft" by writing short stories first, then
progressing to novels. They go for the big score with a howling with wind
first novel. We no longer live in a culture that fostered writing, when we
had Scribner's (Magazine) and Colliers and The new Yorker, and all the other
greats that nurtured the careers of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Capote, Chandler.
Stephen King, the dear, took the trouble of writing short fiction for pennies
in pulp mags before he had the honesty to commit himself to a novel. But that
was in the early 70s.
Reeves Minot

#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.