I am reading the complete stories of Lydia Davis, and most of them are no more than a page or two long. Some, in fact, last only a few lines, like this one:

In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions. “The wind,” said the woman. “Hunters,” said the man. “The rain,” said the woman. “The army,” said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged.

Or:

People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

I can’t say about you, but I have discovered a new pleasure in such small stories, also called shorts. The Internet has spawned a great interest in the short, with sundry forums devoted to this tiny art form. Often, short story writers are derided for not possessing the talent to write full-length novels, a charge that has been levelled against even someone of the calibre of Alice Munro. But short stories and shorts allow writers to showcase a slice of life in a crisp, emotionally hard-hitting way that is, the word is, anonymous. Davis’ stories, for instance, rarely name the characters, preferring to use the general pronoun “he” or “she”. This lets the reader imagine entire backgrounds for the characters and perhaps, therefore, connect better with them. A novel lays the outline pretty solidly, with the reader forced to carry along with the writer’s framework. Not that that is not appreciated, but stories have their own charm, and the long format must not be looked upon as necessarily better.