Shorter can be better …

… With Biographies, Size Matters - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As I read “Rabbit’s Blues,” I thought: Why aren’t there lots of books like this? Biographies have been growing longer and longer for decades now, and even when they’re about deserving subjects, they’re still likely to be far too clotted with hour-by-hour detail to suit the needs of the general reader. What I’d like to see, by contrast, are brief lives of artists about whom it would be pointless to publish what we now think of as a full-length book—the supporting players of art, so to speak.