Do you like to read short stories?
>>24868661Very rarely. But sometimes I stumble upon a collection of short stories by an author I admire and I'll read those.
>>24868661Not really. I prefer long form novels and poems. I prefer to autistically hyperfocus on one great work rather than read a single short story or a collection of short stories. They're also often very uneven.I did like some collections tbf, like Melville's. But I prefer his novels.
>>24868661Most of the time, no. I want to enjoy them, but most of the time, they fucking suck. It's worse than the situation with books because the barrier to entry is so much lower.
I probably (re-)read 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' once a month.
>>24868661The only thing I short is my cryptocurrency BackraCoin
>>24868661Yeah, when I finish a hefty novel I'll read short stories and such as a break, and this year some poetry too. But as far as short stories, I've been plugging away at a huge collection of Donald Barthelme's sporadically, and also really enjoyed Selected Poems from James Tate, which you might call some kind of prose poetry but would also pass as flash fiction (his earlier poetry was comparatively more conventional). Both writers I'd call surrealists, but Barthelme is more of a post-modernist with unconventional narrative structure, while what James Tate wrote feels more like a strange depiction of middle-America around the last half of the 20th century.My introduction to Tate was from this recording of a reading done by him, which is of work in a style similar to Selected Poems:https://youtu.be/MPJTXOMHTk4and his reading of Long Term Memory on this page is perhaps my favourite:https://www.jamestate.net/readingsBesides those two, and somewhat recently though it's been a little while since I've dug or kept up, I was also reading things published online, in particular from Wigleaf. They do flash fiction. Here are a couple they published that I liked well enough to bookmark:https://wigleaf.com/202409knock.htmhttps://wigleaf.com/202501neighbor.htmand now here are a few from other magazines:https://thediagram.com/23_4/siken.htmlhttps://maybemag.xyz/maybe02/kli02https://www.havehashad.com/hadposts/a-better-future-isn-t-possiblehttps://www.scaffoldlit.com/microwritings/walkman-by-pravasan-pillay
