As you might have come to realize, short stories are my favorite literary genre because they are like little cans of double concentrated tomato paste that add that extra zing to narratives other genres are incapable of delivering. In fact, the shorter the story, the grander the zing.  Well, Kate Chopin's story is as short as good short stories come and she manages to deliver the goods quicker than the title she chose for her piece . The advan tage of such crisp little tales is that they're easier to dissect because of the limited number of words they contain. Every sentence and paragraph can be analyzed al most ad nausea m , a task too g ruelling to undertake when reading a novel. Because of this comprehensive examination, the full extent of an author's powers is appreciated and though ma ny would be prone to co nclude that restricted tales offer very few developments , angles and insights, the reader's knowledge that every word written was mindfully selected ...

"Powder" is a short story intended to quickly state the obvious - a father's bond to his son is always a difficult thing to forge when parents aren't on good terms with each other. The level of difficulty in achieving this increases as fathers aren't used to explicitly explaining to their sons that they are trying to forge a stronger bond at a particular moment in time to begin with. Accordingly, the complications the father in this particular story is required to overcome are not only the time constraints the mother has placed on the trip as a whole or the mistrust towards her husband she has allowed her son to bear witness to which the father feels he must compensate for, but also the disparity in character traits that father and son exhibit. Having read the story for the first time, students predominantly respond to the query "What was the story about?" either with "I didn't get it. Some father and son skiing" or "S...

When you read Paley's "Mother" for the first time, you think, "Okay, so why would anyone give this to students to read when there's so much more that can be squeezed out of other short pieces of writing?" Why not give them Lawrence or Joyce to help analyze 159 facets of human relationships? Slap them with some Chopin or Woolf, both of whom produced slightly longer short stories through which you'd be able to demonstrate how a short story works and get a nice discussion going about relationships to boot. Meanwhile, after reading "Mother" for the first time, the main aspect that stays with readers is an overwhelming sensation of nostalgia and sadness bordering on melancholy. Whyever would any author write something this condensed to simply express despondency over a deceased parent? Can this story be that over-simplified? And then you re-read Paley's piece (because you have to give students some information on it so they don...

Husband, wife, mistress. Your stock relationship fit for platitudinous movies, soap operas, and the romance series from Harlequin Enterprises (small aside: An Unexpected Amish Romance -- are they serious?).  Arturo Vivante's "Can-Can" could have foundered in one of these genres, but being a short story, it gets to the point quickly enough and leaves so much to the reader's acumen that it is impossible as a reader to feel intellectually insulted by the tripe that would have naturally emerged had the story jumped ship to become a soap opera or longer romance novel. No, this is no tripe. This goes to the heart of all human relationships and asks questions like "What

If there were a definitive checklist of prerequisites that need to be satisfied for a short story to be rightfully called a short story, then Peter Meinke's "The Cranes" would tick all the right boxes on that checklist. His story is short, can be read in one sitting thus capturing the reader's full attention with details given to pique interest, foreshadow events leading to an overwhelming climax and leave readers with questions that need to be addressed.  His story is as stately as the characters that inhabit it, be they human or faunal, progressing steadily, constructing a lifetime of conjugal experiences piecemeal in less than 1000 words -- the perfect vignette to kick off class discussions about death, suicide, dignity, love, loyalty, perseverance.