Authors Electric

As a child, staring at an old atlas, Czechoslovakia was a country that somehow fascinated. The spelling of the country’s name, the pronunciation, the shape of it on the map. I was twenty-four by the time I saw the place for myself, arriving there three years after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, so no visa necessary, the country was open now to European travellers. Prague. That’s where I first ran out of money for food, and had to eat on alternate days, lying on public benches to conserve calories, nose bleeding. Getting kicked awake in the mornings by railway station guards in pale green uniforms with wooden-handled revolvers in their waistbands. I’d first been introduced to the novels of Milan Kundera four years earlier, by a guy I met who had written a book on film while he had been unemployed for three years. Perhaps the connection between this person and Kundera was that Kundera had been a film lecturer at one point, or, more correctly, a lecturer on world litera...

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...