On the Short Story
In this article about short stories, William Boyd discusses reasons why writers are attracted to the short form, its continuing popularity with readers, and how one might go about defining it. He also attempts to categorize short stories and comes up with seven types: the event-plot story, the Chekhovian story, the Modernist story, the cryptic/ludic story, the mini-novel story, the poetic/mythic story, and the biographical story. While a case might be made for the categorization, it left me wondering how some of the stories he cites as canonical examples in each case would fare if they were to go through a modern-day workshop.