6,000 names on the petition and five tweets a week: the Society of Authors has launched its attack on Radio 4. BBC Controller Gwyneth Williams’ decision in June to reduce the BBC short story slots from three to one drove a cohort of objectors, including Ali Smith, Joanne Harris, Neil Gaiman and the SoA, to organise their campaign: the short story tweetathon. Every Wednesday, from 11am, a famous author will tweet out the first line of a very short story with four tweeters invited to complete the story in 670 characters. Last week, Ian Rankin sounded the starting pistol: “I woke up on the floor of a strange bedroom, clutching a single bullet in my right hand. I couldn’t see any sign of a gun.” Today, Sarah Waters takes charge; the minimum-opus will be delivered at 4pm.
AL Kennedy launched a passionate defense of the literary form a
couple years ago in the Independent, asking us to:
‘Bear with me for a moment, because together we have to rediscover what the short story is really all about. So go and get a glass, maybe one with a stem, if you’re in that kind of household, but
definitely a glass, not one of those plastic things your children chuck at one another. I’ll wait here.
Sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. Tap the glass gently with your nail, or a pen. If the glass has a fault or a crack, it won’t make much of a sound. If it’s flawless, it will sing, resonate
beyond itself. That’s the best way I can show you the nature of the short story. It may be small, fragile, but to create that kind of seamless clarity – that’s a massive challenge to any writer,
and a remarkable gift for any reader.’
The SoA and their army seems to be gaining ground; the petition and campaigners such as Stephen Fry and Joanna
Lumley—admittedly rather promiscuous when it comes to jumping on bandwagons—forced a half-hearted capitulation from the BBC with the reinstatement of a second slot.
That’s great news. We’ve all spent an hour immersed in the company of Chekhov, Maupassant or Poe. And short fiction is also a quick way of revisiting Faulkner, Nabokov or Hemingway and their meticulous prose in crystalline form. “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit,” Hemingway once confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
To bring you up-to-date, here’s the best of current short fiction:
1. Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro (Chatto & Windus)
. Scenes from Village Life, Amos Oz (Chatto & Windus)
3. Saints and Sinners, Edna O’Brien
4. A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: The Collected Stories, Margaret Drabble (Penguin Classics)
5. There but for the, Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
Not to forget Crime by Ferdinand von Schirach; The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad; Pulse by Julian Barnes; The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín and an author, whose Visit From the The Goon Squad defies every category, Jennifer Egan.
Fleur Macdonald is editor of The Omnivore.
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