We all complain about being short on time. We prefer our TV shows in half-hour segments. We favor french fries over the whole potato. Because we still think of short fiction as something to be consumed in an English class, not in our leisure time. The Lottery and delighted in our horror at the unexpected ending.
Short stories didn t always have such a small audience.
The form began as popular fiction. In recent decades, however, short stories have been thought of by the reading public more as something to be encountered in elite literary journals or, more commonly, in a classroom. And yet, the short-story form has not deserted its audience it is still the people s fiction. Good short tales have all the immediacy of real life perhaps even greater immediacy, because there s no room for anything extraneous. The best ones are all about entertaining the reader, not giving the writer room to show off.