Good morning and welcome back to the L.A. Times Book Club newsletter. I’m Jim Ruland, a fiction writer, punk historian and a longtime contributor to the Los Angeles Times, and this summer I’ll be ...

As the saying goes, we all have stories to tell. For some authors, these stories happen to be short. Just as the price tag of a product doesn’t signal its quality, neither does an author’s brevity ...

On Edith Wharton, Vivek Shanbhag and Willa Cather, in a week of choosing short stories over social media.

Has this happened to you? Someone tells you about a book you must read and you’re thrilled – until you realize it’s a Very Big One, a wonderful slab of words so thick it needs its own seat on an ...

For many years, I assumed that the appeal of a short story was that it was, well, short. Instead of slowly reading a novel over weeks, the reader of these bite-size plots can experience character ...