As the saying goes, we all have stories to tell. For some authors, these stories happen to be short. Just as the price tag of a product doesn’t signal its quality, neither does an author’s brevity ...

Good morning and welcome back to the L.A. Times Book Club newsletter. I’m Jim Ruland, a fiction writer, punk historian and a longtime contributor to the Los Angeles Times, and this summer I’ll be ...

For many years, I assumed that the appeal of a short story was that it was, well, short. Instead of slowly reading a novel over weeks, the reader of these bite-size plots can experience character ...

Has this happened to you? Someone tells you about a book you must read and you’re thrilled – until you realize it’s a Very Big One, a wonderful slab of words so thick it needs its own seat on an ...

Consider, for a moment, the unforgiving nature of short fiction. Many highly esteemed novels contain stretches that stumble, lumber and digress, with such “fat” either pardoned in the larger context ...

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. When the news is one report of human suffering — or environmental degradation or ...