How Do You Know If Your Short Story Should Be a Novel? ‹ Literary Hub

Via McSweeney’s How Do You Know If Your Short Story Should Be a Novel?

Bill Cotter Wrestles With the Right Way to Tell a Story
By Bill Cotter, December 15, 2022

The list of novels that began their lives as short stories is long and well known. Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Eudory Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (which began as a short story titled “Gogol”), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (expanded from her 1923 story, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street”), Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (which grew from his 1996 story “Chez Lambert”)—these are just a few of the most often–cited examples in the English language. There are thousands of others, of course, in every language, by writers from every generation since the modern short story arrived as a literary force in the early nineteenth century. It’s a genre in itself, almost: the novel that was born a short story.

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