Arakin 4 kurs new 001 176. indd

BOOKS AND READERS
THEMATIC VOCABULARY
1. 
Readers and reading habits
: alert reader; compulsive reader; 
general reader; sophisticated reader; appeal to the reader; to form a 
reading habit; acquire a taste for reading; to read for relaxation; to 
edge in a little reading every day; to read widely/incessantly; to read 
a book through; to leaf through a book;
2. 
Books and their parts
: a book may be absorbing, controversial, 
depressing, dull, hilarious, thought-provoking, well-worth reading, fun 
to read, compulsive reading, a good/gripping read; to borrow books 
from a library; children’s book; pop-up book; picture book; coffee-table 
book; hardback/paperback; binding; covers; jacket; title page; acknowl-
edgements; preface; prologue; table of contents; epigraph; epilogue.
3. 
Literary genres and modes
: poetry; drama; fiction; science fic-
tion; non-fiction; pulp fiction; biography; autobiography; novel; ro-
mance; fantasy; short story; fable; fairy tale; parable.
4. 
Writers and their craft
: angle of vision; author; narrator; third/
first person narrative; to have access to the thoughts and feelings of 
a character; ingenious plot; setting; exposition; climax; denouement; 
protagonist/antagonist; internal/external conflict; interior mono-
logue; flat/round character; direct/indirect characterization; under-
statement; symbol; suggesting rather than explaining the theme of 
a story; to infer the hidden meaning.
IN DEFENSE OF THE SHORT STORY
by L.P. Hartley
SHORT stories are being eagerly read; they are a regular feature 
of evening papers, some Sunday papers, and of magazines, reviews 
and periodicals. Perhaps they have never been so much read as they 

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are now. They are read in book form too, but not so greedily. Why? 
Why do readers devour them singly on a newsheet, or between 
paper covers, but only nibble at them when they are collected in a 
book?
It is partly prejudice, I think, and partly laziness. What is there 
against short stories as such, or – since people obviously enjoy them 
singly — against short stories 
en masse? 
No doubt the economic fac-
tor counts. Why bother to buy a collection of stories when for a small 
sum you can get several newspapers, each with a story thrown in? 
The novel suffers much less from this form of competition; serialized 
novels are rare; people who want to read novels must buy, borrow or 
steal them.
But to return to the prejudice against short stories in book form. 
Individually, we are told, they don’t last long enough for the habitu-
al novel-reader; collectively, they last too long — or rather, they induce 
a surfeit. A dozen short courses are harder for the mind to digest than 
one long course. Similarly, in con versation, a single anecdote may be 
fun to listen to, but who could listen to twelve anecdotes on end? The 
first few paragraphs of a story demand unusual concentration. ‘Start-
ing and stopping’ exhausts the reader’s attention just as starting and 
stopping uses up the petrol in a car. Another thing is that a novel 
grows, or should grow, more interesting as it goes on, whereas short 
stories, in bulk, are subject to a sort of law of diminishing returns: 
they decrease in interest, in proportion as one’s ability to take them 
in decreases.
These are some of the reasons why people fight shy of a collection 
of short stories, and as I said they are mostly lazy reasons, the reasons 
of those who read simply for relaxation, to pass the time.
Short stories of purely ephemeral interest never find their way into 
collections. The chosen few are, it must be admitted, for alert readers. 
For them, a volume of short stories is at least as good value as a 
novel. It probably contains more ideas, since each story is based on 
an idea; it has much greater variety of mood, scene, character and 
plot, for the author will at any rate try not to repeat himself. And, on 
the whole, it is better written. Almost anyone, it is said, can write a 
novel, providing he has Interesting material. But it takes an artist to 
write a short story, just as it takes an artist to relate an anecdote. 
A short story that isn’t a work of art, at some level, would hardly get 
into print— even if the art is only artfulness, a trick up the writer’s 
sleeve. It has to be tightly constructed, with hardly a word wasted or 

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misplaced. A novel is a portmanteau into which nearly anything can 
be thrust, but a short story must be stripped to its bare essentials. 
From the literary standpoint the average volume of short stories is a 
better bargain than the average novel; better worth buying, better 
worth keeping.
If this were realized, I think that short stories in book form would 
be more popular than they are. It is a question of acquir ing a taste for 
them. In spite of the proverb one 
can 
argue about taste: everybody 
does, and one result is that tastes change. The fashion for going to 
picture-galleries has grown enormously of recent years. Pictures are 
not consecutive; each has to be studied on its own merits and looked 
at with a fresh eye. This means a strain on the attention, but increas-
ing numbers of people find it pleasurable; they have discovered the 
secret of enjoying it. Might they not find the same satisfaction in 
studying a gallery of short stories, if they tried?
A novel appeals in the same way that a portrait does-through the 
richness of its human content. In the past certain novels achieved the 
distinction of being 
loved: The Pickwick Papers 
for instance, and 
Little 
Women, 
Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Tupmari, Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle 
were personally dear to the public; so were Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. 
More recently, the lovable nature of its hero won a similar distinction 
for 
Good-bye, Mr. Chips. 
How, it might be asked, can short stories be 
loved in the same way, when we have no time to get to know their 
characters? And yet they have been: Hans Andersen’s, for instance, 
and Kipling’s, and O. Henry’s and Conan Doyle’s. Agatha Christie’s 
detective novels are deservedly popular, but I doubt if they are loved 
in the same way that the ‘Adventures’ or the ‘Memoirs’ of Sherlock 
Holmes were, and still are. True, the latter had the advantage of one 
personality running through them; they were short stories where the 
same hero recurs, Sherlock Holmes hardly seems a character to inspire 
affection, yet he did, and so have other characters in short stories, 
however briefly delineated. Who can forget Hans Andersen’s 
Mermaid 
or the boy and girl in 
The Snow Queen
?
But it is not only an author’s characters that endear him to the 
public: it is also a quality in his mind, that appears with greater or less 
distinctness in everything he writes. Short stories them selves may be 
discontinuous but the mind behind them is not; in different guises, 
and in brief samples, it can be relied on to give people something that 
they want, something recognizable and characteristic: a point of view 
they sympathize with. One still hears people say, ‘That’s like some-

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thing in a story by Maupassant or Tchekov” — showing that those 
writers created a world that was solid and self-consistent, though it 
only revealed itself in snapshots.
So a volume of short stories has a continuity — not a continuity 
of character and plot, but a continuity of viewpoint that serves the 
same end. 
This
the public at large recognizes and enjoys in the work 
of Somerset Maugham, H. E. Bates, and some other practitioners of 
the short story; but it is capricious and suspicious and unenterprising 
and bestows its favours in a chancy fashion. My contention is that as 
with picture-galleries, so with collec tions of short stories — if the 
public gave them a trial it would find in them a reservoir of varied 
entertainment that hitherto it has only tapped.