“I have been so rattled by the news,” she says, “that other than the odd short story I have stopped reading fiction. I’m only able to read poetry, essays, and the newspapers.” Lionel Shriver feels the same way. “There doesn’t seem any need to make anything up right now. “I’m finding stories a bit too long, and also made up,” Kate Clanchy tells me. Some have struggled to read fiction of any kind. So I got in touch with writers who had won or been shortlisted for the NSSA over the last 14 years – a cohort that represents a recent history of the short story in the UK. In order to test my theory I needed to see if other people shared my experience, ideally people who habitually read a wide range of literature, including short stories. They took me far from locked-down London, to Paris, Thailand and the Florida coast, and brought me back again before the next news report or government briefing colonised anything else I was trying to think about.īut then, I am a special case: I knew this was going to be a spring and summer of reading short fiction anyway, because I’m one of the judges for this year’s BBC National short story award. I read “The Open Boat”, Stephen Crane’s gripping tale of survival at sea, Joseph Conrad’s haunting account of doubleness, “The Secret Sharer”, and Julio Cortázar’s ingenious Möbius strip of a story, “Continuity of Parks”. So whenever I could, between cooking and trying to teach maths, I read a story. The only things that survived were those I began and finished in one sitting. The space in my mind where novels persisted when I wasn’t reading them suddenly seemed to be missing, or busy with some other task (comparing national death rates, perhaps). Not because they slip down easily, but because whenever I put a book down, the move from fiction back to reality was so jarring that what I’d just read would be overpowered. But as we recovered and settled into the strange new everyday, I found that short stories really were the reading material that best fit my days. The time just before lockdown began was weird and chaotic: my wife and I and our daughters fell ill with presumed Covid-19, and it killed my best friend’s mum. And that is often how novels are read, 15 minutes at a time. The busier people get, the less time they have to read a story … people often don’t have a straight half hour of time to read at all. Stories require concentration and seriousness. There’s a lot of yak about how short stories are perfect for the declining public attention span. I’ve written before against the argument that short stories are ideal for time-pressured readers, or, even worse, short attention spans, but I can’t put it better than Lorrie Moore: So did the lockdown represent the perfect moment for short stories: those small, sharp bursts of literary flavour? Those Skittles of the book world, as some seem to consider them. Even for those who weren’t poleaxed by home schooling and the demands of childcare, something seemed to be making it hard to concentrate on novels – or at least the ones that hadn’t been filmed and considerately deployed to iPlayer, like Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Whether because of furloughing or just not being able to go to the pub, the general assumption among readers was that there would be a lot of free time to catch up on the big ones that had until now, like Ahab’s white whale, got away.īut as time passed I saw these plans fall beneath an avalanche of sourdough starters, 1,000-piece puzzles and Zoom pub quizzes. In the early days of the coronavirus lockdown my Twitter feed was full of conversations about whether it was time to read Middlemarch or The Brothers Karamazov, Bleak House or The Anatomy of Melancholy. Or, he might add today, be confined to their homes in response to a global pandemic. M arcel Proust’s brother said the problem with In Search of Lost Time was that people “have to be very ill or have a broken leg” in order to read it.
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