Not Quite Novellas

By Edward Squires

Edgar Allan Poe favored the short story ... and we love them too. “The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length,” Poe declared. “As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality.” Here we have collected 10 of our favorite short stories by AAeB authors – brief, a touch saucy, offering insights into the human heart, always well told. Editorial director Hollis George calls this anthology,” An entertaining blend of storytelling selected by short story aficionado Edward Squires.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: AbsolutelyAmazingEbooks.com
• Release date: Dec 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310092824

Book preview

Introduction

Fiction comes in varying lengths. Short stories, novellas, and novels are the three most common formats. The short story, as the name implies, tends to be shorter; the novel longer. In between is the novella, not quite one or the other.

I’ve always enjoyed short stories. Call it ADHS or Short Attention Span Theater if you like. But I like a quick read, one that doesn’t demand a commitment of several hours or even days.

Edgar Allan Poe agreed with me. In The Philosophy of Composition, Poe argued that a literary work should be short enough for a reader to finish in one sitting.

The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length, he declared. As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality.

This is not to diminish novels. But writing a short story is an art form as distinct from writing a novel as a haiku differs from an epic poem. All are words, certainly, but different ways of using them.

The short story as we’ve come to know it developed due to market demands. In England, writers like Charles Dickens published novels in weekly installments in journals such as Master Humphrey's Clock and Household Words, later to be reprinted in book form. However, urbanization caused shifting populations that made continuity of readership for serialization less possible in America.

According to A Brief History of the Short Story in America: "American novelists had very few venues for serialization, which is why the shape of the American literary novel differs so radically from its British counterpart: chapters from serialized novels read like episodes of soap operas – each chapter opens with a crisis that is soon resolved and closes with the introduction of a new crisis or cliffhanger which will be resolved at the beginning of the next installment. Not so with the American novel – think Moby Dick or Huckleberry Finn."

Eric Miles Williamson, a board member of National Book Critics Circle, explains, With no periodical market for the novel in the US, writers of fiction in the first half of the 19th Century borrowed the form of the short tale from German authors such as Wilhelm Kleist and E.T.A. Hoffmann and altered the form to suit American newspapers. The result was the literary form we now know as the short story.

Thus, the short story was a commercial product written for newspapers and magazines by writers who were trying to make a living at it. Not considered high art, it was the literary equivalent of pop music, i.e. not serious.

Short stories thrived in magazines for a while. Unfortunately, most of those great venues – Scribner’s, Collier’s Weekly, The American Magazine, Southern Literary Messenger, Burton's Gentleman’s Magazine, Graham’s Magazine, The Smart Set, Mercury, Godey’s Lady’s Book, McClure’s, The Bookman, Munsey’s Magazine, and others – gradually disappeared.

Writer’s Digest tells us, We’re living in a time of significant change in short-story publishing. Fewer high-circulation magazines publish fiction today than they did just a few decades ago.…

Nowadays there are few commercial venues for the short story – Harper’s, The Atlantic, Playboy, The New Yorker, and Esquire among the hangers-on. Short story writers are usually relegated to low-circulation, low-paying (or no-paying) literary publications such as Kenyon Review, New Letters, One Story, American Short Fiction, Quarterly West, The Sewanee Review, Black Clock, StoryQuarterly, All-Story, Jabberwock Review, Bomb, Monkeybicycle, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Baltimore Review, Conjunctions, and The Washington Square Review. Many of these are affiliated with colleges or universities. Also there are a number of online literary magazines starting to spring up, among them Fiction Weekly, Triple Canopy, Red Lightbulbs, and Literal Latte.

The novel and short story have two basic characteristics in common: a story and a storyteller. Edgar Allan Poe pointed out that at its most prototypical the short story features a small cast of named characters, and focuses on a self-contained incident with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood.

Or as William Boyd writes in A Short History Of The Short Story, short form fiction offers snapshots of the human condition and of human nature, and when they work well, and work on us, we are given the rare chance to see in them more than in real life.

Indeed I concur. That is why I’m so grateful to Absolutely Amazing eBooks, a publishing house that remains committed to publishing collections of short fiction. That’s not surprising, knowing that AAeB founder Shirrel Rhoades once took on the less-than-thankless task of trying to resurrect short fiction in the pages of the enfeebled Saturday Evening Post. And he continues to publish short stories (hence this volume) even if it’s not a big seller in today’s market.

Short stories have no set length. But as Poe said, undue length is yet more to be avoided. That’s why we’ve picked fiction for this anthology that is not quite a novella.

-Edward Squires

New York City

The Playboy Photographer

And The General’s Daughter

William R. Burkett, Jr.

Buck was dreaming of Claudia Cardinale and it was a delicious dream. Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster were there, too, and Robert Ryan and Godfrey Cambridge, insisting Buck had to turn her over to them so they could take her back to her husband. Buck was inclined to argue, but someone was rattling his bunk insistently, trying to get him to wake up.

He opened his eyes reluctantly and was back in the Army, in the barracks, and The Professionals was just a movie he’d seen on base that weekend. Since in the movie the delectable Claudia had the hots for Jack Palance as a Mexican bandit, Buck’s lustful subconscious had assigned himself Palance’s role.

What? he said irritably. The barracks was deserted except for the soldier in fatigues at the foot of his bunk.

It’s oh-nine-hundred! the soldier said. Are you on sick call?

Nine a.m. human time, Buck said grumpily. I’m getting damn sick of being woken up by strangers in my barracks. You don’t live here. Go away.

The soldier—squinting against the gray light from outside, Buck saw he was a Spec4—drew himself up in a huff. I’m the CQ runner. No one’s allowed in barracks during duty hours unless because of sick call.

Buck pushed back his blankets and sat up. The barracks were chilly. Steady cold rain fell outside. He was beginning to think it always rained at Fort Lewis. Okay, damn it, I’m up, he said. You interrupted a dream with Claudia Cardinale in it. You should probably be in Leavenworth for that.

If you’re not on sick call, you’re going on report, the Spec4 said nastily.

Buck pulled his fatigue shirt off a hanger on the head of the bunk. See these three stripes here below the Sixth Army patch?

So what?

Those three stripes make me a sergeant, which means I outrank you. Plus this is the Headquarters Company barracks and my major reports directly to the CG. If my major wanted me up sooner he would have told me. Go away now.

He plodded through his morning ablutions, put a poncho on over his fatigues and splashed through interminable puddles to the doughnut shop down the street. The hike across the drowned parade field to the public information office, in what had been a dispensary in the Second World War, never seemed to get any shorter.

He dropped off a sack of doughnuts by the unit coffee pot and carried two glazed and a cup to his little office that once had been an examining room. His crew was all in place in other cubicles, seven private soldiers working telephones and typewriters, just like a civilian newsroom except for the fatigues and crew cuts. An eighth was in the egg-crate insulated broadcast studio preparing to feed the daily Training Center Report to local radio stations.

The other E-5 for the section, a lifer named Pike who managed the hometown news release program when he didn’t have his nose up their senior sergeant’s ass bucking for E-6, was hard at work. He was poring over information sheets every basic trainee for the new cycle had been required to fill out their first week in fatigues. Buck was sure he’d been at his desk since six a.m.

Anything worth the Fort newspaper yet? Buck was essentially managing editor of the operation, instructing his trainees in military public relations while editing all copy that left the post.

Nothing as good as a set of twins in the same basic-training platoon, Pike said. That story got good play even in Seattle.

You shot a good pic of the drill sergeant between ‘em in his Smokey Bear hat, scratching his head about who was who, Buck said. Picture sold the story.

Pike smiled at the unexpected compliment; he knew Buck didn’t much like him and he returned to favor.

That drill sergeant was a good egg, Pike said. Gave you some good quotes about chasing one of them out of the mess hall for trying to go through the line twice. Refusing to believe he had twins in his platoon.

He was a good sport, Buck agreed. Not like that lifer asshole on the clown-in-uniform story.

Buck had found a professional clown in a batch of draftee resumes. He immediately envisioned the photo: full clown-face wearing a steel pot: Clown in the Army. It was a visual he was sure would hit the wire services. From a PR standpoint it would underscore that all kinds of young men put their lives on hold when they were drafted. But the clown’s drill sergeant decided Buck was trying to make fun of the Army and complained up the chain of command when Buck told him to grow up.

Buck’s major agreed with Buck’s take on the clown photo, agreed the drill sergeant overstepped his bounds trying to pull rank on Buck across organizational lines, and told Buck they could have forced the issue and got the shot, but his command decision was to let it go.

He patted Buck’s shoulder like the Neapolitan pater familius to his men that he envisioned himself to be.

We could ram the clown story down the brigade’s throat, the major said, or we could make sure the brigade commander had that sergeant spanked hard for interfering with this office. But not both. Do you know why?

Why?

Because, Buck, you told him to grow up in the hearing of his subordinates. Big loss of face, not the Army way. The major gave his fox-in-the-henhouse smile. "The brigade commander actually laughed when he heard that and told me that he’d probably reinforce that advice when it comes to dealing with the CG’s office in future.