SOURCE: Baxter, Charles. Introduction to Sudden Fiction International: Sixty Short-Short Stories, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas, pp. 17-25. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989.

In the following essay, Baxter outlines the differences between short-short stories and longer fiction.

Imagine, for a moment, that you have fallen asleep while reading a great book. Suppose that the book is War and Peace or Crime and Punishment or Moby-Dick; it doesn't matter, as long as the book carries with it a crushing weight of cultural prestige. But somehow, toward the middle, your attention flags, or you're not up to the challenge, or you're tired and irritable because you've just had a first-class quarrel with the person who is now sulking in another part of the place you call home. Whatever the cause, you've fallen asleep. The huge book you've been reading falls to the floor. Because it's a big...