SOURCE: Toynton, Evelyn. “American Stories.” Commentary 95, no. 3 (March 1993): 49-53.

In the following essay, Toynton compares The Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Ford, with several other short story anthologies. Toynton is highly critical of Ford's story selections, asserting that they are characterized by bleakness, flatness, and emotional superficiality, and lack both vivid human characters and intense emotion.

The poet-critic Randall Jarrell once defined the novel as “a prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it.” The short story might be said to differ from the novel in that there need not be anything wrong with it—perfection, of however narrow a kind, being attainable in the shorter form that is inconceivable in the long. It was probably this that William Faulkner had in mind when he said he turned to writing novels because poetry was too hard and short stories only...