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Revisiting the short story
Arts | 10/28/08
Posted online at 1:53 AM EST on 10/28/08
Hey, Brandeis. Do you read on a regular basis?
"I would, but I don't have time." "I'm a science major-what do you think?" "Yeah, right." "By the time I'm finished reading for class, there's no way I'm going to look at anything else."
Excuses, excuses, harried Brandesians. While I'm sure we'd all tackle Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose or the various magnum opera of the notoriously long-winded Leo Tolstoy if we only had the time, literature has provided us with a natural rejoinder to the dilemma of "not having enough time to read."
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the short story. There is a bounty of these light works available, and I know of several volumes that even the most frazzled Brandesian should not ignore.
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Speaking of riddles, in working my way through some of Vladimir Nabokov's short stories, I discovered "The Vane Sisters." The story contains a self-referential secret that, once revealed to me, was so chilling I swear I felt my core body temperature drop. I'm not going to champion any particular short story collection, because Nabokov offers a copious number of short stories that condense his novelistic genius into, at most, a couple dozen pages. Students without the time to tackle Pale Fire or The Real Life of Sebastian Knight will appreciate his efforts.
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