The Short Story’s Novel Life

Short story, a condensed literary genre, has got a lease of new life with the proliferation of the digital media, beginning with e-book revolution which hit us in 2007. There is an ongoing debate of reading having taken a backseat in today’s world of never-ending deadlines and smart phones. But the fact of the matter is that people are reading on the screen rather than on paper. With short attention spans and a fast life, the short story which as Edgar Allan Poe defined it, ‘that which can be read in one sitting’ has gained momentum.  The length of an average short story takes just a couple of screens and  suits the rampant users of the internet and latest smart handheld gadgetry. ‘Amazon, for instance, created its Kindle Singles program in 2011 for publishing short fiction and nonfiction, brief-enough to be read in less than two hours. Although the list price is usually modest, a dollar or two, authors keep up to 70 percent of the royalties: a welcome revenue for fledgling authors and a potentially big payoff for well-known writers.’ Within the space of a few pages, a great author weaves a compelling story which, with a rich narrative and vibrant characters and a dramatic denouement, acquires the depth of a Dickensian and the pace of a thriller, creating memorable literature that impacts the reader long after they have finished reading.  Virginia Wolfe, talking of photography and the art of short story writing, said, “Isn’t it odd how much more one sees in a photograph than in real life? This gives us, I think, a clue to the enduring power and appeal of the short story—they are snapshots of the human condition and of human nature, and when they work well, and work on us, we are given the rare chance to see in them more than in real life.”

The genesis of the short story began with the caveman recounting the tale of his hunting encounter for the day. Improvising, deleting, dramatizing, rephrasing, repeating, exposing and yet withholding details to carve out the frame of a great story, the narrative traversed the ages in the form of anecdotes, parables and fabricated lies( an art ) to the Canterbury tales, fairy tales, legends relayed through poetry. Short story appeared in the printed format just two centuries ago with the industrial revolution and the surging middle class which demanded literary fodder through magazines and periodicals. A plethora of writers experimented and achieved success through their writings of intense stories, which were visited and reread time and again by generations down the line.  There were no evolutionary planes, a slow build-up to a crescendo.  In 1837, a printed short story collection was born when Nathaniel Hawthorne published his short stories titled Twice Told Tales..  The fact that in the early to mid-19th century, Hawthorne and Poe and Turgenev wrote timeless short stories virtually without any falterings, is indicative that the short story is hardwired in the human imagination, and was just waiting for an outlet stream which built into an ocean through the works of Melville, Nabokov, Calvino, Rudyard Kipling, Dickens, Dylan Thomas, DH Lawrence and the like. A long story of short stories that began with Hawthorne reached its zenith with the publications of Anton Chekov.

Chekov is heralded as the greatest short story writer of all times, and rightly so because he transformed the narrative from a beginning - middling- end plot to a formless structure. He recognized the meaninglessness of life, its random dictates and answered questions that people lived and died for. He ploughed into the story format creating fluid characters, resisting judgments, and neat endings. His stories are lifelike i.e. unpredictable, arbitrary, thought provoking and disillusioned. The advent of the 20^th century in the world of short story writing thereafter is all Chekovian. The short story entered its golden age. Short story writers earned particularly good sums especially in America. ‘Magazines proliferated, readers were eager, circulations rose, fees went up and up. In the 1920s, Scott Fitzgerald was paid $4,000 by the Saturday Evening Post for a single short story.’ The Chekovian legacy lasted a long time without any new style bisecting it concretely, till the advent of the modern story.
We have spoken of the event-plot story and Chekovian story. Most short stories, even today, fall into one of these two categories. From them, other types emerged over the coming decades. The cryptic tale baffles many an untrained reader with a depth of meaning hidden under the apparent text, and the poetic story is for the connoisseurs. The biographical story is the latest modern form of short story writing blurring the line between fiction and fact to render sensational stories, maybe a take from the media which sensationalizes hard reality to appeal to the viewers’ appetite for drama in life.
‘The Gorkha’s Daughter’ is a short story collection by Prajwal Parajuly, a student of the Oxford Creative Writing MSt course. He was born in Sikkim to an Indian father and Napalese mother. He signed a record-breaking two-book deal with UK publisher Quercus. The five-figure deal makes Prajwal Parajuly, 27, Quercus’ youngest author and the youngest Indian ever to sign an international book contract. The book is out in the market and was discussed critically at the Jaipur Lit Fest, a sure shot indication of the popularity and resurgence of the short fiction genre in the contemporary world. The fever has caught on and novel writers are now switching over to the new demand of the digital era and new formats of writing. Story collections which had been put on a backburner by acclaimed writers like Tom Perrotaa ( books ‘Election’ and ‘Little Children’ have been adapted into Oscar winning films)  are seeing the light of day.

I recently read a short story collection ‘Difficult Pleasures’ by Anjum Hasan . She revels in the luxury of variety, of trying out so many different garbs or voices; but the perfection lies in its brevity and pointedness and really in the feeling of expansion into life that penetrates our consciousness by means of a style that produces a sense of truth and richness. She views each story as a specific invention, a liberating experience to move out of her own skin and slip into a character’s head and find the language and psychology to tell their story – that’s where all the difficult pleasure is!

My last article was about book apps, the latest format of books on the smart phone, and now the above topic of the new life of the short story has been an endeavor to explore the latest genres of books and reading in the contemporary world. This talk about short stories has surfaced many an unforgettable story from the recesses of my consciousness – which I shall continue in my next article. In the meantime readers can too go explore and recollect their favorite short stories and if you mail them to me I shall expound on them in my next interaction with you.

Happy short story readings on the KINDLE!

Book Apps

                                                        
I am an educationist and my experience as a curriculum developer and administrator for educational institutions led me on a path to develop book-reading worshop-modules incorporating fiction/nonfiction books as the bases of teaching-learning process instead of dry, prosaic academic readings. My book presentations entail power point presentations, maps, documentaries and music downloads along with excerpts from relevant books. Sometimes I share my insights and critical appraisals of books with book lovers on different platforms – colleges, art galleries, libraries and book reading clubs. The journey through these book reading workshops keeps me abreast of the latest in the book publishing world in India and abroad.
New book formats have become part of our reading lives, and they simultaneously create opportunities and challenges to my reading workshops. The e-book has segued into book apps since the launch of  ipad in 2009. It sent the publishers and developers into a tizzy and created app space to redesign, create and develop books in an avant-garde  fashion.  It’s a much more collaborative process and it’s hard to look at any of the apps and say ‘this person made that’… it requires an input from many a different disciplines. The cozy relationship of a writer and his book is replaced by artists, animators, designers and storytellers and their book app.

The London Olympics created a stir with their spectacular preparations and execution. The news doing the rounds in the book world was the Heuristic’s award-winning London: A City through Time which challenged our interpretation of a ‘book’. Taking as its basis Pan Macmillan's London Encyclopedia, the app packed in a simple design and a scrolling menu which navigates 6,000 articles about places, people and events from the city's history. There are panoramas of the city, rare photographs, video documentaries, a timeline and audio tours. The app is not linear like a book and one can tour places and events from links on the map. Indeed a fascinating guide to an amazing city and is well-worth investigating.

 Touch Press is one of the developers that is exploring how books can be reinvented for the iPad. Previous titles, Solar System and Gems and Jewels, have taken coffee table books and re-engineered them for tablet devices. Touch Press has moved away from non-fiction and has renewed its partnership with publishers Faber to try out some poetry. A new app compiled Shakespeare's 154 sonnets and it costs about the same as a decent printed book. But it goes far beyond what could ever be achieved in print and after a few hours of playing with it you'll feel that £9.99 is a bargain. Central to the app are the 154 video readings of the sonnets read by great actors, which is a wonderful thing and the readings here are a delight.
Touch Press experimentation with T.S Eliot’s poem ‘The Wasteland’ was very impressive. There is the poem itself and detailed, informative line-by-line notes which will help students and anyone who wants to understand the work in more depth. Beyond that, there are six readings of the poem, including two by Eliot himself and an excellent one by Sir Alec Guinness, a picture gallery and a facsimile of Eliot’s original manuscript.
One of the most interesting areas in book-apps right now is the one aimed at the children, as publishers blur the boundaries between books, games, animation and creative software. The handling of a book is difficult for a very young child. They have to know how to turn pages, and have to manipulate this thing, whereas with a tablet, you don’t need to work a mouse, or know the concept of folders.  There is a direct relationship between the child and the app or the digital book, and it is manipulateable with tremendous ease. That causes delight not just for the child but the parent, too. There’s a challenge for publishers here though. Books have been designed to be read with or by parents, so while it’s important to create book-apps that are engaging and fun, it would be a shame if that came at the expense of the emotional value of the book: of the parent and child sitting together. The answer could lie with writers and artists who also understand the fundamentals of interactive design. “Those are going to be the new children’s book rock stars!”
Me Books is the digital equivalent of an independent picture-book shop, which is trying to help parents who are struggling to filter the sheer number of book-apps available on iOS."It should be exactly like going into a little picture-book shop where you trust the guy who runs it, and know the stuff he's selling is good.The key feature of Me Books is its "draw and record" feature, where children can draw an area on-screen – a "hotspot" – and then record their own sounds or words for it.
That may sound minor, but in the Peppa Pig and Ladybird Me Books apps, it was enormously popular where they invent their own zebra calls or insist that visitors to the house record their own take on Daddy Pig. In the future, we'd really love the notion of people being able to save, swap and share versions of the stories, both with other people that have the app and the ability and to send your version of The Three Little Pigs to grandparents.
As children grow into their teens and tweens, they’re becoming much more immersed in interactive content, particularly video games, where there is a nonlinear world that they’re getting to explore. The challenge for the publishing industry, then, is to tell stories in the way that these teenagers are used to and want to receive them.
I have shared my exploration through my smart phone and the internet with my readers. In fact rereading the write-up, it is more of what a reader would find on the net. I have bunched in all the relevant detailing on the net to take you through the new world of book reading. What delighted me no end was the fact that my book reading workshops are very much on the lines of the book apps designed by Touch Press, where-in I take the audience through virtual tours of settings in the book, the historical, social, and political backdrop of the book, pictures and maps of architecture, paintings and designs in the book – besides deciphering the plot and literary study of the technique and themes in the book. My most delightful experience so far has been ‘An Equal Music’, written by Vikram Seth in which I made the audience listen to all the five pieces of European Classical Music woven in the story of the book, with an added tour of the geography and artistic musical theatres in London, Vienna and Venice.
Do come to one of my LIVE BOOK APP READINGS in the forthcoming months!