Byzantium: Stories

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RUMOR HAS IT THAT SHORT STORY WRITERS, nowadays, are meant to lack ambition. That short stories are best when about wee tiny things. That brief fiction should be about precious moments, only, and not about the great and grand events. That the short story’s province is one of glowing epiphanies and small changes at the last minute. Short stories should not aspire to gulp down the steaming bouillabaisse of the big world; short stories should remain happy with nibbling at cute cucumber sandwiches. Who honestly believes these hollow prejudices, I do not know.

Clearly, Ben Stroud did not get this misleading e-mail, and I am so very grateful for that oversight, and I do believe the world of prose fiction is all the richer for it.

Rather than spend time trying to diagnose how the world’s vision of the short story became so anemic, let us instead praise the full-blooded sweep and majesty of Stroud’s imagination. Let us celebrate a writer of great bravery and artistry and deep feeling. To be sure he takes us far and wide — from Bismarck’s Prussia to the conquistadors’ New Spain to the Bosporus’s still-Constantinople. Ben Stroud has wanderlust; this collection, Byzantium, is our ticket to ride.

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