It does not matter whether it is human or inhuman, or whether
it leaves you thinking deeply or radiantly but superficially pleased. Some
things are more easily done as short stories than others and more
abundantly done, but one of the many pleasures of short-story writing is
to achieve the impossible.
At any rate, that is the present writer's conception of the art of the
short story, as the jolly art of making something very bright and moving;
it may be horrible or pathetic or funny or beautiful or profoundly
illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from fifteen
to fifty minutes to read aloud. All the rest is just whatever invention
and imagination and the mood can give--a vision of buttered slides on a
busy day or of unprecedented worlds. In that spirit of miscellaneous
expectation these stories should be received. Each is intended to be a
thing by itself; and if it is not too ungrateful to kindly and
enterprising publishers, I would confess I would much prefer to see each
printed expensively alone, and left in a little brown-paper cover to lie
about a room against the needs of a quite casual curiosity.
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