Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club.

Deep dives into the greatest books ever written.

Provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses.

We don't just read the great books. We live them.

Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more.

We'll relish the most moving art ever committed

to the page and stage from every age. Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy, on the reading

adventure of a lifetime with hardcore literature. Let's talk about short stories. I love short

stories, but do you really need a podcast? Do you really need a guide? Do you really need someone telling you how to read short stories? I mean, most people could understand someone telling you how to write short stories, but why do you need someone to tell you how to read a short story? Surely, you just pick up the book, you pick up the collection of short stories, you grab the short story that you want you want and you read it I think a discussion about how to read short stories is valuable because I think most people don't know how to read them or at least I should say they don't know how to appreciate them they don't know how to enjoy them how to get everything they can out of them and that's not really your fault it's not my fault it's it's the way the culture is, the culture's moved on.

It used to be that short story was the form, short story was king, short story was the mode.

We can be weep the fate of the poem, but the poem had its day.

It used to be that people would put recipes into poetry, they would give directions to houses in poetry.

They used to, like, poetry was the vehicle.

Poetry was the vehicle to deliver everything, and we've lost that long, long gone, and now

poetry is really, really niche. And I would say that poetry, in the real sense of it,

in the real understanding, those who really appreciate and understand it, are super niche and super

rare. And we'll have to

talk about how to understand poetry. But after poetry, I would say the short story is getting

the short end of the stick right now. In the 40s and 50s, there used to be magazines, literary

magazines, weird towels, amazing towels, there was whatever interest you had, whatever you wanted to read about.

Whether you were a girl, whether you were a boy, whether you liked westerns, whether you liked war, romance.

Whatever stories you liked, there was a magazine tailored for you.

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