By Becoming a Bird

I believe that the short story differs from the book in the same way that poetry does, and that the best stories are more like poems than novels.

Brief stories seem to be more concentrated - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they function, you never forget about them because they hit and explode. A lot smokeier and less defined than short fiction, long fiction has a distinct atmosphere.
A vignette, sliver, or fragment of a short story. Although it serves as a biopsy of the human situation, it is incapable of independent thought.