As far as artistic experiences go, short stories are particularly hard to explain. They are usually smaller than a novel and usually longer than a poem - though Hemingway, always the rebel, is supposed to have penned the shortest story of all time: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Regardless of length, the best short stories combine the familiarity of long form narrative with the epiphanic release of a haiku. For this reason, there is something vaguely unsettling about them. "A novel wants to befriend," the writer Joy Williams says, "a short story almost never." This year Forty South received entries to the Tasmanian Writers' Prize from around Tasmania, interstate and New Zealand and, as always, the process of judging was complicated by the astonishing variety of form, genre, voice and tone in response to our Island theme.