what a year for the short story.
in Canada, Alice Munro wins a Nobel Prize for a lifetime of short story magic, then Lynn Coady wins the Giller Prize for HELL GOING, a book of shorts. further afield in the commonwealth (England), American Claire Vaye Watkins won the Dylan Thomas award with her collection BATTLEBORN, a book about the sandy underbelly of Nevadan life.
i wonder what this all means.
i’d like to think it’s due to a sense of structural play because i think writers take risks in shorts that they avoid in novels. i also think that the lack of space in shorts force exaggerated writing and this lends a certain energy. i think readers are looking for energy in reading, now more than ever, and this is driven by the adrenaline rush that is TV and, to a lesser and lesser extent, movies.
in a recent article in the NY Times, Leslie Kaufman reports that the speculation is that short stories are easily digestible on the small screen (kindle; kobo). and publishers, normally discouraged by how story collections undersell, are pleased that individual stories sold on amazon as singles are actually selling–keeping in mind that it’s big name writers that are piecemealing their collections. writers like George Saunders, AKA God.
here’s the NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/books/a-good-fit-for-small-screens-short-stories-are-selling.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0
what’s your (short) story?