Coppard, A. E. | C. Henry Warren (essay date 1927)

C. Henry Warren (essay date 1927)

SOURCE: "The Modern Short Story," in The Bookman, London, Vol. LXXI, No. 424, January, 1927, pp. 236-37.

[Here, Warren discusses some general misconceptions regarding modern short fiction and describes Coppard as "the one writer of to-day who is exploiting . . . the best possibilities of the short story. "]

That the prejudice of the reading public against the short story is rapidly passing is sufficiently evidenced in the recent experiments of two well-known English publishing houses. (I am not concerned here, of course, with the standardised magazine type of short story, whose only interest, apart from the speeding of an idle hour, would lie in the indication it offered of the psychology of the mass of modern readers.) The first of these experiments comes, with commendable audacity, from the house of Jonathan Cape, who has embarked upon a "Story Series," each volume of which is to consist of a...

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