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!