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A Discussion on Short Stories at the PEN World Voices Festival

by Bud Parr on May 04, 2008

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“Short Stories” was a discussion held at the Scandinavia House for the PEN World Voices festival of International Literature on Friday, May 2nd. The participants were Etgar Keret, Young-ha Kim, Ingo Schulze, and Abdourahman Waberi. The discussion was moderated by Radhika Jones.

If Radhika Jones, managing editor of The Paris Review, is the most elegant person at the PEN World Voices Festival, then Etgar Keret might be the least. That contrast could be representative of their writing as well, she of the refined literary journal, he of the “badly written good story” mold whose own work is often brutal and abruptly short. While there were many contrasts on this panel on the short story, with speakers from Korea, Djibouti, Germany and Israel, they all agreed, save one, that no matter the value of the short story form to the writer, the market barely acknowledges them.

Surprising everyone, Young-ha Kim told us, through his exuberant translator, that the short story has been the dominant form in Korea and that every year the papers publish prize winning stories on January 1st, making mastery of the form a significant factor in becoming known. Although now, he says, Korea is looking out more to the U.S. so the novel is becoming more important than in years past. Abdourahman Waberi said, reflecting on the French market, write whatever you want, “just put novel.” Keret uniquely described the situation in Israel were the short story form is unwelcome: “People live a fragmented reality,” he says, “they have to check the clock every hour to see if they can go home. They want to read epic stories to escape.” For his part, he says, every story he thinks will be an epic, but he gets to the second page and “it suddenly ends.”

But if there’s any truth to the much discussed demise of the short story, someone should tell the writers. Jones asserted that the short story is alive and well, and said her journal alone receives over 1,200 submissions per month. The best evidence of the health of the form is the terrific stories read by (or for) the writers here during the discussion. I had already read Keret’s haunting piece, “Hat Trick” and found it even more unsettling hearing it read by Keret himself with his thick Israeli accent. All of the stories read were odd, magical, haunting in a way, and varied; a perfect demonstration of the flexibility of the form and it’s potential for power (unfortunately they were out of Schulze’s book that his story came from, but he’s now on my ‘must read’ list).

I’ve long felt that Keret’s work is a window into the everyday tension and ennui arising from the ever-potential for violence in Israel, and the fact that he accomplishes that in such short gulps is indeed a testament to the short story form as well as his own writing (I got to tell him so after the event too, or actually, I told him that I find myself reading his work aloud, in which he replied that that is the highest compliment).

Fortunately, there was not too much time for questions at the end because this day’s was no different than most where questions tend to be either banal (see Dorothy’s notes on the Three Musketeers event) or more about the questioners. One woman wanted to make a ‘statement’ about the short story, she being a writer herself, and another wanted to announce his own literary acquaintances without really making much of a question. It was an “advice to aspiring writers” question that got the panelists talking though, and Keret derided the idea of well crafted yet boring or “sterile” story epitomized often in The New Yorker. He said there “is no way to write a story. Think about the story and not how it’s formed.”

See also Aaron Hamburger's impressions, Molly McQuade's and Geoff Wisner's.

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