The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis
Editors: Per Winther, Jakob Lothe, Hans H. Skei.
Publisher: University of South Caroline Press, 2004.

Review by Pamelyn Casto (originally published in FlashFictionFlash Newsletter, April 2007).

For those interested in theory and analysis, this is a book you must have. It's an international meeting of the minds on short fiction as various university scholars from the U.S., Canada, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden come together to discuss and scrutinize the short story. Some of the scholarly articles include:

* "Why Short Stories Are Essential and Why They Are Seldom Read" (Charles May)*

*"Origins, Development, Substance, and Design of the Short Story: How I Got Hooked on the Short Story and Where It Led Me" (Mary Rohrberger)

*"Closure and Preclosure as Narrative Grid in Short Story Analysis: Some Methodological Suggestions"(Per Winther),

* "Danish Short Shorts in the 1990's and the Jena-Romantic Fragments" (GitteMose),

* "Short Notes on Tall Tales: Some Australian Examples" (W. H. New)

* "Architexture in Short Stories by Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty" (Jan Nordby Gretlund),

* "The Queer Short Story"(Axel Nissen)

There are also many other fine and illuminating articles. I've been hard at work researching and writing a lengthy article on flash fiction (for a large project I'm involved in) and the articles by Gitte Mose and Charles May were especially useful for my research. Well, actually all of them were quite enlightening and well worth reading. I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in short fiction and literary theory/analysis.