In the Guardian’s theblogbooks, Jean Hannah Edelstein attacks “sizeism” in fiction and suggests that novellas might be the perfect antidote to the reading public’s (supposedly) declining attention span:

And then I had an epiphany: could it be that we should look to classics like Ethan Frome to find the key to saving fiction from the worrisome tides of publishing sturm and drang, the statistics that indicate that people distracted by the trillions of choices provided by digital media are giving up on fiction? Might the way to stop our atrophied attention spans becoming terminally distracted be to simply publish more short books?

I’m in favor of shorter books in the same way that I’m in favor of 100-minute movies and 3-minute pop songs–works of art are usually made better by some judicious cutting. But I suspect that novellas have never caught on for the same reason short stories are dying out: because so many people view reading as being more like homework than a hobby, if they are going to read, they want to feel as though they’ve “accomplished something.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under Publishing, Reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.