Short Stuff

I like a 400+ page novel as much as the next fellow, but I’ve always had a special affection for short story collections. Short stories have a long history. A True Story and Lucius the Ass by 2nd century author Lucian certainly qualify. But the 19^th and 20^th centuries were the real heyday of the form. Widespread literacy combined with limited competing sedentary leisure activities created a market filled by a wide proliferation of magazines and newspapers. Writers could make a good living writing short stories for them. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Cather, and others made their names with short stories. F. Scott Fitzgerald earned as much from the stories he published in the Saturday Evening Post as he did from his novels. For readers, short stories were perfect for a ride home on a commuter train or an hour in a lawn chair on a warm afternoon. They could be consumed in full in one sitting without any cliffhanger and without losing one’s place.

Short stories often were an author’s best work. I like everything Mark Twain ever wrote, for example, but I’d recommend his collected short stories over any single one of his novels. I also like Hemingway’s collected short fiction better than any of his novels. 20^th century pulp fiction magazines – science fiction in particular – tapped the market further and made the careers of folks such as Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradbury. Some of the finest short fiction came from pulp scifi writers. If anyone has any doubts, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volumes I & II, containing 48 classic short fiction pieces written prior to 1964, should settle the issue.

In some ways today it is easier than ever to get short fiction published if you include Webzines and similar online sites. (A collection of my short stories, by the way can be found at Richard’s Mirror.) However, traditional venues that pay more than a pittance (e.g. The New Yorker, Atlantic, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and precious few others), if they pay anything at all, have dwindled, and those are reserved almost exclusively for established authors. No matter how catchy a writer’s turns of phrase may be, making a living today as a short fiction writer is, if not outright impossible, wildly improbable. Traditional publication venues have dried up because the market for them collapsed. Westerners in general and Americans in particular have been scaling back on recreational reading for decades, but the trend accelerated in the 21^st century. Time spent reading recreationally is down 30% since 2004. According to Pew Research, 25% of the adult population hasn’t read a single book in the past year; the survey didn’t distinguish between recreational reading and other kinds such as academic assignments. The median book count for adult (over 18) Americans is four books per year, but, again, assigned reading figures into that. Yet, book readership is holding up better than short fiction. On that commuter train back home in 2018, we are far less likely to read a short story in The New Yorker and far more likely to watch a YouTube video on a cell phone.

Nonetheless writers continue to write short fiction even if they keep their day jobs. Some of it ends up in novel-length collections or anthologies, which is one of the few ways the format still can be commercial if the stars align. I’ve enjoyed two this past week:

Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl

Dahl (1916-1990), a former RAF fighter pilot, is best known for his children’s literature (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, Witches, et al.), but the adult literature of this prolific author is wickedly humorous fare on a par with the tales of Robert Bloch (author of Psycho). First published in 1960, Kiss Kiss contains eleven tales of betrayal, murder, passive aggressive games, and comeuppances. The short stories still bite as well as kiss. Strongly recommended.

Mash Up edited by Gardner Dozois

This scifi anthology is gimmicky, but that is OK. The gimmick works. 13 of today’s leading scifi authors (Robert Charles Wilson, Mike Resnick, Elizabeth Bear, Allen M. Steele, Daryl Gregory, Lavie Tidhar, John Scalzi, Nancy Kress, Jack Campbell, Paul Di Filippo, Mary Robinette Kowal, Tad Williams, James Patrick Kelly) were asked to write stories, each starting with a famous first line from literature. So, there is a tale with someone called Ishmael, while in another a spectre haunts Europe, while in yet another a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, and so on. Some of the stories are heavily influenced by the works from which the opening lines are borrowed, and others go off in completely different directions. Anthologies by their nature are uneven, but there is some good work in here. Moderately recommended.

  

**** ****

It’s hard to comment on the decline of reading without sounding judgmental, and to some degree properly so – but not entirely. Many of our substitutes have merit, too, and most are, at bottom, literature after all. Screenwriting, for example, is, as the second part of the word says, writing. Short story anthologies have their screen analogs, such as the marvelous 1923 Buster Keaton vehicle Three Ages (love stories set in the Stone Age, ancient Rome, and modern 1920s), the edgy 1932 precode If I Had a Million (vignettes of eight people picked at random by an eccentric millionaire to inherit $1,000,000 each), the dubious Woman Times Seven (1967) that forces one to wonder if the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini knew seven women, and the superb Argentinian film Wild Tales in which acts of vengeance by legitimately aggrieved parties are shockingly disproportionate to the initial offenses. Given the books on my coffee table, it seemed appropriate on Saturday finally to see one such film that was recommended to me long ago.

Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)

This consists of eleven vignettes, all using coffee and cigarettes to keep people together at a table who otherwise would be unable to tolerate each other’s company. The first vignette was filmed by Jim Jarmusch in 1986 and the last shortly before the final release, by which time smoking no longer was legal in most of the movie’s locations. The encounters in the vignettes range from absurd to merely uncomfortable to openly hostile. There is a good cast and some good dialogue. Some of the actors play themselves. Cate Blanchett plays herself and her envious cousin. It’s a fun flick…once. I don’t anticipate watching it again. Thumbs Up, but not way up.

**** ****

Last week belonged to the shorts, but this week I think something longer is in order: perhaps Empire (1965), Andy Warhol’s 8-hour single shot slow motion picture of the Empire State Building – or perhaps not.

Trailer