Short stories are good. I’m a fan. Collections of short stories are great. Natural stopping points. But apparently no one buys them, or at least no one buys them except from Established Authors. Ernest Hemingway has probably sold more short-fic since he ate his shotgun than when he was alive. Branding is everything.

Probably this is because our lit classes in education train us to read Novels of Great Social and Political Import. Naturally, this must be Challenging and Tedious because reading must be Work that you do to better yourself and society. Sit still and take the medicine. It can never ever be fun or engaging, in and of itself. If it was, how would a teacher command a salary for forcing you to read it? Public education budgets don’t justify themselves, so close reading and critical engagement are the order of the day. Why, if a teenager can just read something, and engage with it as he or she prefers, what the hell good is that?

So, literature must Challenge and Question and Overthrow and Be Important. If reading is staring at symbols and hallucinating vividly, why then, if you make the right symbols in the right way, you’ll cause people to hallucinate the way you want them too. Then you will be … powerful? remembered? A name that others will inflict on teenagers, so they can hate you, too? Is this truly the limit of the author’s minor ego trip?

Or maybe it’s less a career than a compulsion, a bug that bites you and you keep trying to get better at it, trying to justify your time by showing Improvement and Success. It’s Intellectual, you see, and so inherently better than devoting the same neurons to memorizing Baseball statistics or metal album covers or how many re-shoots the latest Disney flop has undergone. Sports are for morons, metal is for degenerates, and Disney adults should be shot on sight. But you, you’re a Creator! You’ve transcended the process of Consumption! You’re an absolutely more cerebral and spiritual form of human, whose genius is only currently unrecognized.

It’s not nihilism, or misanthropy, okay yes it is, but in a cool way. In an I-Will-Have-My-Revenge-on-Middle-School-Bullies way. Okay, that doesn’t sound cool at all. It sounds pathetic and sad when you put it that way, but so does having to drink whiskey like a derelict in order to perform the difficult task of … sitting at a desk and writing words. Which people seem to think is really cool when writers do it, to the point where an aspiring writer thinks he’s a hack if he’s not risking liver disease. As P.J. O’Rourke, both a writer and an alcoholic of great accomplishment, reminds us, you can always mistake a hangover for the pangs of genius.

So The Writers’ Life is a dodge and it’s a hustle and it’s a performance and it’s all about as honest as those pharmaceutical ads on television. Actually, less honest, because those at least acknowledge that using the product may disappoint and even harm you. They’re the most honest ads, addressing a specific audience, clarifying the need for professional guidance, and admitting risks, and we hate them the most. We don’t want to hear that the product may not work or will have side-effects. We want to hear that it works 50% better, will drive problems away like a gale wind, and make us happy and strong and ready to copulate for hours on end. That we’ll shell out hard-earned money for, even if we know perfectly well that it really won’t work, or only works sometimes, or only works in a minor way, or is too expensive to have on hand whenever we need it. We feel as though we’ve accomplished something, made a change, all from the comfort of our couch. Ain’t Science Grand?

Literature isn’t like that. If you read a novel, you might like it, you might not. You might thing the author’s clever, you might think he’s a pretentious ass. You might be so locked in you can’t put it down, you might get bored halfway through and give up. This is in the cards no matter how many people tell you it’s great or trash. Only you have the experience of reading a particular book. The only operator of your Theater of the Mind is you.

However, when that book is a collection of short stories, there’s greater variance and thus, lesser risk. If one story doesn’t appeal to you, another might. If the author’s pretension drives one story, his cleverness might save another. I know “a collection of short stories” seems like a light thing to publish, but that’s just what makes it a light thing to read.

And no, buying it doesn’t make you a schmuck. That’s a joke, people. Don’t take it seriously. Lightness, remember? Just because Ernest Hemingway couldn’t manage it doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t.