Short and to the point

Spanish ‘Granta’ editor Valerie Miles, here for the Book Fair and the release of the second Israeli issue of the magazine, talks about why the short-story format is suited to the digital age.

By BARRY DAVIS
Valerie Miles (photo credit: NINA ZUBIN)
Valerie Miles
(photo credit: NINA ZUBIN)
It wasn’t too long ago that book reading was being viewed as a dying pastime. Then the Harry Potter show got on the road, and suddenly millions of members of the younger generation, all around the globe, were picking up actual tangible tomes and getting engrossed in the antics of the budding wizards at Hogwarts.
However, it remained to be seen whether the corner been turned. We still live in an Internet world of sound bites, video clips, texting and various other means of crisp and minimized social network communication, and the perceived detrimental effect all this is having on our attention span. With that in mind, the short story format may in fact offer appreciable marketing advantages for writers and publishers.
All of which bodes well for the people behind Granta magazine, a British-based periodical that primarily trumpets the cause of the short story.
Founded as “The Granta” in Cambridge, England, in 1889, it was the brainchild of a bunch of university students. Devised as a periodical, it proffered an overview of student politics, fun tidbits and incipient literary endeavor, stories and poems alike. The publication endured and gradually prospered over the years, and accrued a long and distinguished contributor roster, publishing the early work of many writers from both sides of the pond who were to become world-famous – including A.A. Milne, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
In 2003, Granta stepped beyond the shores of the Sceptred Isle for the first time, when Valerie Miles established a Spanish edition of the over-a-century-old publication. In the interim, the magazine has extended its geographic and cultural hinterland to take in such a disparate stretch of countries as Turkey, Japan, China, Italy and Bulgaria.
Last year, Israel also came on board, and Miles was here last week to attend the Jerusalem International Book Fair. Specifically, she was here for the two-day Wide Borders, Short Prose conference – which, among other things, marked the release of the second issue of the Israeli edition of Granta.
The local version contains works by such stalwarts of the Israeli literary community as Dror Borstein, Mayan Rogel, Etgar Keret, Mahmoud Arishi and Shimon Adaf; as well as translations of stories by leading members of the international scene such as award-winning Jewish American author Nicole Krauss, Brazilian writer Ricardo Lisias, Palestinian author Salman Natour and late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño.
So, does Miles – who is a specialist in Bolaño – feel the format she champions has a marketing advantage in an attention- span-challenged world? The Pennsylvania- born, Barcelona-resident editor, writer, translator and professor feels the jury’s still out on that.
“I think that’s a psychological way of looking at it, and you would think that would be the case, but I am not so sure it is,” she muses. “I am not yet convinced that people, now, would read the short story more than they read it before because of the Internet and digital [publications].
That would be the logical conclusion, but I am not yet convinced that is the case.”
Miles says the length of a literary effort is not necessarily the crux of the consumer matter, and that it may be more a matter of a style-genre divide. “There may be something counterintuitive happening.
I wonder if the short-story form is something people would read after spending so much time reading the news and articles.
It’s not a matter of the space anymore; it’s actually a matter of what happens in your head when you’re reading fiction – which is the suspension of belief and the entrance into imagination.”
Zapping across news and consumer websites, suggests Miles, tends to impact more on people’s reading habits in terms of content type than on how much time they are willing or, indeed, able to spend perusing a particular topic. “I think we are living in a time when reportage, non-fiction and essays are [a matter of] living a moment that is very appropriate, thanks to the Internet. You can immediately say, I want to read this because it has a topic I’m interested in, or a nice picture may draw you in. But fiction is a different creature.
I would like to think that the age of the Internet is favorable to short-form fiction; I think yes for the short form, but I am not yet sure about the fiction.”
She says there is, however, concrete evidence that literary consumption is heading back to old-school formats.
Surprisingly, according to Miles, this is particularly relevant for the generation of readers that grew up with the Internet.
“Research on reading habits in the US, which is the world’s biggest market, shows that reading in digital form is actually going down. The novelty of devices [such as the Kindle] seems to be over. Digital sales went down from 23 percent to 21%, while hardcover sales rose. So they are now talking about a plateau [for digital book sales].
“It is obvious that books are not dead!” Miles exclaims with a smile. “The interesting thing here is that the digital sales figures dropped specifically among young people – the people we call the ‘digital natives.’ They’ve grown up with digital books, so for them, the novelty is the tangible book. Isn’t that funny?” Miles is a self-confessed ardent fan of short stories, and does her utmost to spread the word across the Spanish-speaking world and beyond. She says there is a dynamism and immediacy to the more concise literary form over the full-length version. “The intensity [of the short story] has to be different,” she notes, adding that the format makes severe demands on the creator. “You can’t be boring in a short story. You can’t be flabby, every word has to mean something; that’s what a good short story does. There’s no time for recreation. The novel allows the writer time to build and to get into something.
Short fiction doesn’t allow that.”
Since Granta’s inception, time has of course marched on and society has changed out of recognition. Miles brought some indisputable evidence of how things have – in this case, thankfully – panned out. The latest Spanish edition of Granta includes a reproduction of an illustration that originally appeared in the February 1896 issue of the publication.
The picture heading was “Dreams of the Future,” in reference to the possibility of Cambridge University admitting female students. “I wanted to publish this to show how much has changed since Granta first started publishing,” says Miles with a chuckle.
Today, Granta does not just disseminate samples of talented writers to local readers. With its increasingly international consumer base, the publication is now able to introduce people around the world to translations of stories and poems by authors who might otherwise remain beyond the language pale.
“When the Spanish edition of Granta started, one of things I wanted to do was to kind of start a dialogue between the two languages – Spanish and English – and have them mirror each other and speak to one other. Now that dialogue has turned into a conversation, because there are so many different languages talking to each other through Granta.”
With the Israeli version up and running, non-Hebrew-speaking fans of short stories can get a handle on what the Jewish state has to offer – and that goes for the cognoscenti as well. Miles too says she delights in encountering creations by writers of which she was previously unaware.
“In our next [Spanish] issue, we’re publishing Shimon Adaf, a writer I had never read. He was introduced to me through Granta, here in Israel. They said: ‘You have to read this writer, his work is really terrific,’ and luckily, they had a story by Shimon that had been translated into English. I read it, and was floored; I told them I would, of course, publish it.
“Having Granta come out in different languages, in different countries, is like networking – tangible networking, not the virtual kind. I like that.”