“I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence. I think all these divorces show that.”

–Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

Via Kelly Jane Torrance, who has a review of the upcoming Stephen Fry movie adaptation of Vile Bodies here, and a good but depressing piece on the decline of the short story market here. I’m especially intrigued by her suggestion that short stories are an especially American form: “The short story is pretty much an American invention. Its first master, Edgar Allan Poe credited the American magazine with creating the new literary form. Notes Jack Clemens, an associate editor at Writer’s Digest: ‘Before America, a short tale was not known as a short story. Collections of stories were not really published [elsewhere], at least not with the popularity that came in the United States.'”

I don’t, at the moment, think that there’s anything in the short story form that makes it uniquely suited to American writers (or vice versa), but I’m open to persuasion. It is a form that requires a strong foundational idea, like science fiction.