John Baker's Blog

Home
About
On Writing
My Bookshop
Main Menu
Previous Posts
Subscribe to RSS feed
Winged with Death Reviews
Certainly the short story has always been more flexible and open to experiment than the novel. Short-story writers always have been subject at the same time to both a stricter technical discipline and a wider freedom than the novelist. Short-story writers have known - and solved by nature of their choice of form - what novelists seem to have discovered in despair only now: the strongest convention of the novel, prolonged coherence of tone, to which even the most experimental of novels must conform unless it is to fall apart, is false to the nature of whatever can be grasped of human reality. How shall I put it? Each of us has a thousand lives and a novel gives a character only one. For the sake of the form. The novelist may juggle about with chronology and throw narrative overboard; all the time his characters have the reader by the hand, there is a consistency of relationship throughout the experience that cannot and does not convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of - the present moment. Ideally, they have learned to do without explanation of what went before, and what happens beyond this point. How the characters will appear, think, behave, comprehend, tomorrow or at any other time in their lives, is irrelevant. A discrete moment of truth is aimed at - not the moment of truth, because the short story doesn't deal in cumulatives. Nadine Gordimer

Posts added in February 2010

Winged with Death – The Audio Cover

john baker, February 22nd, 2010. 3 comments.

Proposed cover image for the audio version of Winged with Death.

Unabridged audio by Isis Audio Books, read by Michael Tudor Barnes.

Publication details when available.

Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates

john baker, February 15th, 2010. No comments.

The second chapter opens with a Kafkaesque scene: He woke up soaked with sweat, breathing stale and fetid air. A naked light bulb shone in his eyes and he found he was in a steel-framed bunk slung by chains from the wall, like a bunk in a troopship or a jail. “. . . Everybody […]

A Voice From The Book Trade

john baker, February 9th, 2010. 3 comments.

Over at The View From Here Magazine, Helen Miles talks about her experience of the book trade: I was quite unprepared for the bizarre practices that persist in the selling of a book. Apparently, I must set a price for our books (that must end with 99p, obviously) and then offer a whacking discount to […]

Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

john baker, February 6th, 2010. 4 comments.

First published in 2003, Heller’s novel opens like this: 1st March 1998 The other night at dinner, Sheba talked about the first time that she and the Connolly boy kissed. I had heard most of it before, of course, there being few aspects of the Connolly business that Sheba has not described to me several […]

Remembering Howard Zinn

john baker, February 2nd, 2010. No comments.

Historian and political activist Howard Zinn died of a heart attack on Wednesday in Santa Monica, California. He was 87 years old. “What does it take to bring a turnaround in social consciousness – from being a racist to being in favor of racial equality, from being in favor of Bush’s tax program to being […]