Vheissu

Self-proclaimed short story month , post number 17. A few weeks ago, I mentioned some ebullient first impressions of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 31. Today is a good time to look at its innards. McSweeney’s 31 (titled Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: Old Forms, Unearthed ) set out with an interesting idea: to produce contemporary versions of dead or feeble genres. They picked nine: two of them are types of poetry (Malaysian pantoum , Japanese senryū ), two are dialogues (European whore dialogue, Socratic dialogue), and the rest are prose forms (Icelandic legendary sagas, Chinese biji , Spanish nivola , Anglo-American Graustarkian romance, medieval European consuetudinary). None of these genres is what you would call a short story. In my defense, in order to slip this post fairly into the short story month, McSweeney’s 31 does come with a separate “summertime sampler” that includes three excerpts from novels that can pass as short stories. (I may talk about them in ...