I Don't Need You Any More [antikvár]

Foreword: About Distances '' I ^HESE stories were written over the past fifteen years; all -L but one, which is pubhshed in this book for the first time, appeared in magazines. They were not, of course, conceived as a series (although reading them together now I am surprised at a certain continuity). They were done for my own pleasure, if indeed that can be possible when one intends writing to be published at all. In comparison to playwriting, however, writing stories is undoubtedly more pleasurable if one connects that word to something done primarily for its own sake. After all, we in this country pay smaU attention to stories, which are squeezed in between the magazine ads, and are ranked more or less as casual things at the lower end of the scale of magnitude, like bungalows in the architectural world. But I would just as soon see that attitude remain unchanged. The premium on grandiosity leaves us this form of art in which a writer can stiU be as concise as his subject reaUy requires him to be. Here he need not say more than he knows for form's sake. There is a short-story tone of voice which, amid the immodest heroics of the day, still invites whoever wishes to speak or blurt out his truth in a single breath. For a playwright it has certain affinities; its economy and formal decorum—at ix