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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Consider, for a moment, the unforgiving nature of short fiction. Many highly esteemed novels contain stretches that stumble, lumber and digress, with such “fat” either pardoned in the larger context ...

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. When the news is one report of human suffering — or environmental degradation or ...