"Otis is Resurrected" by Brady Udall

I hear the short story is dying and that people only want to read novels. This seems counter-intuitive to me. This means that people either spend all day typing and reading things such as “Heather is going out to dinner” and “Michael hates school :(” or plowing through the Oprah Book Club books with the best-illustrated covers. I refuse to subscribe to a belief that the Reading Public simultaneously sits on opposite ends of a spectrum. In an Era when text messaging and Twitter are the h0t new kraze, I don’t see why people wouldn’t be clamoring all over each other at the chance to read short fiction.

The short story is like a writer’s playground, where nobody expects them to accomplish anything Olympian on the monkey bars. The tether ball expert doesn’t have to play tether ball every day, and writers can run straight from jungle gym to slide with nary a regret.

The self-defining characteristic of short stories (ie, the fact that they’re short) offers heightened creativity because it imposes upon the writer a Box. You can’t think outside the Box without a Box. Creativity is best accomplished around or through or in spite of something; the short story gives the writer that “something.” Every time you read a short story, you have to ask: What did the author accomplish with this speck of a word count? Hopefully, something awesome.

I think, also, that short stories have taken upon them the label of “Literariness.” For a genre, that’s not a good label to have. It gets English majors to poke at the text with sticks until it reveals phalluses and orifices. Edward Blake said something about seeing the world in a grain of sand, and just because a story is smaller, everybody wants to be able to analyze the entire world from it – to find evidence of hegemony, influence from a particular philosopher, a political commentary, etc. Can’t a story just be good?

I’m starting this blog as an argument for the short story. Three times a week I’ll post a link to a short story you can read for free online. I’ll post the short stories that made me grin like an idiot while reading them, they were so enjoyable. I’ll post the short stories you don’t need to write a paper about in order to enjoy. I’ll post the short stories that have left an impression on me. In short, I'll post the stories that don't suck.

When I finished "Otis is Resurrected", I felt like I’d finally read a good short story. More important than any discussion of themes or setting or voice or anything else I might want to mention here, I should just mention that it’s a great story. Have a good read.