Certainly it is easy to create a literary aesthetics of brevity. The haiku and the aphorism have their admirers. Ernest Hemingway is widely thought to have invented a perfect short story in the form of a classified ad: "For sale, baby shoes, never used." Edgar Allen Poe famously developed a theory for why short stories are superior to novels. His explanation of that theory was, IMHO, longer winded than it had to be. The point, though, was that a story should have a unitary impact and this could be achieved best with a work that could be read in a single sitting. Yet one shouldn't let the aesthetics of the short haul have the last word. The world has room for Melville's and Tolstoy's and Victor Hugo's novels, and creating a Reader's Digest version thereof will never be the same. As for Hemingway's six word story? He didn't really write it. It is the work of a playwright named John deGroot who created a one-actor play about "Papa...