Short stories do not get enough attention, either by themselves or in the collections that you every now and then notice on bookstore shelves. I personally tend to ignore short story collections not authored by Stephen King (he’s at his best in the shorter format, imo), and I have no idea why. I only picked up B.J. Novak’s One More Thing on a whim – I needed something to read while waiting for my fiancee at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, and I figured it would better to read a short story or two than to start a new novel, considering that I was already reading a novel at home.

Unnecessary story interrupted, I’m very glad I bought the book. I admit that beyond my skepticism of short story collections, I was also sort of hesitant to purchase the collection because of the identity of its author – B.J. Novak is a talented television actor and I know he’s done some stuff behind the camera as well, but would those skills translate to writing short stories? I had my doubts, and worried a little that One More Time would just be a case of a celebrity cashing in on his fame for a quick paycheck. My fears were totally without basis. The short stories in this collection are by and large excellent, and generally very funny.

One thing I like about short stories is they don’t have the same pressure on them that a novel does. They are written for smaller, more segmented audiences so they don’t have to aim to please everyone. Sure, a short story can be smart and literary and blah blah blah. And these types of short stories are very often very good. I’m thinking in particular of “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease,” by Jonathan Safran Foer, which is one of my favorite short stories that I’ve ever read. There are also the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, which basically are the definition of the southern gothic style, hauntingly beautiful.

But short stories can also just be fun – the author giving a set of readers what he knows that particular set of readers wants. An author writing for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine or Asimov’s Science Fiction, for example, probably has a pretty good idea of who his readers are and what they’re looking for in their fiction. Many novels, by contrast, have the burden of needing to at least try to appeal to a broader swath of readers. Anyway I don’t want to talk too much about this whole notion but the point is, I like that short stories can just be fun. “Zombie,” by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, is a good example of this sort of thing. What’s it about? It’s a short story for god’s sake, why don’t you go read it yourself? Just kidding – it’s about a new teenage fad in which kids give themselves lobotomies, essentially, using heart defibrillators. I understand this story is included in a new collection of short stories by Palahniuk, which maybe I’ll pick up at some point.

Several months ago I read, and meant to write a blog post about, another short story collection called When Mystical Creatures Attack! by Kathleen Founds. I put it off and then forgot and now it’s too late for me to do any real justice to the collection, because too many of the stories have faded from my memory, but I will say that it was a worthwhile read and I enjoyed the book quite a bit. The stories in the collection are linked and they do form a sort of coherent narrative, so you could almost describe the book as a very disjointed and short novel, but that’s not how the author or the publisher have chosen to characterize it, and also the short stories do each stand on their own. One of my favorites, as I recall, tells the story of a woman who ends up in a mental hospital run according to free-market principles. When you check in, you declare “emotional bankruptcy” and you earn the right to make phone calls, enjoy free time, etc, by accumulating “Wellness Points.” The stories aren’t all funny, but many of them were and to my memory that one was in particular. Founds is an extremely talented writer with an uncommon gift for making you laugh, and were it not for what I felt was a needlessly dark turn at the end, I am sure I would have written about it much sooner.

The New Yorker publishes a short story every month, of course, and while I’m a subscriber to the magazine and generally love it, and though I know that being published in The New Yorker is basically a career-maker for any fiction writer, I can’t really remember the last time I read a story in the magazine that I enjoyed. I think the Foer story I listed above originally appeared in the New Yorker, so there’s that, of course, but otherwise I feel like their selections are always a little odd and sort of too smart for their own good, if that makes any sense. There was one, now that I think about it, a while back – hold on, I’m googling – aha! From November 2011, called “Miracle Polish.” This one is about a character who buys a bottle of a mirror polish from a traveling salesman and it makes all his mirrors looks so amazing that he ends up spending all his time staring into them. Maybe it sounds silly but I really enjoyed the story. But the point is, it’s been some time since The New Yorker published anything I really enjoyed. I’m not sure whether that’s to do with me, or with them.

But in any case, there are great short stories all around — they’re easy picking. All you have to do is look.