Authors Electric

A dogge hath a day. [1545 R. Taverner tr. Erasmus' Adages (ed. 2) 63] Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew, and dog will have his day. [1600-1 Shakespeare Hamlet v. i. 286] Young blood must have its course, lad, And every dog his day.    [1863 C. Kingsley Water Babies ii.]          It’s over two years now since my literary agent said to me, I can’t remember if it was on the phone or by email – “Every Dog Has His Day”      I think by then my novel, The Survival of Thomas Ford , had been failing to sell to London and Edinburgh publishers for six months, the novel my agent had initially described as “a certainty”…hope was dwindling, I did not feel at all like a Canine which was destined to have “its day”.      Still, it was a worthwhile thing for him to say to me, it has stuck in my brain ever since.     Later that year, 2011, the Door to ePublish...

There was quite a lengthy period in the history of publishing when the short story was held in higher regard than the novel. A glance now at the collected works of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, or Vladimir Nabokov, shows the huge volume of short stories they produced alongside their novels. Authors such as Katherine Mansfield, O. Henry, “Saki”, and Sherwood Anderson published short stories exclusively, in some cases famously being unable to manage the novel form when they tried their hand at it.   Aside from being a playwright, when it came to prose, Anton Chekhov was entirely satisfied to focus his art on the perfection and development of the short story alone. In his memoir, A MOVEABLE FEAST, Hemingway makes it quite clear that he and F. Scott Fitzgerald turned to the sale of short stories to magazines whenever they urgently needed to keep the wolf from the door; Hemingway only being more stringent in his ideals than Fitzgerald by refusing to change th...