Evidence receipt / observation
Published · transcript-backedTyler Cowen: observation
23 Mar 2022 Conversations with Tyler Lydia Davis on Language and Literature
“If I think about Thomas Bernhard — who also wrote very short stories — he tends to use either a very bad event or some kind of misanthropy to hook the reader.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Tyler Cowen
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- observation
- Recorded
- 23 Mar 2022
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. I have a question about writing very short stories, and that is, what’s the content bias that’s introduced by making them very short? If I think about Thomas Bernhard — who also wrote very short stories — he tends to use either a very bad event or some kind of misanthropy to hook the reader. That’s not what you do, but what is the content bias in writing very short stories? I suppose it’s limited by something that is short in duration, necessarily, either an action that’s very short in duration or a perception that’s very brief and glancing. It might be a perception that could lead to a great many more perceptions or could be developed, but for the moment, it’s very brief. That is the constraint. The stories are born very spontaneously from these immediate perceptions or immediate actions that are there and over in a blink of an eye.…
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