Why not? Susan Harris, the brilliantly witty editor of Words Without Borders coined the phrase in an ongoing joke with the brilliant Chad Post, director of Open Letter Books, about how literary translators in large part tend to be on the shorter side. We all agree this is brilliant. Susan has cast our collective stature in a more positive light with the addition of “alluring” and thus it is that alluringly short comes into being.

While I have always aspired to alluring shortness, there are other potential interpretations for the phrase than physical description. Attention span, for example, or length of writing. We’ll see…