Kurt Vonnegut's most useful advice to writers was not about finding an audience. It was about shrinking one.
The Marginalian gathered Vonnegut's eight tenets of storytelling this week, and the one that lands hardest is the instruction to "Write to please just one person." Open a window to the whole world, he warned, and your story will catch pneumonia. It reads like modesty. It is closer to engineering. A story written for one person can assume things — a shared joke, a shared silence, a history it never has to explain. A story written for everyone spends its energy explaining itself to people who were never going to stay.
Almost everything else in this week's literary news is a test of that claim.