In his study of Kafka Kelman quotes a diary entry by the author: ‘ “Don't you want to join us?” I was asked recently by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffee-house that was already almost deserted. “No, I don't,” I said.’ Kelman then comments:

The remark shows, among other things, Kelman's keen alertness to the vignette-type short story, examples of which he would have come across in Hemingway's first booklet in our time (1924), which is not much longer than Short Tales from the Night Shift. Or if he did not see this small-press Parisian publication, he would have noticed the same vignettes, interspersed and italicized, in Hemingway's longer collection with the same, but capitalized title (1925).

Greyhound for Breakfast (1987), which together with The Burn represents the peak of Kelman's short-story writing, contains a host of such ‘wee’ stories, ranging from the single paragraph to a page and a half. In one of them, ‘An old story’, we find a blocked creative situation equivalent to Kafka's. The possibilities for a story are sketched, yet the story is never properly told.