Read to Listen: The Next Life of the Short Story

This week at work I rediscovered the glory and delight that is the New Yorker fiction podcast. I was assigned to a set of tasks I would characterize not necessarily as boring but certainly as repetitive, requiring my full visual attention but not a lot of calculation. While sifting through a lot of stuff*, my mind would wander too easily, so I turned to my trusty iPod and was delighted to find several months of short stories, read by contemporary authors (Louise Erdrich and Jhumpa Lahiri among them), which I had downloaded but never enjoyed.

I have been a New Yorker subscriber for a while now, but the stories read on the podcast are almost always new to me, because the readers pick a story out of the New Yorker archives. In fact, some of my recent favorites were from authors I had never heard of before, like Jean Stafford ("Children Are Bored on Sunday) and Mavis Gallant ("When We Were Nearly Young"). As someone who doesn't seek out short stories regularly, I think they make excellent fodder to be read aloud in this form: You can absorb the whole story in one session (yet go over it again if you please) and get enveloped in it in a manner I find difficult when I'm reading the paper magazine, being distracted by the cartoons and so on.

There have been so many predictors that the short story will die, but what if it just needs the excitement of a new format? Vladimir Nabokov probably never wrote a story imagining that it would later be downloaded on the Internet and played back in an overheated** New York skyscraper, but it's a great addition to my literary diet.

*Compulsory corporate obfuscation
**They turned the heat on a few weeks ago, while it was still in the 70s outside. The jokes about "Bikram work" are wearing thin.