Books, Arts & Manners: Reading for Pleasure

Sturgeon’s West

By Theodore Sturgeon and Don Ward Doubleday, 186 pp., $5.95 It’s hard to believe now, but just a couple of decades ago most of our best authors took pride in writing commercial short stories. But with the rise of TV and the collapse of the pulps and general-audience slicks, the genre is nearly extinct, its nearest surviving relative being that species of sterile, copybook exercise turned out grimly by university students of creative writing.