Short story collection shrinks in the telling
Fiction; A Kind Of Compass: Stories On Distance; Edited by Belinda McKeon; Tramp Press, €15
‘Distance is inherent to the short story,” writes Belinda McKeon in her introduction to the new anthology A Kind Of Compass.
This is pure waffle: a generalisation so innocuously non-specific and pseudo-profound that its opposite could just as easily be true (“Nearness is inherent to the short story”). Luckily, no one reads anthologies for their introductions. What McKeon means is that she has assembled a collection of stories on the theme of distance ...
