The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice by Charles E. May
Published 1995 · 68,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice to read?
The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice scores 58 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Accessible academic prose with a moderate use of narratological and phenomenological terminology.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Engages sustained theoretical claims about the ontology and psychology of short fiction.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Dense with textual examples and theoretical synthesis across each chapter.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Primarily direct expository argument with illustrative close readings.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Symbols discussed analytically rather than deployed rhetorically.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Earnest scholarly tone throughout.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Arguments are concluded explicitly at chapter ends.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Conventional chapter-based monograph with a clear thesis arc.
How The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice is regarded
The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice holds a literary regard score of 69 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.