Writing in The New Yorker, Ian McEwan maintains that a novella should be "long enough for a reader to inhabit a world or a consciousness and be kept there, short enough to be read in a sitting or two and for the whole structure to be held in mind at first encounter." You could say the same thing about a short story. For this new collection, bibliophile Edward Squires reached out to ten of his writer friends, asking for a piece or fiction, but did not specify a length. Just tell the story, he said. Here's what he got.