Fiction's latest iteration

• Penguin UK is now hosting online interactive short stories.

Pretty cool in theory -- interactive short stories buttressed by online elements like Google Maps and Google Earth. Plus, there's a nice carrot at the end of the stick -- the chance to win a library of Penguin Classics.

Some of the UK's best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.

The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming's The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan's classic thriller The 39 Steps.

It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.

Check out the stories here.

Exploding a trend piece

• At The Smart Set, J. M. Tyree takes apart the notion of "death of literature" pieces.

Equal parts on-the-nose and highly arguable; overall a very worthwhile read. On the nose:

The “death of print,” the “death of literature,” the “death of books,” and the death of reading culture — the death of irony, and now the death of the short story — nothing dies more quickly than the “death of” article...

Great novels and short stories separate us from our fellow human beings, temporarily. They might leave us better equipped to imagine their suffering upon our return. But during the experience, we’re disengaged, sometimes mute. In that sense, serious fiction seems diametrically opposed to the kinds of imaginary communities, games, interactions, and buzzing, surfing, and chatting experiences available online. “Only connect,” E. M. Forster once wrote, but the how and why of connecting online seems categorically different from how fiction works. That quality of all-consuming solitary readerly absorption — what Birkerts champions as “depth” — is essentially humane and its evaporation is alarming. For many the plug-in required to run serious fiction gets disused or was never installed at the factory to begin with because the developers considered it a fancy and unnecessary optional extra. But the real question is whether the Internet and other new digital platforms are more of the same assault begun by movies, television, cable, and computer games, or whether, after serious fiction writing reaches its nadir, it can re-infiltrate the culture using a combination of books, the Web, and wireless screens. Call me, Ishmael — or, better yet, text me — when the answer emerges, because I don’t pretend to know.

Highly arguable:

No pessimism of any sort can be admitted in the cheerful propaganda dispensed by the Glee Club of technology boosters who claim they’re going to save literature using Web sites, blogs, POD publishing, National Novel Writing Month, podcasts, iPhones, e-books, and the like. According to the gurus of the interweb, the cultural changeover from print to digital is supposed to usher in a golden tomorrow of universal democratic access. Sony, Amazon, and Google are the latest contenders in new e-book schemes that most people thought died a whimpering backroom death in the 1990s. HarperCollins is touting browsable free samples of books for the iPhone, starting with Ray Bradbury. Amazon is starting a fiction contest with Penguin, featuring online submissions to be judged by Amazon’s top citizen-soldier book reviewers. And from this day forward until the last instant of recorded time, every Harlequin Romance — hundreds of titles a year — will be downloadable from the privacy of one’s home.

The short fiction writer’s reaction to most of this stuff is probably “Ugh.” Students and business travelers, who can ditch armloads of books and read from a palm-sized device, will probably rejoice over the new e-books. These devices make the skin of most writers crawl. Many if not most serious fiction writers still think of digital media as a threat rather than an opportunity. The online world, especially for the older crowd, is still conventionally depicted as a kind of South Bank of London filled with the literary equivalent of bear-baiting.

A big leap, methinks, hence the "probably" in the first sentence of paragraph #2 to soften the claim. Somehow I doubt "serious" fiction writers look at e-books as a threat; I think what Tyree refers to elsewhere in his essay as "the human need for a story and a storyteller" will supersede any quibbles about how it's delivered. People seek out stories to make sense of the world, in whatever form, and all these various forms of new media are just new wrinkles, new ways to bring clarity to all the madness. Reading, for some, is like faith is for others; it doesn't matter how you do it, just that you're doing it. Anything beyond that is to your own benefit. Probably.

The state of the short story

• Stephen King proclaims the short story alive and well in The New York Times.

Could have done without the bloodstained graphic -- what, exactly does that have to do with anything, except to serve as an unnecessary reminder that King has written scary books? Still a good read, as always.

Last year, I read scores of stories that felt ... not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.

And yet. I read plenty of great stories this year. There isn’t a single one in this book that didn’t delight me, that didn’t make me want to crow, “Oh, man, you gotta read this!” I think of such disparate stories as Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” John Barth’s “Toga Party” and “Wake,” by Beverly Jensen, now deceased, and I think — marvel, really — they paid me to read these! Are you kiddin’ me???

Talent can’t help itself; it roars along in fair weather or foul, not sparing the fireworks. It gets emotional. It struts its stuff. If these stories have anything in common, it’s that sense of emotional involvement, of flipped-out amazement. I look for stories that care about my feelings as well as my intellect, and when I find one that is all-out emotionally assaultive — like “Sans Farine,” by Jim Shepard — I grab that baby and hold on tight. Do I want something that appeals to my critical nose? Maybe later (and, I admit it, maybe never). What I want to start with is something that comes at me full-bore, like a big, hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky. I want the ancient pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes the eject button in his F-111. I certainly don’t want some fraidy-cat’s writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness about what Bob Dylan once called “the true meaning of a pear.”

Six degrees of storytelling

Following up on Wired's six-word short stories, here are the fruits of Friday-afternoon office ennui:

Wachovia. Watches over ya. Too much. [Matt Ward]

Corporate greed. Indictment. Heart failure.
Hero orphaned. Fears overcome. Group victory!
Dirt. Mud. Spin. Sound bite. Election.
In the beginning God. We hated.
Wannabe Samurai joins seven. Blood everywhere.
Once upon a time. Ever after.
Aliens eating sushi. 12:01 oceans emptied. [Jeremy Tufts]

Testman jumped out of television. Angry.
Copywriter presents campaign. Client checks watch.
Hypnosis proved unsuccessful. Account lost. Layoffs.
Within the color printer hamsters multiplied.
Painter fell. Family sued. Agency closed. [Aaron Johnston]

Redundant. You’re telling me that I’m
Violence antidote perfected. Those responsible assassinated.
Born. Died. Born again. Damn zombies. [Jason Comerford]

Amis does Atta

• A new short story by Martin Amis in The Guardian takes a fictional look at the last days of 9/11 hijacker Muhammed Atta.

Good, strong stuff from Amis:

The worst was yet to come: shaving. Shaving was the worst because it necessarily involved him in the contemplation of his own face. He looked downwards while he lathered his cheeks, but then the chin came up and there it was, revealed in vertical strips: the face of Muhammad Atta. Two years ago he had said goodbye to his beard, after Afghanistan. Tangled and oblong and slightly off-centre, it had had the effect of softening the disgusted lineaments of the mouth, and it had wholly concealed the frank animus of the underbite. His insides were seized, but his face was somehow incontinent, or so Muhammad Atta felt. The detestation, the detestation of everything, was being sculpted on it, from within. He was amazed that he was still allowed to walk the streets, let alone enter a building or board a plane. Another day, one more day, and they wouldn't let him. Why didn't everybody point, why didn't they cringe, why didn't they run? And yet this face, by now almost comically malevolent, would soon be smiled at, and perfunctorily fussed over (his ticket was Business Class), by the doomed stewardess.