SOURCE: Bell, Millicent. “Fiction Chronicle.” Partisan Review 64, no. 3 (summer 1997): 414-27.

In the following excerpt, Bell explores the defining characteristics of the stories in After Rain.

Short stories aren't novels—they're shorter. Short stories snatch at life and give us only a concentrated episode or several moments—or thin out an epic chronicle to the bareness of a Bible parable. The point in either case is that this quick read (done at a sitting, as Poe insisted) isn't just a crumb from a loaf; it's a round bagel with a mysterious hole of implication, a tale whose strength, as William Trevor says, “lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in”—quite a different thing. Writing short stories is a high and special art, and only some novelists are good at it; most are not. Many great writers are better when they write briefly...