John Cheever Reads "The Swimmer"

James Franco Starring in a Movie Based on James Franco Short Stories

The Rise of Flash Fiction

The Irish Times discusses it.

From the piece...

But what is a flash and why is the form gaining in popularity? It’s hard to define exactly what a flash is, as no one definition is accepted, never mind a name: they are variously called short-short stories, micro fiction, pocket-size, postcard, palm-size and smoke-long stories. 

In my world a flash has about 500 words and is part poem, part story. Plot is not as crucial as atmosphere and significant detail, and, for me, language is paramount. Though short on words, the flash story is long on depth and should sting like good poetry. Punchy, succinct and surprising, the best flash will shift the reader’s heart but also keep it beating hard.

Just like poetry, every word in a flash must deserve its place. Flash stories revel in musical prose. There is no room for frills and furbelows but there is for hints, implication and mystery. They accommodate the surreal and quirky well.

John Steinbeck Reads

Hear him read two short stories, here.

The Short Story Boom is Bogus

So says Salon.

From the post...

It is true that many online outlets are now selling short fiction to readers on a per-story basis; Kaufman mentions Amazon’s Kindle Singles program and Byliner, a company with which the Times launched an e-books publication program late last year. In the past, these outlets have been lauded as a new way to purvey long-form journalism: reported articles too long for many magazines but not quite as substantial as a traditional book. As a reviewer, I can attest that many nonfiction books read like padded magazine articles, and if writers can make a fair return on their investment of time, research expenses and expertise from these leaner, less expensive pieces (a big “if”), this is indeed a promising innovation. But at the moment, it’s not clear that they can.

Similarly, digital publishing could theoretically help the novella — a work of fiction somewhere between a short story and a novel in length — out of an awkward, between-bar-stools market gap; novellas are usually too short to publish economically as stand-alone print books but an ungainly fit in a story collection. The notably creative small press Melville House publishes a novella series to which readers can subscribe, receiving two titles per month in either digital or print form. (These are, however, novellas by well-known, usually long-dead authors like Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather, and presumably most are in the public domain.)

Still, the idea that such programs have led to renewed general interest in reading short stories is, like much of the Times article, speculative and fueled by wishful thinking. “The single-serving quality of a short narrative is the perfect art form for the digital age,” says one hopeful author, Amber Dermont, whose short story “A Splendid Wife” current ranks at No. 30,849 in the Kindle store. (Her novel, the recipient of a glowing front-page review in the New York Times Book Review last year, is at 14,880.)

Frank Kafka's "A Country Doctor"

An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe

Sherman Alexie Reads Jessamyn West

The Stories of Julie Hayden

Have you ever read a story by Julie Hayden? Do you even know who Julie Hayden is? Neither did S. Kirk Walsh, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

From the piece...

JULIE HAYDEN’S ONE AND ONLY book, The Lists of the Past, was released 36 years ago this summer by Viking Press. Ten of its stories were originally published in the pages of the New Yorker, where Hayden worked for 16 years before her death at age 42.

I discovered Hayden while driving with my husband from Los Angeles to our home in Austin, Texas. For the road trip, I had downloaded multiple podcasts, including several fiction programs from the New Yorker. Along a barren stretch of Highway 10 in southeast Arizona, we listened to Lorrie Moore read Hayden's story "Day-Old Baby Rats." The story follows a tormented woman as she wanders the streets and subways of Manhattan, through stores and other public spaces, and finally through the heavy doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In the darkness of a confessional, while sipping Scotch from a flask, she tries to ask a priest for help. A slightly older and more broken-down version of Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood, Hayden’s nameless protagonist embodies the acute loneliness of living in Manhattan — how the distorted lens of irrational fears and past traumas can transform the city into a dangerous landscape, seemingly impossible to navigate.

By the time the story was over, my husband and I had exited the highway and parked outside a diner. Only a few cars were in the lot, which was on a hill overlooking distant mountains. It was an odd and wonderful setting in which to listen to a story that so fully took me back to New York City — where at times during my early twenties I had experienced similar loneliness and intoxication. Over burgers and fries, my husband and I talked about the emotional power and mastery of the story and how it reminded us of our lost, younger selves. Neither of us could believe that we had never heard of this extraordinary writer.

Charles Bukowski - An American Author

Murder He Wrote

Dismissed by Aldous Huxley as 'vulgar', Edgar Allan Poe is saluted now as a virtuoso of the short story. The grisly deaths he inflicted on his characters helped make him the master of the macabre. Adam Frost, Jim Kynvin and Jamie Lenman investigate how he killed them off, here.

Vladimir Nabakov's Lost Short Story on Boxing, Found, and Published

We can thank the Times Literary Supplement for that.

From the intro...


Nabokov was a devotee of sports and games, ranging from boxing, football and tennis, through chess and cryptic crosswords, to the play of thought, language, desire, art, and the divine universe – those more abstract forms of play that he invokes at the beginning of “Breitensträter– Paolino”, sounding, for all the world, like a Presocratic philosopher, only one come to declare not that all is air, water, earth, or fire, but that all is play. Never again would he express so openly and nakedly this vision of life and art as play, which would govern his work for the next fifty years; no wonder that Nabokov, who later said an artist is lost when he seeks to define art, should have let the piece lie hidden in the archives of the emigration. 

As a young man Nabokov had taken boxing lessons from a “wonderful rubbery Frenchman, Monsieur Loustatot”, fondly remembered in his autobiography, Speak, Memory; he boxed competitively as an undergraduate at Cambridge; and in Berlin he and his friend George Hessen staged a number of bouts. In 1924, he published a poem called “The Boxer’s Girlfriend”, and in his first major work, The Tragedy of Mister Morn (see below), the protagonist, Morn, talks about a fist fight with expert attention to specific punches: a hook is a “comma”, a jab a “full stop”. 

Of all the sports Nabokov could have chosen to focus on, he took in boxing the one that concentrates as no other the pain and violence he always saw in play. But “Breitensträter–Paolino” is a very literary and verbal account of boxing – the author’s red ink seeping across a skein of metaphor into the blood on the referee’s vest – and is punctuated according to the varying rhythms and geometries of the sport: its quick flurries, its wary circlings, its duelling antitheses.

Frank Kafka's "The Country Doctor"

The Tell-Tale Heart

EL CORAZÓN DELATOR (english subtitles) from Alfonso S. Suárez on Vimeo.

"New Boy," Based on Roddy Doyle Short Story

Dave Eggers Reads Roddy Doyle

Hear Eggers read "Bullfighting," here.

How to Write a Short Story

Tenth of December

Whenever George Saunders publishes a new story in the New Yorker, I post it. Why? Because George Saunders is brilliant, that's why.

The Harry Potter/Glass Family Connection

Is there a tie between J.D. Salinger's work and Harry Potter?!

From a piece on Boing Boing...

“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” is also the only Salinger text to be made into a film, My Foolish Heart (1949). The film was a critical flop and followed Salinger’s original only glancingly, which enraged the writer. In fact, Salinger hated My Foolish Heart so much that he vowed to never again allow his work to be adapted into film, which is why we’ll probably never see a movie version of the classic character from The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield. But Salinger’s vow is especially interesting considering that one of the characters in “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” closely resembles one of the most popular book and film characters of all time, Harry Potter.

The plot of “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” follows an afternoon visit between two New York girls who used to be college roommates, Eloise and Mary Jane, where they spend an afternoon drinking too much and reminiscing about their college days. They talk in Salinger’s distinctive educated, upper-middle class dialect, with frequent stops and starts, the conversation often seeming to go nowhere. But from their meandering talk we get a sense of their characters that more pointed conversation likely would obscure, in particular learning that Eloise is rather a jaded individual. We also see Eloise’s young daughter, Ramona, who appears briefly but significantly. One passage has Ramona describing her imaginary friend, Jimmy Jimmereeno, and it is him that bears the Harry Potter resemblance.

A Piano Piece Inspired by Franny and Zooey

Listen to it here.