SOURCE: "The Short Fiction of Malcolm Lowry," in Tulane Studies in English, Vol. XV, 1967, pp. 59-80.

In the following essay, Edmonds provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Lowry's short fiction.

To a friend and fellow writer James Stern, Malcolm Lowry once wrote, "It is possible to compose a satisfactory work of art by the simple process of writing a series of good short stories, complete in themselves, with the same characters, interrelated, correlated, good if held up to the light, watertight if held upside down, but full of effects and dissonances that are impossible in a short story, but nevertheless having its purity of form, a purity that can only be achieved by the born short story writer." Lowry was not a "born short story writer"; many of his works of short fiction do not succeed by themselves, nor do the later stories constitute the interrelated whole...