Friday, December 19, 2008

The Long Short Story

These days I'm thinking a lot about the long short story, in the terms Richard Ford established -- a long short story being just short of a novella in length. Whereas the novella is "designed" with an arc like a novel, the long short story has an arc like short fiction. We know the boundaries between these forms are rough and fuzzy. But for discussion, the long short story would be no longer than 15,000 words. The idea is that it is a long work of fiction that is not long enough to be bound in book form by itself. Normally the long short story is too long for the litmags, but fits nicely in a collection of stories, often serving as the anchor tenant. "Brokeback Mountain," in Annie Proulx's famous story collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories might be an example (although most of those stories are pretty long and I think "Brokeback..." played in the New Yorker). I'm not sure, but many Alice Munro stories have the long arc I'm thinking of, for example her "Passion" and "Silent" from the Runaway collection. I have a notion that online publishing might be perfect for the long short story, often as engaging and absorbing as a novel and at the same time with that graceful story arc that requires only an hour to read yet allows complexity and more than one turn before coming in for a landing. Can you name some other authors who write these or specific stories that fit this description?

5 comments:

  1. Apparently I am not supposed to comment--this my 3rd attempt!

    I'm getting very tired of my comment, having typed it several times, but first, in answer to your question--John Barth used the Long-short as well as the classic short form. Anne Beattie used the classic short and lost her public not because of the form but because of the repetitiveness of her characters and settings in those curious plotless gragments.

    Cheever, long short story. And novel of course. I think the novel might be dead soon. OK, I'm posting this before I hit enter and lose it all again. (It was much more articulate the first timer but I'm tired of my own comments. Love your blog!

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  2. Sorry about the bad typing errors. Next time I will spellcheck.

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  3. Did you know that next year Penguin is going to be allowing customers to choose among short stories and essays to create their own collections? I haven't bought a CD in years, but I do pay to download individual songs. I can imagine buying one short story at a time in a similar manner.

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  4. Mary Ann, this a perfect example of the future of publishing. Short Attention Span literature. The short story is the form most appropriate for downloading. When I have a BOOK, I display different behaviors than with digital reading. If I have a book, I always search ahead, to see how a scene has been resolved, or with a mystery, I always look at the ending, then decide if the writing is good enough to follow to that ending. But imagine 300 pages of digital data. Not very satisfying to fast forward, then find one's place again. The 10 hour book on paper will be an ancient form, like glyphs on papyrus.

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  5. I can't read a lot of material on the screen. When I imagine downloading a story, I imagine it to look just as well-designed as the pages of a book. I'll print it. I know lots of people are falling in love with their Kindles, but I am a paper and print kinda girl.

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