How do you like the idea of a short story that can be read in three minutes or less?

I discovered NPR's "Three-Minute Fiction" contest by chance some four years ago. And shortly afterwards, on October 29, 2009, I sent out an e-mail recommending it to Commitscions.

I also mentioned in that e-mail that "Postmortem", one of the contenders for the top prize, had been submitted by well-known Indian author Amitava Kumar. (Each story had to be an original work of fiction and begin with this sentence: "The nurse left work at five o'clock.")

I received feedback almost instantly:

• From Padmini Mazumder (Class of 2011)

I absolutely love short stories. I think it takes a lot of imagination and quick thinking to write one AND it takes me only a few minutes to read one. :)

Sir, I hope you read "The Last Leaf". Please do. O'Henry rules the short story scene!

• From Ranjini N. (Class of 2010)

I think "Postmortem" is simply awesome. There is a beauty in telling the story in a few words and then subtlety in leaving a lot to the imagination of the reader by not saying it all. Amazing!

You can read "Postmortem" here. Incidentally, Amitava Kumar has just published his latest book, non-fiction this time, titled A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna. You can read up details on Amitava Kumar's blog.

NPR's "Three-Minute Fiction" contest, meanwhile, continues to be as popular as ever. For the most recent round of the competition, guest judge Karen Russell asked participants to submit original short fiction in which a character finds something he or she has no intention of returning. The winning story this round was "Reborn" by Ben Jahn (pictured below).

You can read "Reborn" here.

And check out more of the goodies NPR, formerly National Public Radio, has to offer: books, movies, games and humour, music, and, of course, news.

ALSO READ:

• An innovative and revolutionary short story series in "Mint Lounge"

• The short story that "did more in nine pages than most novels do in nine chapters"

• Rajesh Parameswaran: An exciting new practitioner of the short story form

• Difficult Pleasures: Anjum Hasan's short-fiction collection

Rajesh Parameswaran: An exciting new practitioner of the short story form

Rajesh Parameswaran is some cat. His book of short stories, which I bought for the college library a few months ago, is unlike any work I have read by young Indian practitioners of an art form made popular by some of the great writers, such as O. Henry and Raymond Carver (regrettably, when it comes to short stories and Indian writers in English, I am not able to recall the Big Names, though Manto comes instantly to mind if I think of regional writing, while our very own Anjum Hasan is an excellent representative of the youth brigade).

I was reminded of Parameswaran's book last night when I came across an interview with him in the latest issue of Open magazine. He says he is writing a novel now — one more book to add to our library, for sure — and he talks about how different writing a novel is from writing short stories, but, all the same, he remains a champion of the short story form, as is evident in this excerpt from the interview:

Q. Do you see the short story as a sort of testing ground for fiction writers?

A. No. I think that’s a little bit of a dismissive way to think about it. There are so many writers whose careers are [the short story] — George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro. I think it’s a great form in and of itself. I still will write short stories. It takes less time to fail at a short story than it does at a novel. So if you want to fail a lot and fail quickly, as they say, then you can do that with a short story in quick succession. To me, that was reassuring. I did end up spending years and years at it, but I think the idea of spending six years on a novel and failing, at the time was, to be honest, more than I was willing to risk.

In the interview, Parameswaran also talks about how reading influences his writing and what he does to combat writer's block. Read the article in its entirety here: "The Carburettor".

And you can read The Hindu's review of I Am an Executioner here: "Beyond the Pale".

• ADDITIONAL READING:

The short story that "did more in nine pages than most novels do in nine chapters"

An innovative and revolutionary short story series in "Mint Lounge"

If great stories bring people together, then Wattpad helps people bring great stories together

The short story that "did more in nine pages than most novels do in nine chapters"

I discovered "The Lottery", by Shirley Jackson, on my Kindle Fire when I was on vacation last month and after I raced to the end of this gripping but quietly horrifying tale — it doesn't take more than 15 minutes to read the 3,378 words — I wanted to know more about the author and also understand what her aims were when she wrote this piece.

It turns out that it was The New Yorker that first published "The Lottery" almost 65 years ago. As a recent note in the magazine explains, "The Lottery" proved to be perhaps the most controversial short story The New Yorker has ever published: "After it ran, in the issue of June 26, 1948, hundreds of readers cancelled their subscriptions or wrote letters expressing their anger and confusion over what the story meant. Jackson, who contributed twelve short stories to the magazine, became a literary sensation almost overnight."

The full text of "The Lottery" is available on the American Literature website. Read it here. (There are some discussion questions, too, on this PDF version.)

Also read, for background information, this post on the Neatorama blog: "The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson".

An innovative and revolutionary short story series in "Mint Lounge"

Two weeks ago, one of my favourite weekend reads launched a fortnightly series on Indian poetry ("A serious attempt to give poetry the space it deserves").

Yesterday, in addition to publishing the second installment in the "Poetry Pradesh" series, Mint Lounge also featured an innovative and revolutionary short story column.

"Innovative" because the author, Kuzhali Manickavel, will write an original short story every month "inspired by prompts submitted by readers".

"Revolutionary" because, as far as I know, no publication has tried something as audacious before. Which story story writer is willing to risk his or her reputation in this manner? And which publication is willing to risk taking on the challenge of curating a series of this nature? Congratulations are in order, therefore, to both Manickavel and the editors of Mint Lounge.

Here is a short story in the series based on the prompt, "Flowers and other reproductive organs". Read it here: "To melt a snowman".

Want to submit your own prompt, which can be a word, phrase, quote, or brief idea? You can write to Manickavel at this e-mail address: shortstories@livemint.com. You can even tweet the prompt using the hashtag #kuzhalistories.

The pleasure is all ours, Anjum!

Bangalore's very own Anjum Hasan will be celebrating the publication of her new book at an event at the British Council here on Tuesday. (Anjum spent her early years in Shillong and is now the Books Editor of the venerable New Delhi-headquartered Caravan magazine — but it is in Bangalore that, I like to think, she found her calling.)

Difficult Pleasures, the new short-fiction collection that was released in March, has already earned praise from critics. "The 13 stories ... are a good indicator why Anjum Hasan is widely regarded as a rising star on the literary horizon, as fluid in prose as poetry," wrote the reviewer in The Hindu earlier this month.

How did Anjum get her start? Who are the short story writers she admires? What does she think of short stories? Here, in an excerpt from an e-mail Anjum sent out along with details of the launch of Difficult Pleasures, she provides the answers to those questions:

As a child, I learnt the concept early — the name of the ingredient crucial to storytelling. It was a word my parents used often and approvingly for clever people, the word ‘imaginative’. I knew that if I had to count for anything, I would have to learn to make things up. From the tidy and well-stocked shelves in the children’s section of Shillong’s municipal library, one could pick out and immerse oneself in any made-up world one wanted to. Then there were the stories that one didn’t choose but loved all the same — the English high school reader khichdi of such supposedly immortal texts as an excerpt from John Buchan’s 1910s thriller Thirty-Nine Steps or that terrifying Chekov story, ‘The Bet’ or the highly sentimental ‘The Last Lesson’ by Alphonse Daudet — set in the French region of Alsace-Lorraine which, after the end of the Franco-Prussian war, is on the point of passing into Prussian hands.

When I got to university, one of my monthly pleasures was the arrival in the library of cracklingly new copies of American journals such as Partisan Review and The Southern Review. Before the poems, I would turn to the short stories. What would impress me were not so much the stories in the stories — in the sense of the chain of events described — as the texture — clothes, food, the way people spoke, how colours were named. I envied that texture; I wanted it. I started writing poems as a way of telling stories, trying to locate the specific, the expressible in my own world.

Many short story writers I admire, such as Qurratulain Hyder or Mahasweta Devi, are not writing individually distinctive stories as much as describing in each story a slightly different facet of the same world. Several recent collections of short fiction have been billed ‘linked stories’ because a single background runs through the collection, and characters recur. But that idea of ‘linked’ is often implicit without needing to be highlighted in the older writers. RK Narayan’s An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories is obviously a compact — stories about tradesmen and professional men who must undertake various minor and comic negotiations in order to keep going in an imperfect world.

Perhaps this is true of many short story writers. Raymond Carver’s stories can each seem to have a different quality of strangeness but aren’t they usually about people like himself, the unsentimental, the down and out, the working poor? I’m fascinated by this ability in a short story writer — to create a world in relation to which each story is but one expression.

But I’m also fascinated by the opposite — how a single story, or even a glimpse of a single character within it, does not necessarily have to rely on larger references for its appeal. My own characters are often solitary individuals whose choices are no longer so determined by older social mores, but who therefore have to invent their freedoms. They don’t draw on a world as much as try to locate one. Have I succeeded, therefore, in making things up? Is it possible, walking down a dark street and seeing a lighted doorway, to imagine the world beyond it? The mystery of that lighted doorway is what keeps the story going. You can never walk through it, every story is a just a means of trying.

I just love that phrase, "The mystery of that lighted doorway is what keeps the story going." Back in 2010, Anjum had visited Commits for an interactive session with our students, who were so captivated by what she had to say that two hours just whizzed by... and many students didn't even get to ask her their questions. So, later, I sent them to Anjum via e-mail. You can read those questions and her responses here: "A-1 advice from an author".

For more details about Anjum Hasan's works, visit her website: AnjumHasan.com.

• I have already bought a copy of Difficult Pleasures. After I finish reading it, I'll place it in the Commits library, next to the copies of Neti, Neti and Lunatic in My Head.

• EXTERNAL READING: "The long and short of a story", Open magazine's interview with Anjum Hasan.