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Really Short Stories
Posted by
Quiet One
,
28 August 2007
·
36 views
Short stories are an art. One of the most celebrated Argentinian writers, Julio Cortazar, who was a big boxing fan once said: "a short story wins by KO, a novel, by points".
There are some really short stories out there. It's very hard to condensate in a few words a whole story and atmosphere, because most of the story cannot be written, must be hinted.
Here is one example:
Ernst Hemingway: "Baby shoes for sale, never worn". It raises many questions: why were the shoes never worn? Did the baby died before birth? Was it an abortion? Who is selling the shoes? Yet, the story is all there.
Some others:
Steven Meretzky: "He read his own obituary with confusion"
Ben Bova: "To save mankind, he died again"
Margaret Atwood: "Corpse parts missing. Doctor buys yacht"
And my all time favorite:
Frederick Brown: "The last man on Earth sat in a room. There was a knock on the door"
This is actually a remake of a short story credited to Bailey Aldrich in a Borges anthology: "A woman is alone in her house. She knows there is no one else in the world: everybody else died. There is a knock on the door". Many scholars think that this story was never written by Aldrich but by Borges himself, who credited it to Aldrich.
In spanish, the shortest stories known are:
Augusto Monterroso: "...y cuando despertó el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí" ("...and when he woke up, the dinosaur was still there")
Luis Felipe Lomeli, with his story "The Emigrated": "-Olvida usted algo? - Ojalá." ("Have you forgot something? - I wish")
There are some really short stories out there. It's very hard to condensate in a few words a whole story and atmosphere, because most of the story cannot be written, must be hinted.
Here is one example:
Ernst Hemingway: "Baby shoes for sale, never worn". It raises many questions: why were the shoes never worn? Did the baby died before birth? Was it an abortion? Who is selling the shoes? Yet, the story is all there.
Some others:
Steven Meretzky: "He read his own obituary with confusion"
Ben Bova: "To save mankind, he died again"
Margaret Atwood: "Corpse parts missing. Doctor buys yacht"
And my all time favorite:
Frederick Brown: "The last man on Earth sat in a room. There was a knock on the door"
This is actually a remake of a short story credited to Bailey Aldrich in a Borges anthology: "A woman is alone in her house. She knows there is no one else in the world: everybody else died. There is a knock on the door". Many scholars think that this story was never written by Aldrich but by Borges himself, who credited it to Aldrich.
In spanish, the shortest stories known are:
Augusto Monterroso: "...y cuando despertó el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí" ("...and when he woke up, the dinosaur was still there")
Luis Felipe Lomeli, with his story "The Emigrated": "-Olvida usted algo? - Ojalá." ("Have you forgot something? - I wish")
Surely the shortest story is "The End"?