I’ll never forget reading Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end – the scene where the patient says goodbye to the doctor and she puts a flower in her hair as a kind of thank you to him – and I felt like a cowboy shot from a canyon’s top. This is a different experience from reading a novel, I think. The emotional effect is cumulative. Let’s just hope market forces don’t send short fiction the way of the dinosaur, because their sales are paltry compared to the novel and this is truly unfortunate.
