當代臺灣文學藝術系列：小說卷

Preface: People• Dilemma• Struggle • Values
Okay, so now you are holding in your hands a collection of short　stories. Whether you are making time for it on a busy day, or decide to　peruse it at your leisure, the first question that will probably occur to you is this: "What, a collection of short stories from the last 65 years? How come it's such a thin volume? Did they just pick only the best of the best, the creme de la creme?"
The honest answer is: no, the short stories in this book are not necessarily the very best specimens that Taiwan has to offer.
Since they are not, well—why would one choose them, why translate them? Isn't that a waste of time?
Lets look at it this way: how many short stories have been published in Taiwan since 1949 (or 1945, if you prefer)? If we say that in the first five years, it was roughly one short story per day, and assuming a tally of two per day over the following ten years, four per day for the next twenty, and six per day for the twenty years after that, and say that over the past ten years as many as eight stories were written every day—then all in all we are dealing with more than a hundred thousand short stories over the entire period. And that is not even counting the novels and "short short stories." Honestly, with such a wealth of material, it would be rather foolish to ask which short story is the best, which comes second, and so on.How exactly, then, should one approach this collection of short
stories you are holding in your hands? It is perhaps best to see them as a compilation of works that, for some reason or other, had the good fortune to catch someone's particular attention, and to be selected for translation into English. While serendipity may have played a large role in all this, the pieces presented in thisae are )e are yet fairly representative of their genre in Taiwan.

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