Today (September 17, 2021), my blog ”Reading the Short Story” marked 2 million page views.  I know that is not a lot in the Internet world, but it pleases me that so many people are reading my thoughts on the short story, even though I have not posted any new essays for the past three years, when, without any notice or explanation, I just stopped writing. However, today, I thought it might be a decent gesture to make a few remarks about my decision to stop.  I have been reading stories since I first discovered Edgar Allan Poe when I was growing up in the mountains of Eastern ..read more

In her speech on receiving the National Book Foundation Medal in 2014, Ursula Le Guin, who died this past week at the age of 88, scolded publishers for giving over their responsibility to support good writing and great literature to the sales department, which often promotes authors as if they were deodorant. Books ae not just commodities, Le Guin argued, and said that now that she was nearing the end of her career she did not want to watch American literature get trivialized, for, she proudly insisted, the name of the beautiful reward writers seek is not profit, but freedom..  La Guin called ..read more